Dear friends of mine recently gave me a book for my birthday. I love books. Unlike many women, I don’t hoard shoes, or clothes, or jewelry. But if you were to take a walk around my house, you will see that in every room of the house – yes, every room, even the bathrooms – there are books or magazines. Even the kitchen has a collection of cookbooks. In my honest opinion, you can never have too many bookcases. There. I admit it. I hoard books.
“We met the man who wrote this book on our trip to Israel,” my friends shared with me. “We thought you would like it.”
The title of the book is Let Me Tell You A Story. Well, they had me at the title! Written by Frank McMeen, the book is a collection of personal stories in a hardback format. Right away, I opened the book to look at… the table of contents? The stories? The author bio? No. The first thing I looked at was the formatting.
“Wow!” I said. “I really like the way he used a watermark image on the first page of each chapter.”
“This binding is so well done.”
“I wonder what company he used to do the printing?”
“Did he use a publisher to help him?”
Eventually I did get to the important stuff – like the stories and author bio – but what first grabbed my attention was the bookmaking process. Probably because I have been in the trenches of learning this process myself.
It’s not surprising that I would be interested in bookmaking. It is a known fact, well, at least in my family it is, that I come from a line of bookmakers. My paternal great-grandfather was a bookmaker. He owned a pool hall in the outskirts of Boston and I can neither deny nor confirm that he did some bookmaking on the side. But not the kind of bookmaking that has me up late at night.
As I sit here and write this, I am anxiously waiting for a notification that my order of two proof copies of my book has been delivered. So much time, effort, and learning went into the making of this book. The process was made extra challenging because I couldn’t make a simple book of easily formatted text – no, I decided to jump back into the bookmaking arena with a project that required all kinds of special formatting.
It has poetry. It has devotionals. It has questions to answer. It has pages for journaling. Full page images and Bible scriptures. Formatting, formatting, formatting! And now I wait, on the edge of my couch, for the notification from Amazon that the fruit of my labor has been delivered. And when it is, I will whip it open.
How did the chapter images turn out?
Are my inset images readable?
How does the custom ornamental break look?
Was the glossy cover a good choice?
Will my readers be able to comfortably journal?
To a normal person, even a book lover, these may be foreign, even strange, thoughts. But not so for a bookmaker. Oh, the life of a bookmaker! Words. Stories. Formatting. Paper. Images. Emotions evoked. Minds inspired. Connections made. For all the frustrations encountered along the way, it is still glorious!
