I guess it's about time I revealed what was in the December mystery edition. Years in the making, I finally refined my infinity ampersand design and created an edition to celebrate its journey.
Below is the cover for the mystery edition, with my (final) infinity ampersand design printed on a paper-like material. On the outside it almost looks like a standard kraft notebook, but it's also glued to a bookcloth like all other Dapper Notes, making for a heavyweight cover.
And I replaced the EA bellyband logo with the ampersand, because why not.
The inside of the mystery edition has TWO endsheets. The first is a super thin vellum with my original ampersand sketches. My personal favorite is the one that's raising its fists.
On the back of the mystery edition I wrote a brief history of how the infinity ampersand came to be.
Here's what it says:
Back in 2013, pre Dapper Notes, when I was working on Flatirony with my friend J. Sugar I decided to make my own ampersand. Creating a unique ampersand is a sort of designer right of passage, and I very much wanted to make my own mark. While sketching ideas I noticed that no one had ever before connected the bottom arms of the ampersand. I’m not sure if there’s a typographic rule against it, but connecting them ended up forming an infinity-like loop. And that’s how the infinity ampersand was born. My ampersand.
It took the larger part of a decade for it to evolve into its final form, and I couldn’t be happier with the end result. The history and evolution is encapsulated inside this edition.
