Words & Letters - a smallish art book. No, really

I'm staring another art book, but this one is going to be a pretty small project. It's the one that lead to this piece as I was planning it out. It will be another star book, all the black and white.

I wanted to do something on old book pages, and really like the Roman alphabets with all the lines and circles around them showing to make the letters. However, I didn't want to just to an alphabet book. So I decided to but some quotes in with them. I was going to just do random quotes about words and writing, kind of like an old sketch I did way way back. I can't it, but here's an abstract (ish) painting based on it, which might give you the idea:

This time around I wanted the quotes to have a bit more coherence. So I tookt he quote I liked most, "Words, words, words" from Hamlet and expanded it to include a few of the lines around it as well.

Close-up of the pages. There is one letter and one quote per layout. This is the back layer, and the others will be cut-out so you can see into this one. It's based on a square, because the letters are. The quote is smooshed into the same shaped. I didn't really use calligraphy for the quote, what I did was trace the outline of the letters and scribble inside to (mostly) fill them in. I love it with a little 'sketch'-like quality to it, rather than a more polished finished product.

When the separate pages where done I threw them all on the floor and decided on the order they would go in (see the top photo). The quotes and alphabet to go in order, but I didn't want them to simply alternate (letter on the left, quote on the right) so I played with it a bit until I was happy.

Then they all got cut out and glued to nice stiff paper to finish it off. I ripped the 'H' when I was putting it on, but that turned out to be a good thing because it was a boring letter and I replaced it with a more intricate 'K' instead.