A customer's weird request left me scratching my head

This lady brought in a poetry book she wanted rebound, but she asked if I could use pages from her old tax returns for the endpapers. She said it would be poetic because the poems were about money and loss. I had to think hard about using private papers like that, even if she said it was fine. Part of me felt it was wrong to bind someone's financial info into a book, but she really wanted it. I ended up agreeing, but I blacked out all the personal details with a marker first. The book turned out okay, but I still feel odd about it. Like, what if someone reads it years from now and wonders about the scribbled-out numbers? It was a first for me, that's for sure.

3 comments

3 Comments

hall.joel2d ago

Those blacked out numbers are the best part of the whole idea. They are not a mistake, they are the point. You turned cold, hard financial facts into a ghost in the book. Future readers will see those censored lines and feel the weight of what is hidden, the real loss and privacy the poetry talks about. The client understood that the redaction itself was part of the art. By trying to clean it up, you almost missed the deeper meaning she was going for. That book is now a complete story of money, memory, and what we choose to conceal.

val_craig632d ago

Wonder if the client saw it that way from the start, or if the meaning came later? Almost sounds like the redaction had to teach its own lesson.

grayr722d ago

Wait she really used old tax returns for that? That's wild. The blacked out parts must look like a ghost in the book now.