English
27 August 2009
I don’t know if you noticed, but the other day I added the link ‘Publications’ to the navigation bar at the top of my blog.
The most recent addition to my Publications was How to be a man and How to be a lady, two works by the New England minister Harvey Newcomb (1803–1863). These two books were published simultaneously, and since the majority of the text overlaps (according to my estimation, possibly around eighty-five percent), I typeset them together as one book, using floral printers’ ornaments to distinguish those parts that differed.
I started this project for my father’s birthday, which was on Monday, because we could not find an original copy of How to be a man. In addition, although my father has bound books with loose leaves as well as booklets of one signature, he has never done multi-signature sewn binding.
I did almost all the typesetting on Thursday, Saturday and Monday—and almost all the working period of those days were spent typesetting. Then on Monday evening I brought it to Staples to be printed, and presented it later that night.
I did the typesetting using XeLaTeX, using the font Minion Pro. On my Publications page, you can find a link to purchase it as either a hardback ($29·98) or an ebook ($4·99).
27 August 2009
Excellent work. I dipped into the the book and was quite intrigued. It looks like a valuable and much-needed resource. The typesetting is extremely well done and elegant. Two thumbs up!
27 August 2009
Thanks, Alexi! I think that the book is spot-on most of the time, and I enjoyed typesetting it (I had to reread the whole thing—not that I typed the whole thing from scratch, but I had to correct the OCR and add the LaTeX markup). I’m glad it will be of service to others outside the family.
29 August 2009
I also made a second edition (F-8) for letter-sized (rather than half-letter) paper. You can find it at ‘Publications’.