We’re quarter of the way there with deliveries
about 1 year ago – Fri, Dec 29, 2023 at 05:21:30 PM

We’re in the strange part of the project where it’s too soon to fully celebrate – as a matter of fact, it might be annoying if you are still waiting for your book! – but it also would be strange for me not to express excitement of finally seeing books in people’s homes for the first time. So, let me know if I’m finding the right balance here!

Where we are with shipping

Several hundred copies of Shift Happens have arrived in people’s homes over the last fortnight. 400 more went out today. As of next week, we will have shipped about one third of all orders. Our plans are to get to 50% by mid-January, and –  if all goes well – to 80% by the end of January, and the rest in February.

We will send you a reminder before your batch comes up so you have a chance to update your address! And then, of course, another notification with your tracking number once the package goes out.

As before, if you need your book sooner rather than later – you have a pressing reason, a special request, a move in progress, etc. – please let us know. While we are sometimes constrained by the caprices of the fulfillment system (for example, it’s literally impossible for someone to step into a big warehouse to find a box with a mailing label and postage already applied), we are taking steps to be ready for some emergencies and deadlines.

I believe we even figured out the UK VAT issue! I hired a company to help me out and we just shipped the first batch of books to the UK. They are bound to arrive next week, and fingers crossed that this will be a smooth process.

For those who received the “around December 22” email a couple weeks ago…

Believe it or not, Maine cannot catch a break.

There was quite severe flooding in Maine just last week. Our printer was luckily not affected (they are located on a hill), but the flooding led to power outages at the company making custom boxes to pack the books. They were out of power for a few days more than expected, and only delivered boxes earlier this week to our printer.

The printer is working feverishly to get books out – your book is either in the batch that hit the post office today, or in a second batch shipping right after New Year’s. The tracking number you already received remains valid and we will send you an update whenever the book is actually shipping, or just did so. (If you signed up for tracking when we first sent out the number, that may have expired. Signing up again should fix it.)

There should be no further delays due to the flood.

This is a photo Glenn Fleishman took in Maine when we were there in July – near the amazingly named and frequently misspelled Androscoggin River – followed by a few taken about a week ago by local reporters:

Why shipping is taking longer than you might have expected

I wish this process happened instantaneously, like deploying software – but it doesn’t. Also, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) I don’t have the resources of a big publisher like Random House or Amazon. If you are curious what contributes to the shipping process taking many weeks instead of just days, here are some things I have learned:

• The slipcases (almost all made by this point!) involve a lot of hand work, and all the books are hand packed.
• The shipping tests we’ve made require a sequence of events: purchasing some materials, doing test shipping, purchasing more materials, and then shipping the final batch. The timing of all this adds up.
• Shipping and sending to fulfillment need to happen in big batches because of economies of scale (we cannot send a truck with one copy of the book between Maine and Michigan).
• With some of the packing material, the printer is literally running out of room to store all the necessary bubble wrap. (Believe it or not! And it’s not a tiny printer. But at 18 feet of bubble wrap per book, things add up quickly.)
• Christmas time is the worst possible time to ship packages – USPS sees its mail volume triple in December. It’s been a really stressful time for everyone. It turns out (perhaps unsurprisingly) that everyone involved in shipping is incredibly overwhelmed at this time of year; the American post office is so busy that it often skips scanning items, making the tracking data unreliable.
  

Hundreds of books have been delivered, however

For people who wanted Christmas deliveries, we managed to ship most of the books before the deadline – although I am sorry if yours arrived a few days late.

It’s been wonderful for me to see photos of the books that already arrived around the world, and initial impressions trickling in. (And also a huge sigh of relief at no damage reports!)

Here are some photos, and I imagining yours will be included soon if it hasn’t already:

I also enjoyed this application of Gorton Perfected at the University of Chicago!

Lastly, over at the newsletter, some thoughts I just wrote about how it feels to be at this stage of the process – and an appreciation for my favourite writer without whom none of this would’ve probably happened.  

Happy new year!

The books have started shipping!
about 1 year ago – Wed, Dec 13, 2023 at 09:19:48 PM

The books are finally shipping!

