Episodes
Wednesday May 22, 2013
Episode 107: Lined Wordy Journals
Wednesday May 22, 2013
Wednesday May 22, 2013
My most recent event was the making of two A6-sized lined journals with a slight difference. The difference is that each page had a translation in Japanese and English of a bunch of random words. The words came in two or three categories. First, such words as most learners of English will come across in their studies such as 'food' and 'study'. Second, confusing words the learner of English will probably see sooner or later such as 'book' which means both 'something people used to read in the 21st century' and 'make a reservation.' Third, fun words such as 'bamboozle' and 'booze.'
There are eleven signatures of four sheets each which translates into about 176 pages (both sides, of course. I've decided to count pages like normal people do.) They are A6 in size (41/4" by about 6" for my American friends). The procedure was as follows:
First, think of the words, write them down, and get them translated. As much as possible, I tried to pair words together that reflected something that both words shared: pronunciation in either Japanese or English, meaning, or rhymes. For example, "I" in English is a homophone for "eye". And 愛 (pronounced 'I') means 'love' in Japanese. So 'I,' ' 愛,' 'eye,' and 目 (pronounced 'may') are clustered together. 目 means 'eye' in Japanese
Second, put everything: lines, words, logo on a new file in InDesign and spend a few seemingly hundred hours tweaking it. Third, hope your printer can print out all the pages without eating a few in the process. Fortunately for me, this time, my happy Epson printer was mostly up to the job.
After printing out two copies of the book, I folded, sewed, and glued the spine, mull, and spine reinforcing paper. I then put the two naked, lined, wordy journals on the ever-growing pile on my desk of unfinished books. This gives me five books I must case in in the next week or so.
Most of the time was spent on getting the words and translations. However, the second most time-consuming process was printing. Being careful to print the right pages in the right order; being sure the printer didn't skip a page; making sure it had ink. Fortunately for me, I use a program called Cheap Impostor that does the imposition but between the preferences for Cheap Impostor and the Epson, sometimes I manage to print things out of order. Sometimes? Often. I'm practicing, though, so someday I hope to be as smart as my machines.
Comments (0)
To leave or reply to comments, please download free Podbean or
No Comments
To leave or reply to comments,
please download free Podbean App.