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things things turning tech mumbo-jumbo into tasty, readable gumbo Glog Books General Store Editing & Crowdfunding Glog Books General Store Editing & Crowdfunding Glog Turning technology from mumbo-jumbo into rich tasty gumbo All Audio Bandwidth Misuse Benisms Benjamin Books Bookselling Buddies Business Cartooning Conferences Copyright Crowdfunding Design Entertainment Financial Glenning History Household Humor Journalism Kids Medical Money Opinion Personal Photography Podcasting Politics Print Public Domain Publishing Radio Rex Rexisms RSS Behavior Schools and computers Security Sociopathy Space Standing Desk Teaching Technology Telecommunications Testing Thought Experiments Type Uncategorized Last Copies of Six Centuries of Type & Printing Glenn Fleishman April 29, 2024 I’m down to the last 50 copies of my book Six Centuries of Type & Printing . If you were interested in a copy, now is the time! The price includes the letterpress edition, an expanded book edition (which features a full bibliography), and U.S. shipping. Interior spread of Six Centuries of Type & Printing Back in 2019, when I launched the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule project , I envisioned a short edition of a book to include with the museum. The museum would have artifacts, uniquely created items, and a curator’s manual” specific to what was included, the book would have a broader scope. As always, I was probably too ambitious to build out the museum and book at the same time—even with project partner Anna Peterson née Robinson, the fine woodworker who built the gorgeous cases. But when the pandemic hit, I didn’t regret having more work on my plate to keep busy. The book was my gloss on the scope of modern printing, which started before Gutenberg in Asia, but didn’t ignite and spread until his particular combination of factors clicked. I approached the topic as someone who had worked as a typesetter and in a printing plant, studied and worked as a graphic designer, had stints printing with letterpress types and equipment, and being a modern technologist. The book is a technological lens on the development of type and printing, hand in and hand, and why development stalled after Gutenberg from the early 1500s to around 1800. (I started the book asking why, and make a pretty good stab at answering my own question.) I wanted a metal type and letterpress printed book, which turned out to be easier than expected but more complicated to manage. I worked with Phil Abel in London ( Hand and Eye Letterpress ), who I’d met on a late 2017 trip while researching London Kerning . Phil coordinated the typesetting with his former employee, Nick Gill, who runs Effra Press , his own operation that acquired Phil’s Monotype composition equipment. Nick is in North Yorkshire. Phil was unable to find a satisfactory bindery for my project, and contracted with a German firm, Spinner Buchbinderei . I had an edition of about 425 printed, 108 of which were included with museums. Over the last few years, I’ve slowly sold through inventory, but I offered it as an add-on item in my recent How Comics Were Made pre-order site, and it’s flying off my shelves. In Books , Crowdfunding , History , Type Pre-Order How Comics Were Made Glenn Fleishman March 29, 2024 The Kickstarter campaign for How Comics Were Made ended yesterday, and it was a rousing success, raising nearly $170,000—over 110% of the goal I’d set to make the book financially feasible due to the overhead involved. This puts it in the top 150 publishing projects at Kickstarter of all time (out of nearly 70,000). Thank you if you backed the campaign, provided moral support, or are just reading this post! Even though the crowdfunding stage is over, I’ll be selling the book as a pre-order until it’s printed later this year and offering limited-edition/quantity high-tier rewards while they last. You can go to the pre-order store for more information! I don’t have to give the printer a final number for how many books I want printed until this summer, giving me time to expand based on demand. In Bookselling , Cartooning , Publishing Live Cartoonists’ Interviews Now…Live! Glenn Fleishman March 19, 2024 As part of the work to promote my Kickstarter campaign for How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page , I scheduled four interviews with cartoonists and a curator to talk about newspaper comics through the lens of their work. I had the fourth session this morning, and you can watch (and comment and ask questions) all of them now on YouTube. You can use this playlist to find them all, or use the following videos to play inseeing our tax dollars at work! In Glenning , Personal , Crowdfunding A New Newsletter with an Excerpt of a Bill Griffith Interview Glenn Fleishman November 7, 2023 The long and short: subscribe to my new newsletter about how newspaper comics were made or read the inaugural issue . If you’re anything like me, I would be surprised. (I stole that joke in part from the late, great Mitch Hedberg. If you’d like to see me after the show…I would be surprised.”) But, if you’re of the same era, you may remember the glorious surrealism of Zippy the Pinhead. Somehow, in our universe, this comic strip was syndicated by King Features and ran daily in hundreds of papers. Even more bizarrely, nearly 40 years later, it still does! I loved Zippy and used to pore over old collections of it. Thus it was a huge pleasure to meet Bill Griffith briefly at the Small Press Expo (SPX), an indie comics event, back in early September, and intrigue him enough about my upcoming book, How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page , to set up an interview. I knew Bill had a passionate interest in reproduction: he wasn’t that into printing, but rather wanted his work (and that of cartoonists in publications he edited long ago) to appear as good as possible in print. We had a long, far-ranging conversation, parts of which will inform and wind up in the book, along with production material he’s offering from his personal collection, and appropriate Zippy strips. To capture some of my working process and share interviews, I started a newsletter also called How Comics Were Made that you can subscribe to. I’ll be producing issues regularly as I move towards the February 2024 target of a Kickstarter campaign for the book. Subscribe here , or just click this link to read the first issue , which includes excerpts from my interview with Bill. A 1991 comic, third of five in a series, that Bill created after his local copy shop switched from regular photocopying machines to scanner-printers. He had them scan, print, and scan the same background five times, showing the degradation from Monday to Friday that week. The above is the third strip in the sequence of five. In Bookselling , Cartooning $5 Take Control Sale to Celebrate 20th Anniversary Glenn Fleishman October 23, 2023 To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Take Control Books is discounting all titles it offers to just $5! This includes eleven books by yours truly! No coupon is needed. The sale ends on 26 October 2023 at the end of the day Central Time. What’s that again? This: $5 off all Take Control Books! My current eight actively updated books. Four were updated in September and October. The rest will receive updates in the next few weeks and months. Back in 2003, Tonya Engst of TidBITS asked if I wanted to be part of an experiment in ebook publishing. Several computer book authors and I had been talking about whether someone could launch an author-oriented publishing company that split profits fairly due to a far lower overhead for ebooks. Tonya and her husband, Adam, decided around that time to take the plunge—I can’t recall if inspired by that discussion or independently!—as they already had a dedicated and loyal audience through TidBITS. Some people had been reading TidBITS already for over 20 years at that point. (TidBITS started in 1990, and...