We are headed into the final stretch with the Histories of Newark 1758-2008. Rebecca Johnson Melvin, Jill and I traveled to Ivyland, Pennsylvania, to visit Downey Hoster at Hoster Bindery to approve the foil stamping on the hardback covers, to get a personal tour of the facility, and to talk about final details with the binding and delivery of the book.

It was also our first chance to see the final folding of the book’s signatures and the nesting of those signatures. There are some details we wanted in the book to help give it some sense of being handmade. Two things we did were to print the book on two colors of paper—vanilla and white and to leave the front edge of the book rough.

The book is printed in eight-page signatures (sheets with four pages on one side and four on the other which are folded in half both ways to get he pages oriented correctly). There is one signature in vanilla with two signatures in white nested inside each other. That way the book has 8 pages of vanilla followed by 16 pages of white. We thought it would give the book some texture. The other thing we wanted was a rough fore edge (the edge away from the spine). There was no way to do the book with deckle-edged (rough) paper (we would have loved to do it in handmade paper but we wouldn’t have gotten the book for another 22 years and the cost would about the same as putting in a city subway system). Anyway that fore edge is left untrimmed and it looked exactly like we had envisioned it.
Everything we’ve heard about Hoster Binder has been positive and after the visit we see why. Top notch equipment, personnel, vision, and the ability to see ways to contribute that the designer / printer can’t see.

One very nice element that Downey has added to our book is to round the spine. It seems like a small detail, but after having the architecture of the book explained from the point-of-view of the spine it is a must if you can have it. Once we get the book we’ll show some photos and explain some of these details.
The critical moment right now is Friday, December 7 at 6:00 pm. The Histories of Newark group along with the Mayor is having an opening ceremony along with a booksigning. We hope a lot of the authors come and we kind of wonder if anyone will want us to sign their copy of the book.

The dust jacket is also at the printer and should be printed on Monday. Another detail we wanted was to do a full dustjacket that folded over on the top and bottom. The jacket designed by Jill Cypher ended up being a perfect solution. We used a hand-drawn map of the city from 1820 and overlaid images of Newark people into the house shapes. It does a wonderful job of mimicking the inside look of the book.

We are getting three sets of the book in all of its parts. Wallflowers Press is donating one to Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library, one to the Newark Historical Society, and we will keep one. Once we get into our new letterpress studio feel free to stop in and take a look. It is an interesting process and this book was done right from the very start.

Here is the dust jacket opened up. The worn edges of the map show on the sides.

The printer has about half a day of printing to finish the text block part of the book. Then the endsheets. Then the dust jacket. This is the typography for the title. The typeface is Rivoli designed by dftype in The Netherlands.

Here are two of the final spreads that we like.

The book has a couple of interesting elements as far as we are concerned. First is a rough fore edge (front edge of the book). We’ve deliberately incorporated page creep into the the book by nesting three eight-page signatures so the edges are not in alignment. Then we don’t trim them. We only trim the top and bottom of the book.

Each of the three nested eight-page signatures start with a Vanilla color signature then two white signatures. That way the colors of the pages jump back and forth 24 times throughout the book. We thought it would give the book a bit more of aged quality. The paper is uncoated, but pretty smooth. Duotones are done in black and PMS 547 (see the captions above) in a 175 line screen. We wanted the citizen band across the middle to have the people very recognizable.

The hard back is black using two foil-stamped colors (silver and dull grey) to mimic the colors on the silver coin which has been imaged to be shiny and tarnished the way a coin might be.

We are also excited to be doing a full dust jacket that folds at the top and bottom which we hope will add a nice finished touch to the book.

Don Rash, a nationally known bookbinder, will be producing a dozen leather bound copies. These will also include on of the George II coins along with ephemera produced during the project.

We hope to have books by December 6 for a December 7 booksigning.

For a guy that thought he was out of the design world this has turned out to be a pretty serious design project.

So after eleven months of work we get to the end of the Histories of Newark: 1758-2008. We were using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of each of the stages for each of the 288 pages. Once they all got green it was done except for the final proofreading.

So there you have it. Due at the printer tomorrow.

