Bob remembered that his mother, the interior designer Edna Alcorn, had had her work published, but thought he no longer had the magazine. I made this special issue for him by following that recollection back to her credited interiors in the October 1959 issue of Interior Design, and outward into the rooms, work and family that shaped her world.
The pleasure was in turning research into a discovery Bob could enter: his voice, the magazine, the original black-and-white rooms, then an imagined return of their color. His memory of making little paper furniture also gave me the cover’s impossible chair, with a whole room inside it.