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A bookazine debriefing

Well...whatever these bookazine things are, we just shipped the first one off to the University of Texas Press. Unlike the comparatively instant gratification of magazine production, we won't see the final result until some point in the fall (and be assured that we'll share news of that happy day when it arrives, complete with bells and whistles and some carefully chosen parties, if all goes well).

It has been a very different process, a very different thing, than producing the magazine. Easier, I think. Possibly.

We made it easier, that's part of it. And book pages don't all have to end neatly at the bottom when the story's done, as magazines do; and the columns are wider; and I choose to construct a fairly simple structure and restrictive rules around which to design the bookazine. That last is a reflection of the uncertainty that comes with doing something for the first time. Next issue, perhaps, I'll play faster and looser with the page structures. Or maybe I won't; maybe the simple elegance I was hoping for will actually come off. (Nah.)

But one of the things that I was acutely aware we no longer had to contend with were ads. Which is a funny thing. If you've not juggled file formats with frantic designers around the country (and occasionally around the world) on deadlines that they didn't know they had until somebody they work for or with told them at the last minute that something needed to be done yesterday...well, then you'll not understand some of it.

But having designed publications of one kind or another, going back to the Streaker's Digest at Thomas Hunt Morgan Junior High School (my first publishing venture, a typewritten two-page gossip sheet, modeled after the hip kids' Cliff Times -- they smoked at the Cliffs, see, and nobody knew what Cliff's Notes were, I guess...) since 1974 or some such foolishness...having designed publications for a long time, I like ads. They do nice things on the page, properly disciplined. They provide extra balance points; they allow text to sit simply without seeming unadorned, since there's that riot of color and/or type adjacent.

Working without them, for the first time in a long time, was...odd. Perhaps, next time, it will seem freeing. But just now it felt like a friend was missing from the room, expected at any moment, but never really going to show up.

(I used to have friends like that.)

So we'll see.

The other thing about ads...they paid the bills. They subsidized the writers and photographers (and, yes, editors and art director) who produced ND. A university press budget doesn't really make up the difference, and that's not at all meant to be disrespectful to the kind folks in Austin. That's just part of the challenge. But the cover price will be more than the cover price of a magazine, and that's why.

We have no idea what you'll make of this thing when it's done and available at your corner bookstore for fondling. I'm not sure what I'll think of it when I see it. But it's good work, and I liked doing it, and I am pretty confident you'll like reading it.

And I'm real confident that you'll tell us what you think, when it's time.

Now...about cleaning that office...

Posted by grant on July 24, 2008 1:50 PM | Permalink