In 1994-95, Bourgeois, who was plagued by insomnia, created a series of 220 works on paper during sleepness nights. She kept them together as a group, calling them, "The Insomnia Drawings." The dealer and publisher Peter Blum mounted the first exhibition of this series during the Basel Art Fair in June 1995. Later, the Daros Collection of Zurich, Switzerland, purchased the series and decided to reproduce them in a two-volume book called, "Louise Bourgeois: The Insomnia Drawings," which was published in 2000. The first volume contains facsimiles of both the recto and verso of the 220 drawings. The second volume is comprised of a foreward by Stephan Schmidheiny, texts by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Elisabeth Bronfen, a chronology, and a checklist, transcriptions, and notes.This two-volume work was published by Daros, Zurich, in collaboration with Peter Blum Edition, New York, and Scalo, Zurich, Berlin, New York.
For a special limited edition of this two-volume work, a drypoint entitled "Insomnia" was selected to serve as a bound-in frontispiece in the first volume. Since the selected drypoint was too large for this purpose, it was reworked in a second version, at a reduced size.