For those who said “I want the book by Christmas” or “I’d prefer it by Christmas” in the Christmas survey, the books within the United States shipped today, and we expect our international shipping partner to send out books to addresses outside the U.S. by early next week.

Every book shipped is packed with the improved methods we developed over the last month.

Myself and the printer expect that all U.S. shipments will indeed arrive by Christmas – although this close to the holiday season, it’s hard to be 100% certain. For shipments outside the United States, it should be a similar situation: we are using FedEx International Economy for those deliveries, and we expect nearly all should make it in time. (With one potential exception: unfortunately, the U.K. VAT situation is still unresolved, although I have two independent plans in motion and hoping there might be something to report by next week.)

Your tracking codes will arrive via email as soon as we have them, along with a link to the unpacking guide. (Also, please consult the FAQ if you have any questions about your order.)

Please send photos once you unpack the book! It would mean a lot to me. You can email me at [email protected], or tag me on Mastodon, Threads, or Twitter. 

If Christmas delivery wasn’t important for you, your book will ship starting in a few weeks – we think in early January. (Also, I’m sorry we omitted Hanukkah from our survey: we were confident we could not get books delivered in time for any day of the festival, which turned out to be the case.)

How to order Gorton Perfected

To those who did not preorder the font, but wanted to try it out, you can now order the font in my store. After purchase, you will receive a link to download the font immediately.

I also updated the specimen some more, including even more photos of Gorton in real life. You can check out the specimen PDF here.

How to order more copies of the book

The book ordering is currently on hold, but the last few hundred books will be available for purchase at some time in January. If you want to be notified the moment this happens, sign up here. After these books are sold out, there are no current plans for future reprints!

Because my costs increased considerably from the start of the campaign in February 2023 due to inflation and the more complicated packing method, I will raise the price of both the book and shipping to reflect this when the remaining books go back on sale.

However, if you have placed an order between October 4, 2023 and today (December 12), the price you ordered at will (of course) remain the same, even though I haven’t charged you yet; I waited to charge cards for those orders until we had a revised shipping date for that group. As soon as we are confident in that, we’ll charge cards and start locking down addresses. That’s likely to happen in January 2024.

And, a little more about the little Max Cadliner

Many of you expressed interest at the strange “typewriter” I shared a month ago (at the bottom). If this is of interest, I scanned and uploaded its manual. (I care about this kind of preservation!)

A small update on shipping efforts
about 1 year ago – Tue, Dec 05, 2023 at 05:18:46 PM

Hi, everybody!

Thank you so much to all of you who filled out the Christmas form from the last update! I received over 1,500 responses, which is a lot more than I expected. I’m particularly grateful for everybody who chose “no” just as a means of support, and for everyone who otherwise sent kind and thoughtful messages.

We have been working on this issue diligently since the last update, spending many hours every working day. The challenge with any sort of plans we are making is that I don’t want to say anything specific until it’s absolutely locked in and proven – but also I don’t want to keep you waiting.

With that in mind: I still have no solid update right now, but I feel we are very close and I am hoping to have a specific timeline soon.

Thank you very much for your patience.

In the meantime, here are unglamorous, but very real photos of some of the many packing solutions we’ve been testing in the last weeks:

(In half a year or so, when the dust settles, I will write a big newsletter post about all the experiences researching and learning from this challenge. Maybe it might help someone else; maybe it will be just an interesting read. But that’s far in the future.)

An update on delayed packaging and shipping
about 1 year ago – Wed, Nov 15, 2023 at 05:36:46 PM

For those of you who backed the Kickstarter campaign or ordered via BackerKit by October 4:

I had hoped to tell you in this update books were shipping. Unfortunately, shipping is still delayed, owing to a new challenge. The slipcase maker is now delivering handsome slipcases (see below) at a pace we hoped for back in September, but test shipments done over the last week showed an atypically large percentage of them were damaged, some severely. We are now revisiting and improving our packing and shipping practices.

We don’t know exactly when we can resume shipping. It could be a few days from now, or it could be more. I will provide another update as soon as we’re sure we can ship safely. However, as soon as that happens, everything else is in place.

