Typewriter Disassembly

Typewriters are amazing things. They usually have forty or fifty keys, and with the help of the shift key they can make a hundred or so different characters. It arranges each chosen character in a linear fashion, uniform according to its language, performing its roughshod typesetting and kerning as it goes. Mighty complicated pieces of machinery — and it shows, in this image from Todd McLellan's series Disassembly:

Queer Book Titles Found

From a wire news story, published in 1913:

Queer Book Titles Found

London.—As the keeper of four millions of books, the late Dr. Fortescue delighted to tell of the titular curiosities in the British Museum. He found it necessary very frequently to dip deeply into a book before discovering its subject. Thus, "Music of the Wild" resolved itself into natural history; "Light for the Blind" into an appeal on behalf of foreign missions, and "Earl Percy's Dinner Table" into a war history.

But the book that baffled him completely was "The Abbey on the Marsh." There was internal evidence that the book was an account of a real abbey, but the author had forgotten to mention its name.

So the lesson, dear writers, is as you compose your book of nonfiction, let not your creativity in describing things allow you to forget to say the name of the darn thing.

More Christmas-Tree Books

This Christmas tree made from books takes a bit more effort, compared to the one from a few days ago, and a little taste for book destruction. Juniper Books found themselves with a surplus of green fabric-bound books, whose contents had been digitized and thus the paper was headed for the dumpster anyhow, and decided to make a Christmas tree. The edges of some books went into the bandsaw to make the traditional arrow-point branches, while the rest make up the body of the tree. Via Juxtapoz.

A Book-tree Merry Christmas

Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful, and as long as you've got a nice bunch of books that you're ready to stack, you can make yourself a book Christmas tree! I found out about this fun craftiness only minutes before leaving the house to go buy a real Christmas tree, and just for a few moments I considered unloading the bookshelves…but then I gave it some thought, and I figured I'd be happier vacuuming up needles than having to reshelve everything before New Year's.

The Books of Skyrim

After the Oblivion book from a few weeks ago, you wouldn't think there would be many other people going crazy over in-game texts. But, then came Skyrim. In this new game, there's books all over the place, and one inventive fan has extracted them, compiled them into ebooks, and has all the in-game Skyrim books available on their website. Now, we count down until somebody puts them on Lulu in physical form...

Little Newspapers Doing Well

Here's some good news: small newspapers are doing surprisingly well these days. Particularly, these are weekly papers, small-town newspapers that thrive on stories of largely local interest. They give several examples, and the most striking thing I see is the similarity to newspapers of a hundred years ago.

I do a lot of historical research through online newspaper repositories and sitting at the microfilm viewer, and the meat-and-potatoes of a newspaper in 1920 consisted of a front-page of national news and major local news, a page of just local news, a page of local 'interest' (who was visiting where, how the church social went), a page of recpies and dress patterns for the women of the house, a page of editorials and financial markets, a page of sports, and a page of classifieds. Eight pages, consistently and uniformly produced for decades on small presses for only a few hundred or a few thousand subscribers. Those same methods of news publishing are, apparently, still effective in today's 24-hour news cycle.

So, while those large newspapers have struggled to maintain their hold on news that's available through free sources on the internet, local newspapers are paying their bills by reporting on the stuff not provided by Yahoo! News: the things happening at city council meetings, in the school auditoriums, and in neighbor's back yards. I do suspect, however, that if you added up the budgets of the thousands of successful newsweeklies, they wouldn't even approach that of USA Today, but if they can pay for paper and reporters and keep the lights on, they're going to be the way communities get local news for quite a while.

Truitt's Fix by Rex Evans Wood

The producer of Hear It Now and Dakota Datebook (a show I write for) at Prairie Public Radio has a new science fiction book out. Rex Evans Wood's new book, Truitt's Fix, is about Dan Truitt, a man "caught between warring nations, on the run, and pursued by a relentless villain."

I haven't read the book yet, but I'm passing along this news: Wood will be doing a reading at Zandbroz in Fargo this Saturday, November 12^th, at 6:30pm.

The Keaton Music Typewriter

A typewriter has filled the void between handwriting and typesetting for about two hundred years now, but there's plenty of other things besides just letters and numbers that need ink on paper. Here we have one such example — the Keaton Music Typewriter:
This particular example is for sale on Etsy, with a $6,000 pricetag — definitely worth the money, since there are only a few left in existence. The Early Typewriter Collectors Association has an excellent article on this mechanical musical typewriter, too. If you want to figure out how it works, you can see Mr. Keaton's original patent online.

News-Lined Walls

Sometimes, when people clean out their attic, they find old newspapers. What this guy found was better than just newspapers: he found a bunch of plates used in the printing process nailed to his attic walls. They don't appear to be the actual printing plates; those would be mirror-reversed for the printing process. These look like they're embossed, like either the mold for casting the printing plate, or something thick and soft run through the presses without ink.

Lean Publishing

What do you get when you distill modern book business through the structure of tech startups? You get Lean Publishing, a means by which a writer can look at book production as a profit-building exercise. You won't find any writing tips or methods for overcoming writer's block in this manifesto. Peter Armstrong has produced a plan that puts people with an idea on the same path of Angry Birds, rather than the traditional route of finding a literary agent.

Every problem looks like a problem with the pipes when you ask a plumber, and Lean Publishing is much the same case. Armstrong's background is in a web development and architecture start-up, so fixing the problem of developing a profitable book, of course, looks like something to be solved the web start-up way. Many of the terms and ideas sound very foreign to somebody who has no connection to that world, but there is one advantage to the language of VC start-ups. "Creatives" are the people for whom the start-up system was built, and the methods for navigating a start-up are suited towards directing creative people through business minefields. There's a reason that much of the internet was created by art majors who quickly hired a CFO once checks started coming in: a creative founder needs that sort of help to reach a profitable end.

As such, the people who can benefit the most from Lean Publishing are the people stuck on the traditional publishing path. The process requires giving up the usual process of getting words onto paper, and introduces the scary idea of making ideas available to readers (and the competition) before the text is complete. The Blooker Prize was a bit ahead of its time in recognizing that a worthy book could come from the web. The success of Julie and Julia, the 2006 Blooker winner, should have inspired more in that direction, but taking that route to publishing lacked the roadmap to such success. Lean Publishing hopes to brandish a machete and clear that road, blazing a new path to long-form writing success through the methods that built the internet into what it is today.

(Via.)