Made with Japanese rice paper and hand-tied threads, The Thrill Came Slowly is made to be delicate, but its title, after an Emily Dickinson poem, hits hard. Many of the book’s images, from original photographs staged and taken by Dill, illustrate aspects of the artistic process. On the opening page, a figure empties his eyes of all the images taken in a day. A later page, with its hanging figure, could be said to illustrate Dill’s idea that “We are animals of words …. If you were to cut us open anywhere, what would come out would not be just blood and organs, but also language”.

Printed on Japanese silk tissue from photopolymer plates. Text created from hand-manipulated wood type with half-tone images augmented with applications of shellac, ink-solvent mixture, and hand-sewn threads. Wire closure.