In The Nature Book, Tom Comitta searched books for descriptions of nature until he had enough to claim that he was finding patterns. Then he print them out, cupt them up and started to look for similiarities between the pieces. As things began to fit together, he’d tape them into paragraphs and then into chapters. He then retyped the whole thing as a complete manuscript.

For The Nature Book, the process was a bit more improvisatory. I first focused on canonical books and then branched out because they were quite limiting. I spent a year skimming through ebooks or using Command-F with a list of nature terms like moon and tree, searching for chunks of nature language. By the end of the year, I’d gathered 1,500 pages of nature descriptions, which seemed like enough to get started—enough to make the claim that I was finding patterns in how we write. I printed them out, cut them up, and then started to look for similarities in these disparate texts. When I found enough similarities that fit together, I’d then physically tape the quotations into a paragraph, then paragraphs, and eventually chapters. Afterwards I digitized everything by retyping it all into my computer—the book does not look like a ransom note (View Highlight)