a book is made + update
+ I added a PayPal button a bit farther down this page. Because buttons are convincing, maybe. The number of copies available is very small. May the button disappear soon. +
In the last post couple of posts I’ve talked about a small book I’ve been working on. I wanted to have something to sell for a few dollars (or give away) at the reading I’m doing tomorrow. Here’s how the cover looks–
And here’s page 37–
I’ve got 25 copies of these, and I suppose not all of them will be gone after the reading. If you’re interested in having one, please send me an email (evelynh at gmail dot com) and we can talk about PayPal stuff. The price is $3 plus a dollar for shipping, unless you live far enough to require international shipping.
Read some of a slightly different version on elimae.
Adam did the layout using LaTeX, which I think we’ll be using to lay out the next issue of Dewclaw. I had a frustrating time trying to print the text at a copy shop–the margins were odd and it wasn’t possible to fold the pages without folding up some of the text. This morning I was anxious to find someone who could understand what was going wrong in the layout and fix it, and I called a printer and tried to explain the situation. I barely understood the jargon he was using to tell me how to reformat the margins so that he could print it correctly. And then it was like a game of telephone, me, trying to remember what the printer had said, which I felt I had barely heard because I didn’t understand most of it, repeating this to Adam in a chat window. Somehow Adam interpreted what I thought the printer had said, made some changes, and the book was printed and ready this afternoon. It looks pretty good for being the result of probably many mis-communications.
I’m really liking LaTeX as a layout system so far. Much more controllable and reliable than a visual layout application once you figure out what commands to use.
On the first try printing there was a problem involving things being upside down on the second side of each sheet that I won’t go into.
The second try printing problem was that the left and right minimum margins on the printer we were printing to seemed to be different and undocumented(AFAIK), so when we printed a two-sided document, the left side of the first face did not line up with the right side of the second face. Perhaps there is some way of dealing with this that I am unaware of.
Thinking about this problem in the print shop, I thought that it would probably be possible to print something with no content margin and a box or something in the same place on both sides, measure the offset between sides, create a document with every 3rd page having a margin different by that offset, print that, and then do all of the fitting, trimming and stapling. This sounded too complicated, so I recommended just having someone do it correctly.
[...] Evelyn Hampton wrote this sentence among a collection she recently published, Not That Far: “It is good for the theater when you do not know you are in the theater. Same goes for the city. It is good for the city when you believe you are in a theater having a dream.” This seems sensible to me, and good advice. You can purchase your own copy of her book and read all of more of her sentences here. [...]
[...] haven’t done a full Dewclaw issue with it yet, but I did lay out a small book called Not That Far, and it worked real [...]