Episodes
Tuesday May 08, 2012
Episode 79: The Idiot Runs
Tuesday May 08, 2012
Tuesday May 08, 2012
The Idiot Runs is my latest novel. It's about a Oregon coast man who travels back in time to Venice in the 16th century to work with Nicolas Jenson, printer, binder, and typeface creator of the Roman font.
I wrote, edited, imposed, printed, sewed, and slapped a case binding on it. There are 160 pages of eight signatures of five sheets each. The book is bound in a tan burlapy book cloth with Japanese-esque endpapers (resembling mompei, discussed in Episode 75 when we were talking about another novel: The Priests of Hiroshima) with brown paper attached to the front.
The book is B6 in size - a handy pocket-sized book if you have slightly larger than normal pockets. And, surprisingly, it went together quite well over a period of a couple of days. Not the writing and editing. That took quite a bit longer. On the first evening, I sewed the signatures up. The next evening, after a leisurely dinner, I glued the spine, mull, and that extra strip of paper to the spine. On the third evening, I cut and pasted the endpapers; cut and pasted the cover and assembled the whole thing together. The third evening took about an hour. I wasn't rushed during the whole process and only made a couple of mistakes but nothing I need to point out here.
By the way, The Idiot Runs is the first book in my Calvado Pentalogy which contains the following books: The Idiot Runs, Calvado, The Priests of Hiroshima, The Venetian Slime Woman, and Tristram's Printer. Certain characters and situations show up in all five novels but not always blatantly obvious. If you're familiar with Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet you might recognize the structure in The Calvado Pentalogy.
Upon finishing this and putting it on my improvised book press, I looked at my work table and discovered I have seven more projects to finish up. Seven! And where might I find the time to do them all? Heaven knows, eh?
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