In the summer of 2025, a close family friend I’d known since I was born, Eddie, died unexpectedly. He was basically an uncle to me growing up and a good friend to me in my twenties. I’m devastated that he’s gone. I don’t want to get into too many personal details here. But I did want to share the poetry chapbook that I designed for his celebration of life because I would have loved to tell him about designing it, and I think that sharing it honors his legacy and love for poetry.
Eddie: A Poet, Philosopher, and Friend
Eddie loved reading and studying poetry, philosophy, languages, literature, board games, and spirituality/religion. He had a boring office job to support his family but spent his free time learning about the subjects he loved. One of my earliest memories of him was Eddie talking about how poetry was his new religion. Over the years, we talked about these subjects, and I revered his insights and ideas. (He was also the only person I knew who worked from home in the mid-2000s, which I thought was cool! And now I work from home as a freelance editor.)
Eddie was one of the only people in my personal life who I know read the print literary magazine that I published and edited, Capsule Stories. He was Capsule Stories’ longest and most generous Patreon subscriber, which meant the world to me. For the books I produced to be sitting on his bookshelves next to beloved 1920s Poetry magazines, books about languages (and flashcards upon flashcards), art books, and out-of-print biographies of poets was a true honor.
As we prepared for Eddie’s celebration of life in fall 2025, I volunteered to put together the program. Eddie’s family and friends wanted to celebrate him by reading poems that made them think of him. As the Google Doc of poems grew, I thought back to Eddie’s bookshelves and those 1920s Poetry magazines that he’d been collecting in the last year.
Designing a 1920s Poetry Magazine-Inspired Chapbook
I decided to design the program for Eddie’s celebration of life to be a poetry chapbook inspired by 1920s Poetry magazine.
I started my design process by looking up Poetry magazine issues from the 1920s. I found this clear image of the cover of the June 1920 issue of Poetry.
First, I focused on designing the colophon and front cover of the chapbook/program.
Colophon
A colophon is a publisher’s emblem or identifying mark. Poetry magazine’s colophon in the 1920s was the letter P with a pegasus.
I immediately knew I wanted the colophon for Eddie’s chapbook to be an E with a snake, which was his spirit animal.
I messed around in Canva with an uppercase E in Garamond and tried intertwining different illustrations of snakes around it. Finally, I landed on a version of a snake that fit the typeface.
But not everyone was keen on Eddie’s celebration of life program having a snake on it because some folks might take it the wrong way. Fair enough.
My solution: Chop off the snake’s head but keep its body. This was deemed an acceptable compromise: We’d know it was a snake for Eddie, but unsuspecting relatives wouldn’t be taken aback by such a devilish creature slithering on the front of the program.
So I killed my darling snake. I edited the graphic to remove the head of the snake, then I played around with how the loops of the snake interact with the E. I changed where one of the snake loops was, moved the tail, and added more of the little star embellishments around the E. I also switched from the placeholder E I’d been working with to the Adobe Garamond Pro Semibold E so it’d match the title.
It was important that the colophon be instantly recognizable as an E, but not immediately obvious it was a snake. I nailed it, tbh!
Front Cover
I started designing the front cover in Adobe InDesign by using a placeholder image of a medieval-looking E and playing around with the typeface and spacing for the title and text. I read that Poetry magazine used the typeface Monotype Garamond in the 1920s, but that exact typeface isn’t available through Adobe today. Luckily, Adobe Garamond Pro (Semibold) is, which visually matched Poetry’s Monotype Garamond nicely. I had a rough mockup of the front cover.
Once I got the colophon figured out, it took a lot of adjusting, but I finally got the exact right size and kerning for the title, Eddie, to make it look like the colophon E was seamless with the rest of “ddie.”
The contents on the cover of the June 1920 Poetry magazine mapped surprisingly well to a celebration of life program:
- The volume and issue numbers → His birth and death dates
- Poetry → Eddie
- A Magazine of Verse → A Celebration of Life
- Publication date → Date of the celebration
- The list of the poems included inside the chapbook
- Publication place → Place of celebration of life
I’ve anonymized the personal details on this version of the cover, but here’s what it looked like.
Interior Layout
Then I moved on to the layout of the poems and the interior of the chapbook. The interior layout was fairly easy to recreate based on this digital copy of the June 1920 Poetry magazine.
The interior layout design features:
- The running title italicized on the top left pages
- The type of content italicized on the top right pages
- The poem title centered and in small caps
- The author attribution right-justified in italics a line underneath the end of the poem
- The page numbers centered at the bottom of the page with square brackets around them
For the typeface, I used Adobe Garamond Pro Semibold. I opted for a larger font size to ensure readability.
We added in some final touches that made it more Eddie. A page titled “For the Drive Home” with a playlist of his favorite songs alongside a cutout photo of him rocking a pair of shades and a rad shirt. Photos of him and his family interspersed among the pages.
Printing the Chapbook
I realized after some trial and error that Adobe InDesign does not let you export a PDF in a booklet format. To print the file in booklet format, you have to print directly from the InDesign program, which was not feasible for this project given our printing options. So I had to manually rearrange all the pages within InDesign into correct booklet printing order, then export to PDF and print it very carefully to ensure each page was printed the correct way double-sided.
We printed out the pages on an off-white cardstock, which made the chapbook look more and more like the century-old 1920s Poetry chapbooks.
Hand-Sewing the Binding
Then, we sat at the kitchen table and made a little assembly line to collate the pages and punch holes in the spine. We hand-sewed the chapbooks together with dark green and brown embroidery floss.
With the binding sewed, the program was complete.
Eddie: A Celebration of Life
It felt good to make something tangible that people could keep and reread and think of Eddie. Maybe that would be the first time they connected with a poem. Eddie would have been thrilled that so many people read and listened to poems, then went home that day with a poetry chapbook to put on their shelves.
Wish you could have seen this, Eddie. You’d think it was cool as hell.
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