Chin Music Press has just won its first award. The cover of Last of the Red Hot Poppas was awarded a HOW International Design Award of merit in the covers category. It's featured in their International Design Annual and will eventually be online.

Let me congratulate Craig, of course, but also two people who helped make this crazy global origami-book-cover project end up so beautiful: Illustrator Leslie Staub and the president of Yushin Printing in Japan, Kohiyama-san, who actually helped fold the poster/cover by hand. Now that's a work ethic!

Briefly, Craig and Leslie coordinated the very exact dimensions of the artwork from CMP HQ in Tokyo and Leslie's studio in Durham, NC. Then Leslie painted Rex and the other characters on a gold-leaf background and a man named Bubba took a photo of the finished art and sent it to Craig. Kohiyama-san then finished the project by having his staff make the first couple of folds by hand on the thousands of posters we printed. A machine did the final folds.

So time to uncork the champagne. Congrats Craig, Leslie and Kohiyama-san. And thanks to Jason Berry for giving us something special to wrap!

Minor edit by Craig: Regarding the folding — actually the final copies were also done by hand. The folding machine used was only able to do two folds. The cover itself required either two folds + an "unfold-pullout" or three folds. So in the end Kohiyama-san and his workers unfolded or refolded every single one of the 4,000 copies. And still got us the completed book from data to a Seattle bound boat in two weeks!