The situation in Lewiston, Maine (TW: Gun violence)
about 1 year ago – Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 06:03:29 PM

(TW: Gun violence)

I was about to post an update about the status of shipping, but as many of you in America are already aware of, an unspeakable tragedy happened. Our printer is in Lewiston, Maine, a short distance from the sites where the gunman killed and injured so many people yesterday, and where everyone is still under lockdown.

My heart and that of my editor, Glenn, are with the people in Lewiston with whom we spent two weeks in July, and who have worked so hard to make my book into a reality. We don't know yet if any of the printing staff were injured or killed, but I do know that everyone in that area – and in all of Maine – will be experiencing grief and trauma. Lewiston is a small town of under 40,000; more people died from violence on Wednesday and Thursday than in most years in Maine.

It may be several days before I can let you know where things stand on the shipping schedule, but I wanted you to know how connected we are all to events that may seem distant, and appreciate your patience and any kind thoughts you might have toward people in Lewiston and their loved ones.

Vulgar fractions all around
over 1 year ago – Sat, Sep 30, 2023 at 06:37:58 PM

A reminder to please provide/check your shipping address by October 4 – the books will start shipping soon after then. Visit the shipping instructions and FAQ to learn how to update or verify your address, and for answers to other shipping questions!

Smell report

I promised this in May, and here’s my report: the book smells great. It’s more subtle than I expected, and doesn’t appear strange or toxic or offputing – it’s somewhere in between “paper” and “petrichor” category, i.e. wonderful.

(How do people talk about smell? I have no idea.)

Approving the last thing to be approved

The slipcase had to wait for the cover, the cover had to wait for the page size, the page size had to wait for paper selection. But now all of these dependencies are resolved and we know the final slipcase dimensions are 7⁵⁄₃₂"×10¹⁷⁄₆₄"×5¹⁄₈". Yeah, I’m from Europe, and this looks ridiculous to me also, but you can’t deny this technical font and all these stacked vulgar fractions below don’t look goddamn cool: 

The slipcase is now approved and printed. After a bunch of FaceTime calls, and an emergency 10-gigabyte file delivery (for better reflections of keys), I think we are in a good place!

Here are some photos of us reviewing the prints remotely, including one where I forget about the rotate function and awkwardly tilt my head to get a better look:

The packaging jargon never ends

We are locking down the packaging, too. It’s important for me that the book gets delivered in as best a shape as possible. I am learning all sorts of new jargon like double-walled (two layers of fluting spaced between three paper sheets), fluting (formed sheets of paper that are glued between two kraft paper sheets), kraft paper (paper or paperboard produced from chemical pulp produced in the sulfate process), sulfate process (a process for conversion of wood into wood pulp, which consists of almost pure cellulose fibers), cellulose fibers, fibers made with ethe… do you see what I mean?

Let’s just say we’re likely going to go with ¼-inch, double-walled, full overlap. I’m being told this is going to do fine. 

The booklet cover is getting a little upgrade

After seeing the results of the booklet test print last week, I made a call to upgrade the cover treatment slightly so that the booklet looks nicer and more consistent with the book volumes.

In between volumes 1–2, extra volume 3, and the booklet, I want to create a really nice “typographic universe” of Shift Happens and I think this come together look really nicely.

If you are interested in a bit more of a design process of the booklet’s cover, I wrote a newsletter issue about it – not to spoil anything, but there is a surprise appearance of a certain computer science celebrity.

You should visit The Museum of Printing, if you ever have a chance

A few days before going on press to supervise printing, myself, Glenn Fleishman (the book’s editor and project manager), Jeff Jarvis (a journalism professor who just published The Gutenberg Parenthesis), and Doug Wilson (who is working on Linotype the book and previously made the excellent Linotype: The film), had an entertaining little conversation at a fascinating place – The Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Massachusetts. 

The founder of the museum, Frank Romano, is a very interesting person whose books about the history of the Linotype and phototypesetting were of huge help in writing my book. 

The video of that event is now online. It’s a weird, meandering discussion, but I think – like the Museum itself – fun and with a lot of charm. You can watch it here on YouTube: part 1, part 2, and part 3. (Each part is about 20 minutes.)