Unfortunately, this means some books will miss the Christmas delivery window, an important target for some of you. Assuming we can start shipping soon, we have some flexibility into what goes out when, so please let us know how much a Christmas delivery matters to you. This will help us with rearranging deliveries, and would appreciate it if you could do this by this Sunday, November 19. (I tried to liven things up by making the Christmas site linked above cheery by filling it with a rotating display of seasonal keyboard and typewriter ads.)

I’m sorry about this. The shipping damage (all after we added additional protection) surprised everybody involved, from the slipcase manufacturers, to the maker of the custom shipping boxes, to the printer, to my editor. They have a great amount of collective experience involved in this process – our printer has shipped hundreds of thousands of books, including a good subset in slipcases; the box maker has made countless millions of boxes – and no one yet understands why we are seeing these problems. We are testing and asking more experts. We don’t want to ship until we are confident books will arrive with no damage.

Many of us are spending hours each day on this, and we have some early promising results of a new method of packing we’re testing in the next few days – please keep your fingers crossed. (This one survived a 10-foot drop onto concrete.)

Please let us know if your address or delivery preferences change as a result of this. We’ll accommodate you. If you haven’t yet confirmed your address (and do now through the end of the year), asked us to hold your book, or placed an order on October 5 or later, we now expect to ship those orders no earlier than late December 2023 or early January 2024. We’ll provide an update on that topic when we begin shipping the above.

However, the slipcases are finally here

On the good news side, the slipcases are in full production. We have 30% of the total for all printed copies on hand, and will receive 20%-30% every subsequent week. While I’m still unhappy with the earlier production delays, the end result feels very good, and I think the finished book inside the slipcase looks terrific!

I wrote in my newsletter how hard the journey to the end result on the design side, and didn’t even mention figuring out the color of the interior of the slipcase, having to abandon the notch, or figuring out the matte vs. glossy paper. Today, it feels that it all collectively paid off very nicely:

It’s also a handmade object, which makes it feel very special. Making a slipcase involves using a machine to cut the rigid board and trim the printed wrap, but the assembly for a high-quality slipcase goes through human hands. To some extent, this is true about the book volumes, too. Given a big enough lens, no two books or two slipcases are alike. My editor said “books are living things,” and I found this to be a beautiful statement.

Gorton Perfected, perfected

For those of you who missed the email with Gorton Perfected delivery: If you follow the instructions on verifying your address at the top of the shipping FAQ, somewhere next to your address there will be a link to Digital Downloads where you can retrieve your font.

Also, I have continued working on the Gorton specimen in recent weeks, and finding new facts and photos. The PDF became a sort of a love letter to this strange font we’ve probably all seen (and summarily ignored) at many points in our lives.

If you download the font archive again, you will find a new specimen with over 20 new pages of photos! Or you can just check out the specimen online. (The font itself is the same; you don’t need to reinstall it.)

The newest strange typewriter in my strange collection

I thought I researched Gorton enough when I was recreating it, and then again when I was collaborating with the type designer. But while finding materials for the specimen I once again learned even more.

One interesting moment was the discovery of the kind of machine I didn’t previously pay much attention to but I should have. Here it is, fresh off eBay:

It’s called Max Cadliner CD-750 and was made in the late 1980s. Naming it a “typewriter” is a little bit of a stretch – it’s a plotter with a keyboard and a drawing board accessory – but after equipping it with a standard Rapidograph, you can type in text on the little keyboard, and the machine draws it, one letter at a time, in a mesmerizing way:

(You can even hear different kinds of motors activating for different kinds of shapes!)

It’s interesting in and of itself, but the font the machine is using is the most exciting part, and why I had to pick it up. It’s Gorton, or one of its descendants!!! The shapes of digits make it very obvious: 

Not to mention the strangeness of a few other characters: 

The device also has a cute keyboard we’d call “ortholinear” today, with no fewer than three shifts.

This might very well be the last “typewriter” in my collection before the book gets delivered to everyone. It suggests a wonderful alternate universe: if metal type had never been invented, it’s possible all typewriters would have looked like this, mechanical recreations of human hands writing letters on paper.

