This is a continuation of a series of posts that I started what seems like a long time ago about getting a book designed and published. The series starts here.
A lot has happened since I last reported on this project in — gosh, has it been that long? — July. In this post, I told you about deciding to have Jerry Takigawa do the design, and Brooks Jensen handle the project from there, with Hemlock doing the printing.
Jerry did a marvelous design, with striking double black pages separating the sections devoted to each city. He also designed a spiffy semi-transparent fly sheet. I sent a pdf to Brooks, who got back to me with some questions. Most were easily dealt with. A few were not.
Brooks pointed out that the all black facing pages would rub against each other as the book was read, acting sort of like sandpaper, and causing the nice rich black to deteriorate over time, to say nothing of causing black dust to get all over everything near the book. Jerry said that he planned to deal with that with an aqueous varnish. But the press that Brooks was planning on using didn’t support that. To get the varnish, we’d have to go to a different press, which upped the cost a lot.
In addition, Brook’s standard book had nothing like Jerry’s attention-grabbing flysheet. If would have to be glued in by hand, at not-inconsiderable cost.
Finally, after getting a quote from Hemlock for doing the book Jerry’s way, Brooks said that this was turning into a custom book, and that’s not what he was selling, and suggested that I have Jerry work directly with Hemlock.
I had to agree. I really like what Jerry has done with the book, although at the time I didn’t realize that he was designing something that didn’t fit Brooks’ specs. I’m probably not going to do this a lot, and I’ll just hold my breath and write a bigger check.
Leave a Reply