Before and after the event, I went around the Museum with my camera. You might not have expected the museum of printing to have a lot of keyboards, but they’re all over the place:

Especially this last photo, aaaah! The orange keys with a classic shape, the strange technical font, the charming shortening strategies? I love this so much. There is basically no design decision here that I disagree with, and that includes – oh, yeah – the use of vulgar fractions.

I uploaded a bunch more photos on Flickr, if you are interested. It was too late to put these photos in the book itself, but the “The day Return became Enter” booklet wasn’t finished yet at this point – and it turns out, obscure phototypesetting machinery comes with quite a few interesting Return and Enter keys! 

So, just like the Computer History Museum + Museum of Communications, Living Computers Museum, and the museum in Spain before, The Museum of Printing will now be a forever piece of Shift Happens, and that makes me so happy.

Yeah, I’m from Europe, and I love museums like you have no idea.

Until next time!

Ctrl+Alt+Shift Happens update!
over 1 year ago – Mon, Sep 25, 2023 at 07:20:18 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

We are locking shipping addresses October 4!
over 1 year ago – Mon, Sep 25, 2023 at 04:21:09 PM

Some great news: The books and booklets are all ready, slipcases are being made, shipping boxes come next, and then everything starts heading out mid October.

Especially if you have moved this year, or plan to move in the next two months, please check and update your address by October 4 – the books will start shipping soon after then.

Visit the shipping instructions and FAQ I just posted to learn how to update or verify your address, and for answers to other shipping questions!

Right after October 4, I will lock all existing orders and addresses, and your credit card will be charged for any items it hasn’t been charged for yet. After that date, you will need to contact me with changes, and it might be too late – labels may be printed, postage paid, or books already in transit.

You will still be able to order new books and booklets until they’re sold out. But I expect orders made on October 5 and later won’t ship until at least December 2023.

A short shipping delay, but all books still on track for this year

We have generally managed to keep on a schedule promised nearly one year ago through printing pressures, ongoing paper limitations, natural disasters across the U.S., and much more. I’m very happy about that.

However, I am sorry that we recently did lose about two weeks for domestic and about four weeks for non-U.S. shipments as we’ve gotten closer to delivery.

But: We built extra time into the schedule, so even with these short delays, we believe we are on track for all books to arrive between late October and mid-December. (If you’re in the U.K., we’re still waiting on a government agency VAT approval – more details inside the shipping FAQ.)

I’ve never FaceTimed a book before

Since it’d be a logistical nightmare for me to keep flying to Maine for one hour at a time, we started doing something new – FaceTiming the book (or, more accurately, people working on it in various locations) to check on the progress!

Here’s how it looked when we checked in on the varnish factory (yeah, I’m still talking about varnish!): 

(I’m being told the official name for “the varnish factory” is “the bindery,” and my name is pretty disrespectful, but I guess I already wrote that and it cannot be undone.)

It was a very strange and surreal experience, although also a rather comforting one – there was nothing I spotted that was particularly off, the varnish continued looking great, and everything was in the right place.

A strange little detail that made me happy: Seeing all the strange indentations and edges that happen when a hard cover meets the spine. They were all too complicated to model in my book 3D viewer, and somehow seeing them made the book feel even much more real than before.

I’ve never held a book I wrote in my hands, either

Speaking of.

(I am, as they say, burying the lede.)

The FaceTime call was a few weeks ago. Just today, I have actually received the book and the booklet in the mail.

I am not going to lie: I was very nervous. This is basically the finished book with only one part missing – the slipcase. But the rest is here, ready and done. Thousands of these are waiting in the warehouse to be encased, packed, and shipped.

If I saw anything wrong with the book, there would be no way to undo it now.

Luckily, everything felt great:

It’s a book! A real book. It’s such a weird feeling, seeing what were previously pixels on my screen and loose pieces of paper flying through printing machines at incomprehensible speeds, become… this. 

The third volume and the booklet are also here, looking sharp. Can’t wait for you all to have these, too.

Which leaves us with…

The case of the slipcase

We are done with the research and slipcases are now actually being made.

Do you remember the strange white dummy prototype I shared in May? Meet its slipcase counterpart:

We ended up chatting a lot with the slipcase manufacturer – I’ll be FaceTiming them very soon, too – and they even sent over photos of how the slipcase is actually made.

