The challenge of designing The Original of Laura was that the material only existed as 138 index cards, which immediately raised the question of how to turn that into a substantial book. What occured to me was that we were publishing an artifact, not a conventional novel, and that the reader should be able to perceive the text exactly as it was written, as well as in typeset transcription. I think the result is a bittersweet but no less invaluable look into how Nabokov’s working methods functioned in the last days of his life. The cards are perforated, so that the reader can remove them and rearrange them, the same way the author was prone to do. As for the jacket, I wanted the book itself to look like it was dying—dying as the author did: with grace, elegance and dignity.

The handwritten index cards that represent Nabokov’s final unfinished novel are faithfully reproduced (front and back) and are scored so they can be removed.