David John Lawrence

Irving, Texas 
David John Lawrence has been a member of the Craft Guild of Dallas since 1998, studying there with Pamela Leutz and Sally Key. He has also studied in the Czech Republic with Jan and Jarmila Sobota.

Winner: Award for Design

Example Binding: 
Ramsey Campbell. 
The Decorations.
Illustrated by Ladislav Hanka.
Stockton, Minnesota: Alpenhouse Apparitions (Sutton Hoo Press), 2005.

Crimson goatskin worked in bas-relief and blind tooled; gold tooled with various sizes of dots, stars, and bells; title gold tooled on spine. Hand embroidered silk headbands; top edge graphite; marbled paper by Catherine Levine. A Christmas ghost story, the idea for the design was to make the book look, from a distance, like the ubiquitous Christmas greeting card. What first appears in bas-relief as a Christmas tree with decorations becomes, upon closer inspection, a skeletal hand.

Design Description: 
Beige goatskin with onlays of yellow, terracotta, dark brown, and chocolate brown goatskin; inlay of medium blue goatskin. Blind and gold tooling; top edge gilt; hand embroidered headbands; flyleaves and doublures of silk. Full beige goatskin chemise with tooling on volume reproduced in blind, title gold tooled on chemise's spine; drop spine box. This minimalist design depicts the course of the Brazos River from its source in northwestern Texas to its termination in the Gulf of Mexico. The three gold-tooled lines represent the dams built to create Possum Kingdom Lake, Lake Granbury, and Lake Whitney. The four blind-tooled lines symbolize dams that were planned but not built. The onlays depict changes to the land and peoples. The image for the flyleaves and doublures is from the Brazos River Authority Planning Map (February 1954) of dams and reservoirs built as well as those planned but not realized. It is reduced and digitally reproduced on silk.