ELLERY: Lawrence has always been well loved in the design world but mostly, I think, because he works with type. It suits designers. They’re not thinking much deeper. They just like the aesthetic: ‘Oh, it’s type!’ But for me, Lawrence was the only person I’d ever worked with who had done more books than I had. His team was as sharp as me and my team about ink and paper and binding, about smell and feel.

WEINER Which was lucky. But I think we’re missing the point of what’s worthwhile to talk about. It’s not about the specifics. It’s about the concept. Why would you throw a very talented designer and, it turns out, a reasonably talented artist together in the same pot? It’s what we thought we were going to get that interested me.

KENNEDY What did you hope for? Many years ago you described the ideal condition of being an artist as being ‘perplexed in public … because the artist was to be invested in things that did not have a pat answer.’

WEINER We’re stuck in an aesthetic now in the art world where people have the answer and then try to rationalize the question. We did this in order to enter something into the culture in a way that the culture has to adapt in order to use it. Well, that’s what art should do!

ELLERY This morning I found an email Lawrence sent me a couple of years ago, when we were really working toward something. He said: ‘My envisagement of the work would be like one of those people on the street with a cardboard box and three walnut shells and the public is supposed to find which shell the pea is under, very much like three-card monte. And all of the images that inspired you would be translated into a composite image, a development that would allow us to speak of our anguish and speak of our aesthetics in a presentation of line and form.’ It ends: ‘I think that with the inherent talents we have, we can come up with an innate book that, when found, requires no explanation other than itself, because in fact it does not refer to anything but itself.’