The art in this book is one painting, four times.
It is an abstract work in ink on canvas by the artist — a nebula, laid down in stages. First the washes: yellow and gold and pink on white, all weather and no sky yet. Then the full colour of the nebula itself. Then the starfield, point by point. Then the deep field, the dark laid over everything until the colours burn through it.
Each stage appears in this book as itself — a photograph of the work at that moment, cleaned of its surroundings and otherwise untouched. The cover is the fourth stage. The parts of the book open on the stages in order, so the painting finishes as the book does.
That seemed only honest, and more than honest. This is a book about a change that arrives in stages while the thing changing stays itself — a holder's keys, a holder's coins, carried through a migration that replaces the mathematics around them and nothing else. Many stages. One work.
Art credit: the painting and the art throughout this book are by Douglas John Brownfield.
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Douglas B. is an independent builder and artist based in America. He builds self-custodial software tools — programs designed so the people who use them keep hold of their own keys, their own work, and their own decisions — and he holds his own assets the way this book describes: fresh addresses, an offline seed, signing done by hand on hardware he controls.
His abstract paintings, ink on canvas, take their cues from Hubble photographs of galaxies and nebulae, all wash and weather and deep space. One of them, in four stages, carries the art of this book.
Before Q-Day grew out of the author's own preparation. Faced with a scheduled change to the mathematics his holdings depend on, he went looking for the book that explained it plainly — what is settled, what is not, and what to do in the meantime — and then wrote the one he had needed.