I have known the author John Berendt since the 1960s when we were both working at Esquire magazine. When his novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was published in 1994, John asked me if I would bind a copy for him; but somehow the project never went any further. When he published City of Falling Angels in 2005, I suggested to him that I do both books as an unmatched set. 

I referred to the architecture of the Mercer House in Savannah, where the murder occurred, for the cover of Midnight. John had asked that the statue from the graveyard that was used for the dust jacket also appear, and she seemed ideal as a spine decoration. 

For the Venice book, I found an interior photo of the Palazzo Corner Spinelli that appealed to me. For a single angel to straddle the spine, I suggested one in a sixteenth-century drawing by Luca Cambiaso that I had just bought at auction. When I showed it to John, he exclaimed, “That’s my angel!”