RGD Book Club — Fake love letters, forged telegrams and prison escape maps

Why This Book? 

We thought we’d dive back into the exploration of design, with Annie’s book Fake Love Letters, Forged Telegrams, and Prison Escape Maps: Designing Graphic Props for Filmmaking. Annie has graciously joined us at DesignThinkers in the past so we thought she’d be the perfect case study for our discussion. 

Dublin-based designer Annie Atkins invites readers into the creative process behind her intricately designed, rigorously researched, and visually stunning graphic props, discussing how even the most fleeting of moments help to create movie magic. 

Purchase your copy

Note from Annie Atkins:

For those of you asking what’s inside, it’s basically a different movie prop on every page and personal stories from film sets, some about the creative difficulties in making certain props and sometimes just fun memories of what it was like to work on certain shows. Ps. If I had thought more about eventually having to tweet, etc, about this book, I would have given it a shorter name. Its full title is: “Fake Love Letters, Forged Telegrams, and Prison Escape Maps: Designing Graphic Props for Filmmaking”, just in case you want to order it somewhere other than Amazon.

This is our 4th Bookclub book of 2025! In the spirit of Annie’s book we encourage you to think of your favorite film props and share with the club how they helped immerse you into the story. 

The Book Club duration is 1 hour.  We’ll spend the first half hour sharing books and other resources we’ve been loving and then the second half will be focused on a discussion of the book we read together. You are under no obligation to read the book to join the discussion (however, there may be spoilers).