A is for Autocrat Goes Live for Preorders!
D.B. Dowd, illustrated spread from A is for Autocrat, Spartan Holiday Books, 2020. Designed by Scott Gericke.
Today is a big day: Preorders are starting at Spartan Holiday Books on our new offering, A is for Autocrat: A Trumpian Alphabet, Illustrated. This project was conceived, written, designed, illustrated, and taken to production during a feverish episode from late May to early July, 2020. After three-and-a-half years of refusing to draw the current president, the chaos finally impelled to respond to the moral catastrophe of Trumpism—and to do so using a form typically used for children: the ABC book. Yes, Trump is childish. That might have been the angle for a humorous book, but that’s not what my collaborator, graphic designer Scott Gericke, and I have produced.
We used the ABC because it favors an elemental approach. We explain things to children simply, because by doing so we honor the listener and the content. So with Autocrat: it’s a pleasurable indictment, one letter at a time. From the introduction: “This fierce little book is for our younger, unjaded selves, a salty refreshment of our moral and aesthetic capacities, of late battered by double talk and villainy... An ensemble of characters, qualities, and artifacts from the miserable era of Donald J. Trump.”
The book will ship August 28, 2020.
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