Timothy Comeau

Vita Nova is the product of creative writing I began in the summer of 1999, and by the end of that year I was curating it to assemble a narrative divided into four parts. A guiding theme was a summation of my experience growing up in Nova Scotia ("vita nova scotia") but it also repurposed the title of a work by Dante Alighieri, whose work I then understood as a summation of the 14^th Century zeitgeist. I too wanted to capture the spirit of the age and record what it was like to grow up in the late 20^th Century.

The book was originally produced in 2000 as a handmade artist book, printed on 4x6" index cards with an HP laserjet printer. It was distributed as a gift through the years 2000 to 2003 as a numbered edition. The handmade version had six different cover designs, and each had an assigned ISBN. I kept a log (reproduced below) to record who they were given to.

Print on Demand Version (2009 – 2021)

In 2009–2010 I created a print-on-demand version. In 2021 I revised it to produce a hard-cover version more in line with the orginals.