10.21.09
That part of the future which is here today
As you may have gathered, if you’ve been following along, the reason I no longer post much around here is that I’m in grad school, in a program that doesn’t have anything to do with books. Not usually, anyway. It’s a two-year master’s deal, and I have to come up with a thesis sometime in the next couple of months, so I’m hoping to find some way to work books back into it. In the meantime, however, most of the connection between school and books is in the readings I do for my classes.
A few of these readings are in the form of actual bound books, most of which I’ve bought because I don’t have time to wait for them to be available at the library. Many more of the texts I have to read are stapled photocopies, just as Gutenberg printed them when I was in college six hundred years ago. But the majority of my readings this semester are online, either on good, old-fashioned Web pages or in dedicated e-book sites such as Safari or Books24×7, to which my university subscribes.
So, uh, I know it’s old news, but reading books onscreen sucks.
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09.28.09
California, here I come!
Now I know what I’ll be doing next time I’m in SF: Tim James of Taurus Bookbindery has opened the American Bookbinders Museum. The Chronicle reports.
In the museum sits an 800-pound Imperial arming press from 1832 that James bought and had shipped from France three years ago. Asked how expensive that was, he answers “frightfully,” declining to elaborate. James has been working on the museum for 15 years, accumulating paper cutters, paper samples, lettering tools, contraptions for lining blank paper, photos, manuals, and union pins from the International Brotherhood of Bookbinders.
Earlier this year he attained nonprofit status and started giving tours by appointment. In August he opened to the public. Admission is free and on Saturdays binder Tom Conroy is there working in the traditional fashion.
Even if you’re not going to San Francisco in the foreseeable future, do look at their website, which includes, among other things, a database of books annotated with salty comments such as,
- Edition:
- First, one hopes
- Annotations:
- This may not be the most utterly useless self-published book ever written on binding your own books; and it may not be the very worst bound. It must, however, be in the final running for both prizes.
- Condition:
- Covers heavily cockled, pages cockled at gutter, from poor binding technique
Have any of you dear readers yet been there? If so, please report.
(Thanks, Jack!)
09.04.09
To be fond of ; to like ; to have good will toward ; to delight in, with preëminent affection.
Love.
Chronicle Books had only a dummy of the trade edition at BEA, but the book is out now. (Indiebound | Amazon)
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08.26.09
Mysteries of publishing revealed!
My esteemed former colleague Shelby Peak has written a tidy breakdown of ye typical book production schedule, When’s that book coming out? It’s based mostly on her current day job, which is at a large academic publisher, so I’d love to hear others chime in (ouch?) on how the timing in other contexts differs.
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08.25.09
My Kind of Town
Last week I went to Chicago for two days, to see what there was to see. I had lunch with Maia Wright, a now-even-more-cherished visitor to this blog, and spent an afternoon tooling around with Sheila Ryan, whom I also originally met in the comments here and who led me over to my blog-away-from-home, Clusterflock. In between these two planned and much anticipated treats, a friend hooked me up with an impromptu personal tour of the Columbia College Center for Book and Paper Arts, led by Clifton Meador, who—in addition to making his own gorgeous books—directs the MFA program there.
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08.22.09
When, not if
Today over tea I was holding forth about backup methods, which reminded me that I’ve long meant to post something about how I’ve been handling it. To wit: right now, I’ve got a two-part system—constant partial backup online via SugarSync and less frequent but complete offline backup using Time Machine and an external hard drive.
Yes, I got backup religion the hard way, by having my laptop drive fail in 2006 when it was six months out of standard warranty. I was able to salvage most of my data using Prosoft Data Rescue, but only because I happened to notice before it went into a complete dive that the drive had failed its S.M.A.R.T. status test. Now I keep Smart Reporter in my menu bar, and I back up constantly and redundantly, over and over again, a lot. And I always fork up the money for AppleCare, which replaced that dead drive in a weekend.
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07.13.09
from the Guardian
They’ve been doing a lot of nifty slide shows at the Guardian. Here are four recent ones:
- British Library launches online newspaper archive
As you may have guessed, I love this kind of stuff. Unfortunately, the archive website’s not working—at least, for me. I click on links and get nothing but error messages. I’ve written to Gale’s tech support, but I’d be interested to know if the site’s working for other people, especially those in the UK.
- Article: “British Library publishes online archive of 19th-century newspapers,” by Maev Kennedy, June 18, 2009
- The archive itself: British Newspapers, 1800–1900, at Gale Cengage Learning
07.10.09
Vanessa Davis, computer whiz and more!
The charming and talented Vanessa Davis has a new comic about past jobs, good and bad, over at Tablet, which is Nextbook’s reconceived, redesigned, and mostly restaffed* online magazine: Vocation, All I Ever wanted!
Vanessa’s also, after a long period of dormancy, reorganized and relaunched her own website, Spaniel Rage. With a blog and everything! Yay!
* Yes, yes, I’m going to clean out my office today, finally, I promise.
(Cross-posted at Clusterflock.)
———
Update, 7/16: There’s a great interview with Vanessa over at Largehearted Boy: Antiheroines: Vanessa Davis
07.06.09
Please, Mister Postman
Oh, I think I need to make a field trip to the 11215 post office . . .
Dear Postmaster Potter:
I am writing to ask if you would please consider redecorating my local post
office. Maybe you have heard of it: 11215. It’s the Park Slope Station in Brooklyn,
New York, and I believe that a great many novelists spend time there, waiting to mail
their manuscripts and galleys and quarterly estimated tax payments and whatnot, so
perhaps it is the source of a great many written complaints. Or perhaps not. Anyway,
may I elaborate on the nature of the problem?The nature of the problem is choice of font.
—Rudolph Delson, “An Open Letter to John E. Potter, Postmaster General” (PDF, 127 KB), February 12, 2007
Oh, but that is not the only problem, as it turns out. And these issues have been observed not only at the 11215 post office, as I’m sure many can attest. I particularly recommend the 10009 (Tompkins Square) location for psychotic signage (not to mention patrons).
I think I also need to get a copy of Mr. Delson’s novel, Maynard and Jennica.
(Via Manhattan Users Guide)
06.11.09
Indexigning
Via e-mail, Lars R. asks, “Would you consider doing a write-up on your blog on the production of indices and how indexing relates to the design process as a whole?”
Some topics I’m interested in include
- The usefulness of InDesign’s indexing feature (as opposed to third party programmes if they exist, or simply manually typing in numbers)
- The practicalities of the designer being involved with the nitty gritty versus any sort of indexing specialist working independently)
- At which stage in the production process indexing begins and ends
- Differences between independent/inhouse publishers and large commercial affairs
- Does the designer generally have any input to level of detail, extent etc, or is it exclusively a case of matter having priority over form? How does the index influence castoff?
