The voices behind the arc.

Our founder took Jules Verne's Michael Strogoff, or The Courier of the Czar out of the public domain and rebuilt it. Not a touch up. The old English was carried across into clean modern English, then that modern edition was translated again into Spanish, and both were published. Then came the pictures: 17 full page illustrations for Book I, 15 for Book II, 32 chapter images in all, plus the covers and original route maps of Asiatic Russia so a reader can follow the courier from Moscow to Irkutsk. Everything was built at 300 dpi, for print, and the art files come with the book.

We would like to see more books made that way, and we will help you make one. If you want your own title to carry its own art, its own maps, its own covers, tell us. That is what the team above is for, and it is why the open call sits at the end of every craft on this page. A book with pictures in it is a different object from a book without them.

And if you work by hand, we especially want to hear from you. Pen and ink, brush, pencil, scratchboard, woodcut, watercolour. That work has never stopped being wanted, and it is wanted most in exactly this place: a printed book, where an image sits on paper next to type and has to hold up under a reader's thumb for years. Hand work carries a mark that nothing else carries, and readers notice it even when they cannot name what they are noticing.

None of it is quick, and none of it is automatic. Tools may help along the way, but the eye does the work: choosing the one moment in a chapter worth drawing, throwing out the four that nearly worked, matching a picture to a paragraph so the two say the same thing, and holding a look steady across 32 images so the book feels like one book. That judgement is the skill. It is never handed off, and it is the reason a set of illustrations reads as a body of work rather than a folder of files.