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April 25, 2007

Sweet Release

Last week was a marathon of creativity for Robbi. She painted nonstop for five days and nights. A week ago tonight things looked very bleak indeed for The Town that Somehow Fooled the British. But Robbi gave up sleep and sanity, and eventually the book was done. We printed out 25 copies, drove to St. Michaels, had our reading and felt content for about two days. The wonderful thing about The Town that Somehow Fooled the British is that the other 2,500 copies are going to be printed by someone else, very far away from here. The book we printed out for last Friday's reading was not yet perfect. Some images were poorly scanned, the cover design was not yet finalized, a few copy issues had yet to be resolved. Step by step this week we addressed these final details as we prepared the files to send to the folks in Hong Kong.

On Tuesday a set of color proofs arrived, sample images printed from Robbi's files on the actual paper stock on the actual printing press. The point was for us to see how the color translated from Robbi's screen to the Chinese printing press. We were pleased to see that the color reproduced beautifully. Though it was somewhat more subdued than the color that printed out for the limited edition books we produced last week (according to Robbi, that color was too garish).

Today we received the "dummy" book from the printers. That is, a completely blank, white sample book made of the exact materials that our book will be made from. So we basically had a chance to hold and feel a near facsimile of the finished product. It was awfully gratifying.

Today Robbi prepared the various things we had to send to the printer.

1) a black and white version of all of the "text" pages (that is all of the interior pages) of the book.

2) color print-outs of the endpapers (the page between the cover and the first "text" page) and of the covers.

3) a CD with the Adobe InDesign (the page layout program we use) file and high-resolution files for each of the illustrations and logos.

These things in tow, we drove to good old East Coast Storage (where all of our worldly posessions lived for those months between living in Baltimore and moving into the barn) to send the FedEx. East Coast Storage doubles as our local FedEx depot.

We were gleeful on the final leg of this long process.

Here is Robbi with the cover printout (note the glee).

And with the other stuff (Note the overly-enthusiastic documentation of mundane detail on my part).

Note my enthusiasm for FedEx--that even picks things up in Chestertown.

Now that the files are off, the waiting begins. In a few weeks we will get a set of "wet" proofs from China, that is a complete version of the book's contents for the purpose of final review of content, color, and placement of images. If all is well, we will give the green light and the printing will begin. In my albeit limited experience in the design and production world, it never, ever happens that all is well.

There will always be something amiss, in spite of the expert editorial services of Mr. Matthew Westbrook, the talisman we wield to ward off the dark forces of typographical mishap. His powers are vast and legendary.

If you find yourself in a dark alley with Matt and he's holding a red pen and he challenges you to a proofreading duel, please, in the name of all that is holy, refuse. The man will cut you down like the hollow sapling that you are. And then will laugh, standing over your bent and broken frame.

Posted by bogenamp at April 25, 2007 07:59 PM

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