Fire was the concept behind my binding of the little volume Spontaneous Combustion, A Literary Curiosity by John Rathbone Oliver (Chicago: Argus Book Shop, 1937), which analyzes instances of this physical phenomenon in literature. I couldn’t resist the perverse pleasure of burning a book. I needed fire on the covers, but I wanted the flames to seem to be biting into the leather, so I did them as pressed-in onlays before covering the book. The result is the appearance of flames embedded in the covering leather. My pastedown is decorated with a painting of a match on the corner of an endsheet that I actually burned.