Design a cover for Canada's founding debates. Republished for first time since original in 1865

The 1865 Confederation Debates: Index

We are looking for a one-piece cover for our new book: The Confederation Debates,1865. For the first time since their original publication, we are republishing the debates in full. These founding debates are crucial to the creation of Canada as a unified country. These debates led ultimately to the drafting of the first Constitution of an independent Canada, the British North America Act of 1867. There will be a few volumes to this collection including a stand-alone index.

Why we’re republishing them?

We’ve decided to republish the debates to modernize them -- the text in the original was small and faded. There were also paragraphs that went for pages that we’ve divided. We’ve created a brand new index and footnotes to this dense text. Quite simply, this work is of too much significance to Canadian history and law (it is cited in Supreme Court cases) for it to be so hard to read.

For this volume of the debates, we are creating a stand-alone index. The 1865 Confederation Debates were originally published without a meaningful index; a problem that has plagued scholars ever since. In 1951, a partial index was completed as a stand-alone volume, but it is incomplete, and is nearly impossible to find in libraries. This volume contains both previous editions, along with significant additions. The new index will also let the reader search by many new categories including section of the Constitution and legislation, among other options.

Ideally this will be read by Supreme Court justices, judges, lawyers, law students, academics, and historians, as well as the general public.

What we’re looking for

We are looking for an academic cover with a modern twist. We would like to become the authoritative version of these important debates. We want to portray our authoritativeness and our seriousness, but also our modernity. We’re not trying to rehash the old debates, but also revolutionize how they’re read.

Who We Are

For about five years we have been trying to make every document related to the Constitution of Canada accessible to the public, in a fully searchable manner on the website primarydocuments.ca. We believe very strongly in open access to this critical information. Our project is funded by the Canadian Constitution Foundation.

Not really. We're not design experts, you guys are. I'm attaching the CCF logo, the vector file of the logo, and our editor's intro (still a work in progress) so you can get more of a sense of the index.