Life on the Mississippi by Rinker Buck

This title is a memoir tracing the author's own journey down the river, and I wanted the design to feel as grounded and documentary as the writing itself.

The title page keeps things spare and classic, a centered serif with a black-and-white photograph of the flatboat opposite, setting the tone before the story even starts. A hand-drawn map of the river follows, charting the "Voyage of the Flatboat Patience" alongside the towns and waterways Buck actually passed through.

Throughout the interior, detailed pencil illustrations of the boat, the camps, the river itself sit alongside historical photographs, giving the book a scrapbook quality that moves between past and present. Chapter openers stay simple: a numeral, a small line drawing of the flatboat, and straight into the prose.

The goal was a design that reads like a field journal, part travelogue, part history, grounded in the same hands-on, homemade spirit as Buck's trip down the river.