User:Simon/Dumbstruck A Cultural History of Ventriloquism

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bootleg book: Dumbstruck—A Cultural History of Ventriloquism

First edition

Printed: 29.10.19
Dimensions: 150x235mm
Cover stock: Clairefontaine Trophee (yellow) 210gsm
Text stock: Bio Top 80gsm
Binding: Perfect bound (hot glue)
Pages: 433pp

This book took about 40 hours to create, the longest time it's taken so far... I found a PDF on Lib Gen, but for some reason the OCR'd text was tracked quite tight making each line look like a very long word - this was even worse when printed. After a quick search on worldcat, I discovered that this book was available to be borrowed from the Royal Library in the Hague. Off I went to borrow the book. I planned to scan it using the bookscanner, but the cameras kept crashing after scanning half the 433 page book. So, I managed to extract the text using Calibre's book convert process from PDF > RTF. However, after placing the text in an InDesign layout, all of the numbers appeared as missing characters. From the looks of the PDF it seemed that these were perhaps from an Opentype font's custom stylistic set, which would explain why they weren't turning up in my system fonts. Also, in the index at the back of the book the numbers seemed to have the appearance of hyperlinks (when hovering over the hand icon appears) but when clicked, did absolutely nothing. So I began the rather painstaking process of laying out the book with exactly the same text flow and page numbers as the source. The work included removing headers and page numbers from the RTF, scanning all photos from the printed book, endlessly wordspacing paragraphs to make sure they fit where they should on each page, styling the text, removing manually written hyphenation (this was done programmatically, and ended up with a few words that were joined together in the case of examples like "re- and dis- associate" becoming reand disassociate") and the seemingly endless task of manually entering in EVERY number. At times it felt a bit masochistic, but I used this time to reflect on the process, thinking a lot about the changes I was making to preserve the form of the original. Ironically, this also involved a lot of forced line breaks, which would make the task of anyone who wanted to bootleg this book a bit more difficult (forced line breaks are the bane of the bootlegger). Another strange thought - I'm reading these books as I redesign them, but my reading happens on a more superficial level perhaps, meaning that I'm not absorbing the content fully, but reading it like a machine would as I look for anomalies and address them.

  • Front cover

  • Title page

  • Spread: Image section

  • Spread: Section begins

  • Back cover

Second edition

Printed: 28.11.19
Dimensions: 150x235mm
Cover stock: Clairefontaine Trophee (yellow) 210gsm
Text stock: Bio Top 80gsm
Binding: Perfect bound (cold glue)
Pages: 433pp

Clara Balaguer asked me for a copy of this book, and it seemed like a good opportunity to try a new printing and binding process. I decided to print the book double-sided on A4 paper, as opposed to the previous method of 2-up imposed printing on A3 paper. I wasn't very satisfied with how the previous printing method had produced a "split" in the book due to the paper grain direction. Yin Yin Wong at PS Rotterdam had recommended printing double sided rather than 2-up to avoid this, so this was the technique I decided to try out. I also decided on hand-binding it with cold glue, a technique which I had recently learned. Cold glue binding is done with equipment and materials such as a hacksaw, scissors, medical gauze (or cheesecloth), brushes, PVA glue, bookbinding thread, a jig to hold the book in while notches are cut and the spine receives its initial gluing, and a book press to keep the book in overnight, which stops the book from warping due to the high water content of the PVA glue. Cold glue binding allows the book to lay open flat on a table, a benefit I was keen to apply to this edition of the book as I was dissatisfied by how tight the binding of the first edition was because I had used the hot glue binding machine, which takes much less time but for thick books can produce a lower quality result. I was quite pleased with how this book came out, however, when applying the cover I had to decide not to glue it to the spine. Cold glue binding results in a rough spine, and hot glue creates a smooth layer of glue that dries quickly, producing a smooth spine. The only way to avoid this is to not attach the cover to the spine if using cold glue.

  • Bootlegged books front covers: Second edition (left) and first edition (right)

  • Front covers: Source publication (left) and second edition bootleg (right)

  • Beginning of image section: Source publication (left) and second edition bootleg (right). The second edition bootleg book lies open more easily due to the cold glue binding

  • Spines: Source publication (left) and second edition bootleg (right)

  • Back covers: Source publication (left) and second edition bootleg (right)

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