Spencer Bailey

really what I want to be running.

Instead, I've built a very healthy seven-figure media business that I get to run on my own terms.

One of your first major projects for Phaidon was your book In Memory of Designing Contemporary Memorials.

And you spent three years researching and writing it, approaching memorials not simply as architectural objects, but

But as emotional and philosophical environments and in many ways, the book feels inseparable from your own biography, even though it rarely centers on your identity or you directly.

At what point did you realize the project was also a way of interrogating your own relationship to memorialization?

I think it was the original intent.

So when I left Surface, Keith Fox and Amelia Tarani at Fightin, Keith was the CEO at the time, they called me into a meeting and they're like, we want to work with you.

What ideas do you have?

Come be our editor at large, basically.

She was like, oh, this is exciting.

I want to make books.

And the very first book I pitched to them was this one on memorials, which felt both very personal and very universal.

It was like, I'm probably one of the only people who can really write this book from my perspective.

Like, I don't know anyone else who's been memorialized who's not like...

General in the Army?

Keith Fox actually is worth bringing up because he was very involved with the AIDS memorial in the West Village area.

I believe he's still on the board there, and he was instrumental in realizing that project.

So he also felt very passionate about this subject.

And I think he also saw that I was somebody who could write about it from a perspective unlike anyone else.