theBarnstorming: Making Books

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May 05, 2007

Making Books

We recently discovered that Idiots'Books has been granted a table at the 2007 Museum of Comic and Cartoon Arts Festival this June in NYC. This means we will have our very own six-foot table in a huge room full of other people who make books, some of whom are pretty famous in the "comic and cartoon" world, others of whom are, like us, trying to figure out exactly what they are up to. We have no idea what to expect at the MoCCA festival. We will stand behind our table, smiling eagerly, begging silently for approval, acceptance, affirmation. But will we be satisfied?

As I have said before on these pages, our books are not comics or graphic novels, the categories into which most of the stuff at MoCCA is likely to fall. So we could be shunned and avoided, people walking by our table, averting their eyes and whispering conspiratorially and laughing sarcastically.

Or, there might be some interest. We just don't know. And so we are preparing for the best case scenario.

Our goal is to sell a lot of books at the MoCCA festival, with the hope of "getting the word out", creating a bit of name recognition and, hopefully, signing up a few new subscribers. (I prepared the mailing labels for the volume 7 mailing today, by the way, and the number of subscribers is up to 170.) In anticipation of the potential flood of eager, cash-waving customers, we are creating a massive inventory of past volumes, hundreds and hundreds of books. The real bottleneck in book production is the printing. And so Robbi has been doing so in earnest.

Here are 100 copies of Facial Features of French Explorers, boxed and ready for the trip to NYC.

Last week we gave Staples a lot of business. We ordered:

-12,000 sheets of fancy text stock
-6,000 sheets of 8.5x11 card/cover stock
-5,000 1/4 inch heavy duty staples
-100 rolls of "glue dots" (used to adhere covers to the book 'guts')
-12 new paper cutter mats (supports the rolling blade in the paper cutter
-6 new rotary blades for the paper cutter
-1 new scoring wheel (just so that we have a backup, given the critical importance of the scoring wheel, of which we have but one at present)

Here is some of the haul.

Here are 100 trimmed-but-yet-unstapled copies of Death of Henry.

Over the last few days, 150 copies of Ten Thousand Stories rolled off the printer before, out of sheer exhaustion, perhaps, the printer decided to jam in a chronic sort of way. We're giving it a break.

Here is what the table looks like in the midst of book production.

I have been having intense longings lately for a factory to call my own. A huge room with sturdy formica counters, well-lit and stocked with endless reams of paper and many scoring blades. I call it paradise.

While I have been making old books, Robbi has been finishing a new one. Volume 7 is called Understanding Traffic. It is a book more than 6 years in the making. At least in my mind. Whenever I sit stuck in traffic I fume and curse and dream of someday writing a book explaining the many nuances of traffic's sprawling complexity. My dream found fruition with Volume 7. For the past few days, Robbi has been doing the illustrations.

Here she is at her light table.

After drawing through the night, around 5:00 this morning, Robbi finished the illustrations. I'm starting to think that she prefers to work this way.

As is our habit upon completing a book, we called upon our editorial guru, the spectacular and wise Matthew Westbrook. We decided to drive across the bridge to take him the finished book in person. The fact that we would be able to make a pit stop in the Annapolis Chipotle played some role in the decision to deliver the book instead of emailing it, as we otherwise might have.

Last night we parked the car beneath a tree full of pink flowers.

When we got to Elkridge (south of Baltimore, where Matt lives), we enjoyed a Chipotle lunch and then looked at the many fossils Matt found on a recent trip to a sulfate mine in North Carolina. Among his finds was the inner ear bone of a prehistoric whale. It was pretty cool.

While Matt read Understanding Traffic, grinning madly, cackling wickedly, and wielding his red pen, we frisked in the yard with Iggy, who was in true form.