I may have mentioned before that I (perhaps foolishly) volunteered some months back to take the 1948 manuscript of a friend’s father into print, using the same online service that produced Cinema Paronomasia, which in the five months since its production has already sold two copies at retail (thanks, guys!).

Anyway, I took the 300 pages of typescript, deposited on onionskin paper via a ribbon that ought to have been discarded by the end of the war, and rendered these, via a tedious and labor-intensive series of procedures, into machine-readable form. Following much massaging, and some contentious exchanges with the author’s son, I am closing on the final product. Presently I’m making a last page-by-page review with a mind to extirpating such errors and omissions as have survived the past several carpet bombings, and also to correct any subtle formatting inconsistencies such as would elude the eye of the lay reader—there will be few of these—but not the close scrutiny of a trained publishing professional, of whom there will be none.

The finished product will likely have a print run of a dozen, mainly to the heirs of its author (1922-1956), but I feel rather good about bringing the young man’s work into the present century. I think he would be pleased with the printed product, and I’ve enjoyed exercising my design chops to this end.

Preliminary cover treatment here.

cordially,

the profit above printing cost will not go to me, the hardworking editor and designer, but to the late author’s millionaire scion—who, I will add, is a stand-up guy.

The formatted text can be found here. Keep in mind that this was written by an adjunct professor, then twenty-five, near the end of Truman’s first term.

cordially,

Yeah, I revised the copy, including that repetition, before it finally went to press on Monday. The author is looking out of the picture, to be sure, but the other side is reserved for the ISBN barcode, and I wouldn’t have wanted for the poor man to “turn over in his grave.”

There is one formatting inconsistency mid-book that the lay reader—not that there will ever be many of these—will never register. I could have fixed it at the cost of much manual repagination, which at that point, four months in, I didn’t feel much like undertaking.

cordially,