About

Photo of the Paul Razzell, creator of Inherent Vice Diagrammed.
Paul Razzell, creator of Inherent Vice Diagrammed.

There’s a good story behind this website, and you can read it over at ThomasPynchon.com. The article traces my journey from reading Inherent Vice for the first time in September 2018, to launching Inherent Vice Diagrammed eight months later.

The article covers

  • why I created inherent Vice Diagrammed
  • my information-design strategies
  • examples I emulated—and those I avoided
  • false starts and missteps
  • the evolution of the diagrams from early sketches
  • display and design notes
  • colour-coding the novel’s power dynamic
  • proofreading and making the index

My background is in English Literature, book editing, indexing, information design, and communications. This project has been a happy confluence of all these streams.

— Paul Razzell
Victoria, B.C., May 2019