One passage, drawn as the gap it wore open

A tall field of fine bone-white lines, stacked the way leaves stack when a book is seen edge-on. A third of the way down, a solid red wedge opens out of it: widest at the right edge, tapering to nothing at the left.

Lower down, two more wedges are drawn as broken red dotted outlines and left hollow.

A section forced open at the same place enough times stops springing back. After that the copy picks the page, and the reader arrives at it whether or not that was the plan.

Why is the gap wedge-shaped rather than a straight slit?

Because the leaves are anchored along one edge and free along the other, so any gap that opens has to be widest where nothing is holding it.

Sewing and glue run down the folded edge of a section. Force it flat often enough and the thread stretches, the glue loses the fold, and the leaves splay. At the outer edge they can move as far as they like; at the sewn edge they can barely move at all. The resulting shape is a measurement of where the give is — the same class of change that turns a corner folded down until it lies flat on its own into a permanent feature of the sheet.

Why is the opening red rather than lit up?

Because the design points at the place instead of photographing it.

A photograph of a book falling open shows daylight in the gap: white, soft-edged, the brightest thing in the frame. Red is not what a gap looks like. Red is what a mark on a diagram looks like, and that is the register this print is in — the bone lines are the object, the red is the comment on it.

There is a practical half to it. On black cloth a white gap reads as a hole punched through the print, and the eye goes to the hole rather than to its shape. A colour belonging to no book anywhere keeps the wedge readable as a mark.

Why is there no book drawn around the lines?

Because a rectangular field of stacked lines already reads as a block of paper, and drawing the covers would demote the gap to a detail inside a picture of a book.

Once there are boards, a bound edge and a shadow under the whole thing, the subject is the object: the eye checks the proportions, looks for a title, and finds the wedge on the way past. Cropping back to the leaf-lines leaves nothing to look at except the one event, and drops the invitation to read a title that does not exist.

What are the two dotted wedges below it?

Places that have started to go and have not gone.

Most copies with a habit have more than one candidate: a second passage turned back to, a page carrying a photograph, the place a marker sat for a year. Those sections have loosened without giving way, and on a table they will not hold the book open by themselves.

Drawing them broken and hollow says exactly that much and no more. The solid wedge is a decision the copy has already made. The dotted two are still open questions, and one of them may end up being where you stop rather than where you return — which is a different event entirely.

Whose permission does a copy's own wear need?

Nobody's. The wedge was put there by one reader's hands on one reader's copy, and there is no title, author, publisher or series anywhere in the print.

The general rule is less simple and worth stating. A jacket, a series design, an illustration and a character belong to somebody, and every one of them is licensable — publishers and studios do it constantly. If a real one is the point of the design, getting permission is part of the job rather than a reason to stop. If it is not the point, there is no paperwork here worth taking on.

Style has no owner. A work does.

Fine ruled lines and a red wedge belong to nobody; a specific cover somebody drew belongs to them. And the recognisable version is the weaker shirt anyway — a printed jacket is a thing a hundred thousand people own, while a gap at one page is a thing one copy has.

Can anybody else tell which passage it is?

No, and the withholding is doing real work.

The print gives the position of the gap in the block and nothing else. A stranger sees a diagram of a book that has been read hard. Whoever owns the copy sees a specific set of sentences. That gap between the two readings is the design, in the same way that a line ruled under a sentence years ago carries a reason nobody can now recover.

If you would rather it were readable, that version is not a lesser one: a fragment of the passage set small along the foot of the block turns the same design into something that starts conversations. Both work; choosing to somebody else's taste is the error, not choosing the loud one.

Does it print well?

Yes — two flat colours, hard edges, no gradient anywhere, which is close to the ideal case for cloth.

The one thing to get right is the line-field. Ruled at the density a real leaf stack has, the lines fall below what the weave can hold and merge into a grey wash. Drawn coarser and further apart than the original, with a bit of break and wobble along each line, the field survives and still reads as paper. The red stays solid with a clean edge; a soft glow inside the wedge would be the first thing to go muddy.

Black is the natural ground because the bone lines carry the whole image, though deep charcoal and dark forest hold it too. Two inks, and the block's own outline is the print's edge — a frame around it would turn a diagram into a poster stuck to a chest.

How do I get one made?

Describe the copy at JustOG — where the gap opens, how far down the block it sits, and what else has started to give. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Set it down on a table, take your hands off the covers, and it opens there again.