Thankful

I was doomed from the start to love words. I remember visiting Colonial Willliamsburg a few times as a child, one of those "living museum" reconstructions of the actual, original site. For a bookish child, it offered plenty of sensory wonders (hot cookies! hedge maze! cannon firing!) and scholarly interest (archeology! period materials! hot cookies!) One of my favorite locations, besides the bakery, was the print shop, with its actual functioning press. I was in love with the marbled paper they produced and sold, because a marbled endpaper in a book to me meant it was Classy and Important. Also, it just looked cool. How did they do it without it looking muddy and mixed-up? Magic, that's how. I was the kid that brought home a souvenir copy of the Bill of Rights, printed on "authentic-feeling"  material.

So, I was a little strange, I'll admit, but there was something inherently magical about the ritual and dance of the printers moving around the great machine, inking the type, inserting the paper, compressing them together with the machinery, and ta dah, a completed page appears. It's still magical to me, and now that the Algorithm has me again in its willing grasp, it's figured out that I will watch print shop and linocut content for hours if I want to. All I'm missing is the cookie.

As I'm typing this, I'm on a self-taught journey to typeset The Fall and Rise of @TheRealJoyG for paperback. I don't have a press or aprons or ink, and I can't insert cool handmade endpapers, and at the moment, it feels like the pieces of a printing press have arrived at my front door with a treasure map to looking for the assembly instructions. Some parts of the press are obvious. Some are arcane. I'm learning.

Somewhere between hedge-mazes and online print-on-demand, I was a graduate student, and the go-to free-as-in-beer software then and now for modern electronic "typesetting" was LaTeX (pronounced "LA-tech" or "LAY-tech" but never "latex" like the oozy tree sap.) It's software of the old school, without any fancy interactive UI or clicky aspects, and allows precision to a degree that is even more flexible than lead type. Instructions go in, print comes out (a PDF, in my case.) Generations of users have contributed, extended, and mercifully, documented its use. The information I need is out there, so my journey now is in the finding.

It's coming together. I've wrestled my way through the basics, and I'm learning the steps of the dance: manuscript goes here and template goes here and format options go here and we burn a pot of incense and offer a cookie to the gods, and LaTeX generates lovely output here. Debbie Berne's excellent title The Design of Books is my guide star, and I'm thrilled that most of the intricacies of laying out print according to design rules (there are many!) is handled elegantly and automatically by LaTeX. This is a well-walked path, and I am simply rediscovering it for myself.

I could do any of this without the examples, conversations, blog posts, forum posts, online communities, and other digital town squares where we collect experience. Back in Williamsburg, apprentices would have learned the trade from the masters. I don't have a print-master to guide me right now, and I'm surely making a number of apprentice-level mistakes. I can run off as many test prints as I want, though, and I've got plenty of virtual helpers if I need them both historical and contemporary. I'll get it. And when I do, I hope I'll be pleased with the outcome.

I plan to celebrate with a cookie.

🧩🦏