We’ve finished the main effort toward taking citizens of Newark photographs. Here are the totals.

Scheduled hours included in photoshoots: 98

Total number of citizen photos taken: 5,054

Total file size of originals (color .jpg images): 6.86 gigabytes

Total number of retouched photos: 1,237

Total file size of retouched photos (black/white .tif images): 2.79 gigabytes

Estimated hours for retouching: 155

Total citizens (some in multiple images): 3,767

The design of the book includes a 1″ band that will run through the middle of every page of the book to include current citizens of Newark. A book on the history of the city doesn’t have room for the contemporary city and a lot of the old photos do not include much of the humanity that has gone into that history.

This citizen band was included to counter both of those problems.

While the effort in the citizen photography was far more than we anticipated the fun of doing it was also far beyond what we anticipated.

Every so often while we’ve been taking the ‘citizen’ photos for the Histories of Newark book we’ve had a reason to actually set up a photo which requires some fairly serious retouching.

Original #1. From this one we got the overall feel of the piece, the two ’strong’ guys and the lady’s feet.

Original #2. From this one we got the lady and the third guy.

Retouched. I love the look on the face of the middle guy. I can hear a kind of Beavis and Butthead voice saying, “We got a big one this time. Huh huh huh huh huh.” The one thing we didn’t do that we may go back and redo is the middle guy’s left arm. It is in a better position in #1.

Some days this is just plain fun.

Every so often while we’ve been taking the ‘citizen’ photos for the Histories of Newark book we’ve had a reason to actually set up a photo which requires some fairly serious retouching.

We are going to post several on this blog.

Original.

Retouched. And I need to remember to retouch that guy’s fingers that barely missed the edge of the photo.

We shot a panorama of Newark, Delaware and its surrounding countryside from the city’s reservoir. It took 70 images, the original is 165″ wide at 300 dpi, and weighs in at 728MB with layers still on.

Check it out.

This was a great weekend with 529 citizens showing up to have their photos taken for the Histories of Newark: 1758-2008 book we are designing.

Our 19711 zip code and part of a larger photograph of citizens who protest the Iraq war every Friday from 5:00 - 6:00 pm at the corner of Main Street and South College Avenue.

When most people come in they ask, “What do you want us to do?” I often say, “Can you do a cartwheel?” Well this group could.

One of those wonderful moments when we had a fireman come in with his full gear on and an amazed 10-year old. Then the offer, “Want to try it on?” gave us a great photos. A group that came in ready to play. We shot this one with them lying down and there are two other really good ones of them. This family of breakdancers really got into the fun of the photoshoot. We should be so lucky every day.

Two more days of this sequence of events we’ve been doing for the past five Fridays and Saturdays.

One of the things we like about letterpress is producing objects that will help maintain memories. After each citizen gets photographed for The Histories of Newark book we give them a 3″ x 5″ card which tells them the number they were in the line. We are working to get at least 3,000. As I write this we are up to 935.

You can click on the category “Histories of Newark: 1758-2008″ to see some of the citizen photos.

We added another two hundred or so ‘citizens of Newark’ to what we hope to be a 212 foot-long strip of 1″ high photos. It was a bit of a slow weekend with Easter and also a weekend that was colder than Halloween, Christmas, and New Years. So much for global warming, I guess.

A hispanic group with perhaps someone’s father who played hard-to-get. After taking the rest of the group in two photos, he agreed. You can see his son(?) in the photo a second time.

Two young women who had just bought a nice historical poster. Kind of fit the occasion quite well.

We like it when people bring props and this quilt hit the spot. It was inscribed on the back in ink that looked like it was written yesterday and dated 1851. It had been in their family 155 years.

Three women doing the Abbey Road image. I kind of fell for it as I’ve really done the Abbey Road image in London.

Another person with props that say something about them. And yes, “War is gauche.”

Several people have gotten in front of the camera and asked what they could do. My pat response is, “Can you stand on your hands?” The answer has always been “No.” Except this time. It took three tries to get almost up.

The fourth time was a tad over-the-top so to speak. Here are the results on our white seamless. A bit of white duct tape and all was repaired.