I thought you might enjoy looking at that, too:

Since – again – I won’t be able to fly back to Maine to supervise, I have also prepared a set of instructions on precisely what should happen to the print. You would think matching the hue or color should be easy, but we take that for granted on computer screens… here I have to very precise since the paper, lamination, and even printing method are slightly different:

Our next guest needs no visualization

I’m also working on a few other small things: shipping labels, putting invoices together, finalizing packaging details, and so on. I don’t want to share them, though, because some of those things should be (nice) surprises!

Since last time, a few people beta tested Gorton Perfected and, after putting in a few fixes, I consider the font done and ready! If you are interested, one of the friends of the project, Max Voltar, beta tested the font and is already using Gorton Perfected on his website. 

I also got into perhaps the absolute last eBay bidding war in the history of the project! This is a really cute chart that shows how to calculate the spacing of the font. You know that I love Gorton’s unassuming, blue-collar origins, and it’ll be fun to put a photo or two of this in the specimen of Gorton Perfected – the only remaining design task of the whole project.

That’s it for this update! Thank you for your support and – as always – please comment or message me if you have any questions.

Suddenly in love with varnish
over 1 year ago – Sun, Aug 27, 2023 at 05:03:59 PM

TL; DR

Volumes 1–3 of the book are done and are getting wrapped in covers. We are finalizing the slipcases. And the extra booklet is now finished, approved, and will be printed soon. 

We’re still on track according to our original schedule set when the Kickstarter launched. If all proceeds at the current pace for binding, slipcase construction, and assembly, copies shipping to the U.S. may start leaving the warehouse for the post office as soon as the end of September, and certainly by early October. Most books shipping within the U.S. should arrive within October, but it may take the whole month to ship them. For orders outside the U.S., those should finish by mid-October, but the process may take a few weeks for all books to ship.

A little UV on top of CMYK

When I left Maine, all of the volume 1–2–3 printing was done, and the pages were slowly being trimmed and folded. This is now done, and we moved on to the covers for the volumes, and the slipcase.

I recently got a sample of the volume covers printed with the extra varnish and… they’re beautiful. I’m rarely 100% happy with anything, but I’m really happy with this. For the minimalistic title in Gorton and the key symbols on the spine, I decided to go with equally minimalistic treatment where there is no extra color under the varnish because I thought it would look nice – I have never seen it before myself, although I’m sure this is not a completely novel idea – and it does!

If you follow the newsletter you might remember how much strange effort it took to visualize that varnish in the book’s 3D preview. Happy to report that for once, the physical part ended up being easier than the digital part!

If you see a guy taking photos of corners of high-end books at museum bookstores, that might be me

I’m learning a lot about slipcases, including going to bookstores and secretly taking photos just to learn what’s out there.

A few things I found out about in the last months:

• Some asymmetry in slipcase edge design can actually be better, because it allows for more rigidity.
• You have to be careful about making the inside of the slipcase darker, because that can rub off on the cover of the book in the longer run.
• The slipcase notches can look bad because they expose the (not colored) material.

The manufacturer is making some samples of various options, and all should be approved soon. There is an interesting dependency where we need to wait for books to be bound first to measure them precisely, and only then we will know the exact dimensions, so I could provide final designs to be printed and assembled.

After exploring shades of orange for the book, and then shades of gray for the photos, I am now into shades of black for the cover. There are all sorts of finishes – gloss, matte, soft touch – plus you can do something you can’t really do on screens: you can actually print the black twice for a richer color!

It’s interesting and hard to make the slipcase design stand on its own, but also match the covers of individual volumes. But we’re close to getting this right.

A small world of obscure keyboard aficionados

For many of you who ordered the extra “The day Return became Enter” booklet – the writing, photography, and design are now complete!

I think the booklet turned out really well. It’s complementary to the book in more ways than one. It expands on some of the book’s stories, it has 34 brand-new photos (not a single one reused from the book!), and typesetting that is both close, but also separate from the book, existing sort of in the grand typographic universe of Shift Happens (for example, all the footnotes are symbols from various Enter/Return keys only, and the main accent color here is what is the book’s secondary color).