In our universe, it’s an oddity. It’s also a precision device – I think it’s meant to annotate technical drawings made by architects? It’s rather clear I’m not using it correctly. I never screwed the machine to a table like I’m supposed to, the pen wobbles as it’s writing, the paper moves once in a while I’m pretty sure it is not supposed to.

But this all feels appropriate today.

I’m frustrated that these last weeks of the book delivery are not more mechanical. People at the slipcase manufacturer kept reneging on the plans and deadlines they had promised for weeks. The phone calls were tense and messy. Fine-tuning packaging is taking so much more time than I expected, and the damaged deliveries and drop tests – I didn’t mention it yet, but I grabbed the first book I received and kept dropping it over and over again, from ever higher, using ever more force – are honestly really unpleasant and heartbreaking. (I’ll spare you the photos!)

It’s not like there is a choice, though. I am more and more appreciative of anyone ever attempting to actually produce anything physical. I can make a Christmas form mini site quickly and put it online within hours, but shipping a book – that’s quite a bit more challenging.

As I mentioned above: I appreciate your patience and understanding with all the human parts of making a book. I am working with others so you can receive yours as quickly as possible.

Things are finally getting out there
about 1 year ago – Mon, Nov 06, 2023 at 07:55:32 PM

TL; DR

Everyone we worked with in Maine is safe and back at work. Thank you so much for your words of support and kindness – we passed them to the printer. (Also, the state of Maine set up a page providing info about donations for victims, survivors, and their families if you are ever so inclined. Thank you.)

Book shipping. The events in Lewiston delayed shipping back a few days, and the contracted slipcase maker has also been pushing back their delivery date every week for the last six weeks, but – finally! – the first batch of slipcases was picked up today by our printer and they will start working rapidly tomorrow to get these packed to start shipping initial copies. Those will then head out by week’s end to some U.S. addresses. Packing and shipping all copies will take a few weeks (see below), but some of you should receive your books very soon. My current prediction is for all U.S. shipments to go out by November 30, and for all international shipments to ship on or before December 15.

Gorton Perfected (the font) dropped last week! If you purchased the font, you should have received an email from BackerKit with a download link for the font and an accompanying PDF specimen booklet.

We shipped booklet-only orders last week to everyone with a U.S. delivery address. Those orders went to anyone who purchased either only one or more booklets and no books, or who bought more booklets than books. You may have received your booklets by now if you’re in that group! (International booklet-only orders will happen later this month.)

Did you move since you initially provided your address for shipping or never provided us with a shipping address? Scroll to the bottom for more on that.

Book shipping dates 

A few weeks ago, when I sent the previous shipping update, I thought that books were about to start shipping in the U.S. However, our slipcase maker continues not meeting deadlines and pushing out their promised delivery date further. Thousands of ready-to-go volumes have been sitting for weeks in our printer’s warehouse.

Today, the printer picked up the first batch of finished slipcases, so they can start packing the books as early as tomorrow. The slipcase maker has promised – for what that’s worth – that they will deliver all slipcases in the next few weeks. I’ll keep you apprised if they are further behind. I know you’re frustrated you don’t have your book yet.

U.S.: This means that the first books will head out to U.S. addresses later this week! We start with the United States and addresses most distant from Maine, as those will take longer than shipments to the Northeast and East Coast. We will send you a tracking number for your shipment(s) when your books go out. We can’t tell you when any individual book ships exactly, but we expect at this moment all U.S. shipments will be in the mail by November 30, and possibly earlier, as our printer promised to make up for some of the slipcase manufacturing delay. We expect nearly everyone in the U.S. to receive their books between late November and early December.

International: We will also start packing books for international fulfillment soon. We plan to ship furthest first internationally, too (e.g.: Australia and other southern hemisphere addresses). We expect to start shipping before the end of November, and will update you when we know more. All international shipments will use FedEx International, which is tracked, and with which our fulfillment partner has had the best experience. We can’t predict when all books destined worldwide will ship, but our expectation is that the last ones will ship on or before December 15 to the nearest destinations, which require just a few days of FedEx shipping. Most people outside of the U.S. will receive their books between about December 1 and December 23, 2023.

