Evolution played a fairly important part in the creation of this book. My ideas do not spring full-formed from my brow. I like to create a version, tweak it, look at it again, tweak it, and so forth. This is why I like the digital media: plenty of undos and redos. But evolution occurred in more ways than a gradual process. According to the theory, it is random mutations and chance that play a role in how an entity develops.

The images in the book, some of which you see here on this site were the happy results of play with Adobe Photoshop. I would slap some random gradients down and play with them until they were evocative of something that I could tease out. Sometimes I steered them more, sometimes I just let them stay as they emerged from the primordial binary soup.

Other things, such as the cover, came purely from chance. I had wanted a green cover, but due to the shortcomings of regular fabric, my own ignorance, and a limited selection of bookbinder's cloth, I ended up with a handsome textured beige cover. Things did not end up as I had intended.

But in the interest of exploring how this book evolved, below are provided links to PDFs of the book in its various stages of development, the Descent of Text, I suppose. The final stage, though is too big to show here in this fossil record.

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