An Imperial Affliction

The epigraph of one of my favorite books, "The Fault in Our Stars," is from a book called "An Imperial Affliction":

As the tide washed in, the Dutch Tulip Man faced the ocean:
"Conjoiner rejoinder prisoner concealer revelator. Look at it, rising up and rising down, taking everything with it."
"What's that?" I asked.
"Water," said the Dutchman. "Well, and time."

It's the perfect start to the book.

Hazel, the main character of The Fault in Our Stars, lives and breathes An Imperial Affliction. She's read it probably a hundred times. She travels to Amsterdam with Augustus Waters to find the book's long lost author, Peter Van Houten.

An Imperial Affliction is not an actual book.

You can imagine me, full of the buzz you get when you finish a really good book, sitting at the computer and googling over and over again: An Imperial Affliction. Peter Van Houten. Sitting in disbelief that this wonderful thing does not, in all actuality, exist on the face of the earth.

People design covers for it all the time.It's kind of real now because we know what it's about and what it might look like, but we will not know how Hazel felt when she read it the first time, because we can not read it the first time ourselves. Constantly googling pictures of covers others had designed, I did not feel fulfilled. Of course, I still won't because I have not read the actual book An Imperial Affliction because it does not exist.

Something was missing from my bookshelf.

So I made it. Sort of.

Of course, it's just the dust jacket. The pages inside do not tell the story of Anna. The narrative doesn't end in the middle of a sentence like it's 

But I think it is happy with my other books. And I designed the whole thing all by myself and without using a computer once. So I win.