There are a quite a few rare keyboards in the booklet: The Quadritek phototypesetting machine, the most interesting Dvorak typewriter I’ve ever seen, and a Canadian Apple Mac keyboard. (How does a Mac keyboard from Canada relate to the story of Return and Enter? I guess you’ll have to find out!)

I also bought a late Teletype keyboard to photograph for the book. The keyboard might appear to be a boring beige thing, but its layout and typography are surprisingly modern. I love the Gorton-like typeface and the arrow keys integrated in the keypad.

I found this keyboard on eBay just before I went on my trip to the printer. This caused all sorts of trouble. After a few attempted deliveries failed – signature required! – the keyboard entered a strange limbo. I had it waiting at a facility nearby, but it got lost. Different people at UPS kept disagreeing with each other. Long story medium long: I finally figured it out and grabbed the keyboard from the facility at the outskirts of Chicago where the seller was told the keyboard was kept, and where I was told explicitly it wasn’t. In the process I started chatting with the said seller… and it turns out we all both heard of each other before. He knew about the book and already pre-ordered it, and I knew about his keyboard switch work and various restorations. What a small world!

(Also, fun fact: For a while I toyed with the idea of calling the first book volume Return and the second Enter. It felt weirdly hilarious to me – why would “enter” be second, and “return” first!? – and it actually kind of made sense given the evolution of the keyboard’s biggest key. But in the end, the whole book was named after Shift and it started feeling needlessly gimmicky. The volumes ended up not having any titles, although the symbols printed in varnish were picked and recreated from typewriter and computer eras, respectively.)

The three volumes and the three booklets

This is the final design for the cover of the booklet, with a photo I took at the Museum of Printing just last month, carefully cleaned up so it appear to be “good dirty“ rather than… you don’t want to know. (The keyboards are often so filthy and I saw so many things that cannot be unseen, whether yielding q-tips and soap, or zooming into Photoshop.) Anyway, the cover:

The title is also going to be printed in varnish. (Have I mentioned how much I love varnish.)

I called it Booklet №1 because I like the idea of adding a few more booklets like this one, each sized the same, and each 32 pages long:

The second one would be a specimen for those who ordered the Gorton font. The third one… many suggested it would be fun to collect the printing photos I shared the last few times, plus I still want to write about the printing process in more detail.

Booklet №1 will be printed and delivered to those who ordered it (we will print a few more copies so you can still order it today!).

Booklets №2 and 3 are not currently planned as anything more than PDFs – but… you let me know! Would it be interesting for you to hold these in your hand? I am not sure how to arrange it since it would have to be with print on demand, and not at the printer. But I’m sure we could figure it out if we wanted to.

Perfecting Gorton

Speaking of the font, the work on Gorton Perfected† is now complete! It’s not only a complete upper- and lowercase font with a variable width, but I also went a bit further than planned and paid extra for one more thing: The font now supports not just Latin-1, but also Latin-2 characters, allowing pretty much everyone in Europe to be able to use it:

I’m pretty excited about how this turned out! Inga Plönnings, the type designer, did a fantastic work translating my messy revival into a proper font. We both worked on a bunch of little easter eggs, too, including a “Make things more ugly” or “Make things less ugly” option. (I haven’t yet decided which one should be the default.)

I also included a bunch of classic icons – ⇧, ⌘, ⌥, ⌫ – and the two old-school insert/delete symbols that disappeared from the keyboards some time in the early 1980s:

† Thank you to Glenn Fleishman for suggesting the perfect name for this particular revival of Gorton. (“Perfected” was the last 19th-century naming tradition of a “version 2” of a product.) 

From A to :)

A few people suggested this one, so it’s available now: if you would like a poster of the keys that will be used on index pages, you can get it now from my old poster store. I got a copy printed for myself and it looks very nice! It is printed on demand, and it would be delivered quickly, independently from the book. (Alas, for this, only U.S. shipping is available.)

A profile of the book

A Northwestern journalism student Annie Xia asked to do a profile for her class, and she interviewed me and a few other people – including some backers! – and I think the end result was kind of fun. (I asked her if I could put a copy on my site and she agreed.)

What’s next?

As mentioned above: binding, slipcase, then packaging and delivery. It really starts feeling like the last stretch. 

And, in the 30 seconds after I took the photos above, my cat did what every cat does. The varnish is right under her right paw, but something tells me she doesn’t care as much as I do: