Printed the first two copies of Volume 1 over the weekend. The first was posted to George Westbrook. She’s going on holiday and needed some reading material and she couldn’t take an A4 copy so I used Pagemaker (an ancient Adobe piece of desktop publishing software) to create signatures of sixteen pages which I then stapled and hot-glued into a cover I printed. The cover was a little thin so on the second copy I added some blank pages at the start and stuck them to the cover. This also helped to prevent them falling out. The end signatures are typically less well-glued than the centre ones.
Printing these signatures was a nightmare when a blank page went through and I couldn’t work out where to restart printing. Worked it out eventually but not something I want to do very often. I figure the copies cost me about $10 in materials, which compares well with the $40 most printers would want to print that volume of books.
I was quite happy with the result. It’s important because
a) the printed article has a different look and feel than when seen on screen.
b) I’m probably going to offer 50 copies to a sample of seventeen-year-olds for their comments.
Then I started proofing one of these copies and then had the problem of how to update the copy with the new pages and I got in a terrible mess trying to stick the revised pages back in and ruined my beautiful book. I then printed the whole thing again on A4, much easier and quicker, and began proofing that. Came up with some good ideas, such as putting a separator between changes of Point of View.
I also started thinking about fonts and decided the book should be printed in Agency FB and Perpetua. Agency has a nice angular shape which suggests the angularity of Crystal. Perpetua is similar to Times New Roman but much more condensed, so cheaper to print. This will be useful to print samples and if (heaven forbid) I can’t find a publisher for this masterpiece.
