I’ve been more-or-less off-planet since mid-July, obsessed with my admittedly silly project of visually recasting film titles as geographical puns. I did about five hundred of these before I sobered up, but then I was seized with the notion of doing a, you know, “vanity press” edition, a proposition far less costly than it would have been a generation ago. I have a proof copy on order—it is pocked with errors and infelicities, but after several additional passes I’ve squashed each new bug as it crawls put from beneath the baseboards—for the purpose of determining whether the output quality is worth the tariff. If it is, I’ll print a few copies to distribute to my sibs and to a couple of former inamorata who still profess to think of me fondly. For anyone who might be interested, the proposed cover is here; a password-protected* PDF (locked up because there are subroutines these days trawling the web for pirated pixels, an outrageous trespass upon our ancient liberties) of substantial megabytage is parked here. My brother says that his cable modem brought it up with alacrity; my creaky old DSL line required a quarter of an hour.

It has been over ten years since last I designed a book. The process has reminded me of why this sort of thing is optimally broken down to tasks and stages assigned to teams of specialists—but I knew that already. It felt good to shake the rust flakes from my “Creative Cloud”—pardon me, from my “Fetid Fog” skills and put the spurs to my old training.

*The password—case sensitive—is:

Langerhans

—With great power comes great responsibility, so don’t, you know, abuse this.

cordially,

I’m pleasantly surprised by the quality of the product. I saw five years ago a sample of what I assumed would be this same tech, and it didn’t look a lot better than what I used to get from my big Ricoh color printer (the size of an industrial dryer) at BDS. This? If you didn’t know better, you’d assume that it was produced by the traditional four-color* process. The paper stock is good too.

It’s riddled with errors, of course, but I’ve had ten days to weed these out, and on my last review detected just one, so minor, so unnoticeable, that I couldn’t be troubled to upload a correction.

cordially,

*During tha latter fifteen years of my alleged career I used to be seconded to an industry group that sent their annual awards program, which I designed, out to a commercial printer. “Dear god,” he once moaned, “find me another designer who understands prepress!” He was being given a lot of 72dpi images in RGB from people whose entire design careers had been spent producing images for screen. Let’s not even talk about the stuff he received in Microsoft-fucking-Word…