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About illustrating The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock David Small writes:

It was during the pandemic. Work was scarce, the future uncertain and, finding myself in the vestibule of old age, I recalled Eliot’s famous lines: “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled.” Rereading the poem after several decades I found it relevant to me in fresh ways. It’s wry humor, for one thing, was revelatory. (I hadn’t sensed it so acutely before, when I was young and unfamiliar as yet with the circumstances.) Dark humor is perhaps the best way to cope with the diminishment of midlife and what lies beyond. The poem is, in fact, so accurate an expression of the plights of certain men in middle age, it astounds me that Eliot was only 28 at its conception. Illustrating this, which I think is among his best and certainly most accessible poems, gave me great pleasure. 

This book was produced by the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center in 2025 in two versions: a paperback edition with a perfect binding and a deluxe letterpress edition using handset Centaur type printed with a Vandercook Universal III Press on flurry cotton paper. The illustrations for each edition were digitally printed by Riverrun Press. The deluxe edition was bound with paper handmade at the KBAC in a custom clamshell box.

There are 80 copies of the paperback edition and 20 copies of the deluxe edition.

Deluxe letterpress printed hard cover book with original watercolor and clamshell box: $1500
Digitally printed soft cover : $75
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