Remembering Joel Friedlander
Joel Friedlander
January 11, 1948 – May 7, 2021
Joel was a typesetter's son who never outgrew his love of type. He began in the 1970s setting books by hand at his own letterpress, served as production director of Aperture, where his work earned an AIGA 50 Books of the Year award, and in 1994 founded Marin Bookworks in San Rafael, California. By his own count, more than 20,000 books were published from his designs.
In 2010 he started The Book Designer, a blog that taught a generation of independent authors how real books are made. He wrote more than 700 articles, gave his knowledge away freely, and Writer's Digest named him one of the top publishing people to follow in the world. He believed every author deserved a beautiful book, whether or not they could afford a designer.
In 2012 a stranger emailed him an article, unasked. Joel read it, published it, and asked for another. Six months later the stranger was his business partner, and Book Design Templates was born: professional book design, made reachable for every author. More than 70,000 authors have built their books on the designs Joel shaped here.
Joel died on May 7, 2021, at 73, after living, in his community's words, productively with cancer for seven years. His wife Jill wrote that he died while still working as a book designer, a publisher, and an author. Of course he did.
A note from Tracy
I was the stranger. Joel took a cold email from a technology guy in West Virginia and turned it into an apprenticeship, then a partnership, then one of the great friendships of my life. He taught me how books are made, and more than that, he taught me how a craftsman carries himself: generous with knowledge, exacting with work, kind without exception.
Everything we make here still carries his standard. When you open one of our templates, you are holding work that traces straight back to a man who learned type at his father's side and spent fifty years perfecting it. The torch he handed me lights every book we help create, and it always will.
Thank you, Joel. The books remember.
Tracy R. Atkins
Co-founder, Book Design Templates