I love our Japanese paper man. He's small and spry and keeps saying, "YES YES YES" in Japanese while you speak to him. He's in his 60s with big, wild eyes behind huge bifocals. "YES YES YES" is forever coming out of his mouth.

We want it to be a poster, we say, and he screams back "YES YES YES!" Folded like this, we say. "YES! I SEE!"

And off he goes to his wall of paper samples. Mumbling and YESing as he quickly snaps a handful of sample packets from the massive wall. They come flying at us — literally, he's throwing them onto the table — whilst never taking his eyes off the wall. A finger held in the air, nose up, searching. He dumps four, five, six packets, each with three or four pages swung out for us to inspect.

He loves our idea — I think this is the most exciting project he's seen in ages. But I get the feeling he loves everything. Everything is great. Everything deserves a YES. And he is going to show you how it can be done.

He rifles through the samples going back and forth, explaining fold quality vs. print quality vs. thickness vs. finish vs ... It never ends. And his explanations are all full of paper history. YES! This is a good paper because ... This was actually used in a book I made in 1968, YES! Excellent quality.

After designing two books blind — in totally different continents than the printers, having to defer to mysterious Icelanders or slack-jawed Americans for material availability — being able to sit here in the paper shop with the Yes Man, digging through his files and brain is like getting a new set of perfect eyes. It also happens to be a lot of fun.

And from the way things are looking, our next book should be damn handsome.