Adam Gasiewski

Two first-year students at Temple ran up a bestseller inside a few weeks in the autumn of 2017. Adam Gasiewski, then reading computer science with a business minor, and Emily Beck, a political science student from Northeast Philadelphia, found Rupi Kaur's Milk and Honey in a Center City bookshop and answered it with Milk and Vine: Inspirational Quotes From Classic Vines, setting transcribed lines from the six-second video service in the same spare, solemn layout. Gasiewski typeset the 74-page result and Beck drew the pictures on an iPad; they put it out through Amazon's self-publishing service that October, expecting friends to buy it. It reached the top of Amazon's sales chart instead, with sales reported at about 155,000 copies by the end of the year. Complaints that the Vine makers had gone uncredited came quickly. The pair took legal advice through a Temple entrepreneurship programme, credited the makers, and brought out a second volume, Milk and Vine II.