The American Federation of Arts sponsored this traveling exhibition and the accompanying catalogue. An exhibition of such artifacts risked, they thought, the danger of being perceived as a lackluster academic exercise. Their brief to us was “Help!”

Our first contribution to the editorial process was to refuse to design the book if they called it The Gold of El Dorado (a title that was eventually squelched). Second, we blotted out all the maroon and cobalt velvet backgrounds against which the artifacts had been photographed. The rest was easy, devising a color palette from the artwork and printing in stochastic so that minuscule type could be rendered in 4/c. The bright white pages sometimes looked too stark against this ancient art, so we ground some pre-Colombian dirt into some of the pages for a modern antiqued look.