We expect all books to arrive home and dry, because we made some changes to packaging!

After your feedback, a better packaging

Some of you replied to the earlier update sharing box packaging details with horror stories of destroyed and damaged items. We felt confident that the originally suggested box packaging was enough – people who came up with this solution have collectively many years of experience shipping things worldwide without a problem – but we didn’t want to ignore your feedback either.

In the end, the most sensible course was to… add another box! So: Each book will be three volumes in a shrinkwrapped slipcase, itself placed in a box, which is then placed in another tight box. Each box comes with a specific rating for wall and corner crush protection. Combined, we think the book could be dropped off a one-story building and the packaging would absorb all the damage.

Adding another box increased the cost I’m paying for shipping, but there are no pricing changes for you. Plus, note that if you receive a book damaged in shipping, I will replace it at no cost to you. See the return policy at the bottom of the shipping page for the full details of how we will handle problems with what you receive.

Turning the slipcase into a game

I don’t feel as great about the slipcase situation, but progress is being made. This is an actual photo of the finalized slipcase which I don’t think I shared before with you!

If you don’t follow the book’s newsletter, I also wrote a long design breakdown about how the slipcase (and other covers) came to be, so check it out if you are interested in seeing all the ugly explorations and what your book will not look like!

I also made a website that turns the book‘s slipcase into a small game where you can test your Shift knowledge. Have fun! 

Other ways to kill time before the book comes

The book has been featured on Ars Technica – it’s a new interview and not just a regurgitation of the PR release, and even the comments are pretty interesting/entertaining. I’ve also been on a public radio podcast, which is a fun and easy listen!

The booklet cover: Now with more lovely varnish

As noted above, those of you in the U.S. who ordered just booklets (or more copies of booklets than books) should have received their copies already. If you ordered a book plus a booklet, you’ll receive each book packed in the same inner box on the same schedule as listed above.

I mentioned last time that I updated the quality of the booklet cover to match more closely that of the book itself. Here’s a comparison! All of you should get the booklet in front, which feels much nicer – a more sophisticated matte feel, a more subtle title, and ~v~a~r~n~i~s~h~.

By the way, the booklets are now completely sold out! I am investigating whether it might be possible to arrange a print-on-demand version, but that is not confirmed yet.

By the way also, the book itself is very close to being sold out (permanently!), as well. If you know someone who’s on the fence, please tell them to hurry.

Gorton Perfected is finally out there

Gorton Perfected is ready! All of you who ordered it should have gotten an email last week with a download link. (Please let me know at [email protected] if you didn’t.)

I’ve had a lot of fun putting together the specimen, and as a matter of fact plan to keep updating it with more photos! I also finally figured out the relationship between Gorton and Leroy lettering sets, so that was pretty exciting.

Let me know what you’re doing with the font (I used it in the mini game linked above) – and thank you so much to everyone who already sent feedback or bug reports!

Address updates

Over a month ago, I sent out a final call to provide or update your address if you’d moved or were about to move.

If you provided an address in the United States and didn’t update it: All shipping material and labels have been printed and your book will be sent to that address. I incur a reasonable amount of cost in shipping and handling if the book can’t be received and is returned for re-shipping. Please check the question at the bottom of our shipping page for more details of what will happen then.

If you’re not sure if you provided your address ever: Please follow the address verification instructions and double check. For those who never provided a shipping address, the second window of shipping starts in December, when we start shipping books ordered after October 5, 2023 as well.

Non-U.S. addresses: While it’s too late to change addresses for U.S. shipments, but we have a little more leeway with those going to the rest of the world – contact me at [email protected] if you haven’t provided your address or need to make a change, and we’ll let you know if we still can.

This might start happening to you

I’ve been doing a bunch of traveling recently, and it feels like the book is all around me even if I don’t tag it along.

At the airport, I found this strange keyboard that I have never seen before:

It’s not only that the airport had a bunch of things set in Gorton…

…but the keys to my hotel room north of San Francisco also… 

…and even the cup for the coffee I picked up in between the two locations:

Beware: Once you read the Gorton specimen and once you get the book, stuff like this might start happening to you.

Until next time!