The cover of the book is board covered with velvet paper, enhanced with aluminum foil. The closure is metallic silver elastic, decorated with a silver washer and a silver-tipped match.

The inside pages are Canson Stygian Black. They are bound with a simple link stitch of silver metallic thread.

The rounded forms of the font, Californian, echo the ever-growing outward spiral.

At the beginning of the book, I am small and alone. By the end, just by listening to the sounds I can hear from my bedroom at night, I realize I am a part of a much larger whole. Each page grows successively larger, as my view of my world changes.

The vague, dreamlike photographs are negative images, printed on ink-jet transparencies, backed with silver and white mica powder, and insanely hard to photograph!

The last page pops out in an explosion page, signifying the vastness of the universe.

This is also a horrible photograph. The pop-up is printed on an inkjet transparency, and it's actually a galaxy, with a face and hands superimposed. If you look closely at the pop-up page, you'll find that our sun, which we think of as infinite in existence, is actually just the flare of a match.

This book was created in response to a challenge for artists' books with the theme "Match Book." My immediate thought was to use a matchbook structure, but I wanted something different. The subject of this book had been rattling around in my subconscious for, literally, years, with no ending. Then I had an epiphany -- I love it when that happens :-) -- that the perfect ending would cause the book to fit this theme.

Remember the theory that our entire galaxy exists in a drop of saliva in a giant's mouth? This is the feeling I wanted to convey in this book. I love the structure - it definitely makes apparent the "expanding universe" theme of the book. I'm not entirely happy with the words, and want to rewrite the entire book (it's on my when-I-get-to-it list). I also think I might try to use some form of image transfer for the pop-up -- I don't really like the shiny texture of the transparency.