On the second floor of the PAW, we had our mural archive but we also wrote the book The Mural Manual. When we first walked in the door of the Workshop, I started getting calls from old friends of mine saying “well, you have to write a manual, you had experience with Siqueiros in Mexico and in Chicago“ and I said, “We've just begun to paint murals, how can we develop a manual?” I brought a few people together and slowly we developed an 86 page book. We even had a paint section, which is not at all useful today. We had brief history of the U. S. mural movement--which obviously needs to be updated. But how to develop the theme for a mural--and the drawing-- if you've got doors and windows, do you just pretend that they don't exist or do you weave them into the concept, into the drawing. Some people have their own approach and that's just fine.

In 1972, we completed the Mural Manual. Holly Highfill, Marie Burton and I did all the writing, gathering of photographs. Holly developed the drawings.  Went to the printer, October Graphics in Buffalo, a progressive printing business that my father had photographed. We printed 2,000 copies. The moment books arrived to us, I sent off copies to a dozen publishers. We didn't hear a word for one year, and then, out of the blue, Beacon Press of Boston wrote. They said, “Your book is not at all like what we publish but we want to publish this“ and they published 12,000 copies, so we have in total sold 14,000 copies. Beacon is a Unitarian press, a good press. I still have their letter. -Never The Same interview with Rebecca Zorach

The Mural Manual is the only complete guide for mural making for both the community and classroom....[it] outlines all the practical ways for finding a wall to paint, getting permission to paint it, getting insurance, using scaffolding, and transferring an initial sketch to the wall itself. It includes suggestions for artistic and thematic development and provides sketches, illustrations, and examples of the process of mural painting.

“And you know, that silhouette booklet, there were again a lot of people who said, you know, “I really like this approach.” I’m in Urban Gateways, and I developed that concept and I wrote the booklet and then I wrote another version of it, which was much, much more sophisticated, where we would take and instead of just plain-here it is—instead of just plain taking a projector and doing this, we would take and photograph the shadows and then re-project upside down, backwards, and so it became more sophisticated. I’ve got boxes and boxes of slides, all black and white, and you’ve got this person in this beautiful pose, or I would just photograph them, but usually just the shadow. It’s interesting.”

-Never The Same interview with Rebecca Zorach