3-D Printing... a Book

I have long been promising that (someday !) my blog site will offer up some of my extended narratives (originally issued as a series of shorter blog posts) as 'books'.

Books indeed - both in the now-traditional e-book but also in my 21st Century 'downloadable' take on the old 19th Century (printed) 'story paper'.

story papers as model for 21st century books

 21st century U-print 'story papers'

I worked long enough in bookstores to realize that our current book publishing system is very badly broken and probably the most climate-destroying of all the culture industries.
Its sins are many: 'bulk up' the contents of books to be far bigger than necessary ,  print far too many copies, send them out and back in gas-guzzling trucks and then end up pulping most of them anyway.

Luckily I am in the periodical end , not the book end, of the word business.

It is true that the magazine trade , floppy covers aside, differ little from the book trade.

Magazines too have the wasteful practises of 'ship too many and pulp too many' --- in fact, the magazine business invented this method and then taught it to the book trade.

But one part of the periodical trade has always hinted at a better way : thestory-paper.

What really makes newspapers unique from books and magazines is that they are not bound - not secured by staples or sewing or glued cloth.

Instead each newsprint sheet is merely folded into one another and the whole thing holds together by the cumulative friction of rough paper on rough paper.

This system is low tech , trouble free, very fast - and very cheap.

It obviously works - the vast percentage of words printed throughout history have ended up on unbound but folded sheets of newsprint , not on bound book paper.

Some canny publishers in the 19th century  decided to kick the news out of the newspaper format and replace them with stories - anything fact or fiction that was not time-sensitive , anything from short essays to long novels.

It thus became the content of a typical magazine , but in the format of a newspaper.

The story paper was far and away the cheapest form of literature for more than a century until steady book trade propaganda killed it.

I have merely brought it back for the frugal and green-minded 21st century.

Most readers will prefer to read my short articles (about 600 words each) online in The Mills of Nature blog.

Some will even wish to read the longer articles (about 6000 words) online in The Mills of Nature website.

But for many others, a quarterly print version (of about 60,000 words) of The Mills of  Nature that combines the best of both the short and long articles would be nice.

But not via the typically messy collection of letter sized pages printed off the web, with lines of print far too wide for easy comprehension.

Today all home computer printers can print professional quality fonts legibly and do 'double- sided printing' - some by design, others by an easy workaround.

The only thing holding them back from printing unbound magazines of about 60 to 80 pages in length from online PDFs is the fact those PDFs are not normally imposed.

Imposing is what  magazine printers do to ensure that the first printed sheet of a 60 page book has on one side has the back cover to the left and the front cover to the right, while on the back side, page 2 is on the left and page 59 is on the right and so on right through the entire magazine.

Once printed and folded into each other, all the pages end up right reading automatically.

Today this slog can be very easily done by quite reasonable priced software (I use and recommend Cheap Imposter if you own a Mac).

So I will provide online a pre-imposed PDF file for each quarterly issue ofThe Mills of Nature so you can, if you wish , download and print out on your work or home printer, fold and read.

A magazine delivered to your door electronically night or day and around the world, but only if you want it.

Now I can imagine others selling their version of a pre-imposed PDF , but in my case, the file is totally free - in fact totally in the Public Domain.

As the file is free, the only cost for a sixty page magazine delivered to your home printer is about sixty cents in your paper and ink.

In a sense it is the 21st century system of distance manufacturing, but applied to the word business.

I'd hate to claim that I am the first to come up with this - my local library already prints off every morning selected out-of-town newspapers on a cheap tabloid sized computer printer for its patrons.

The result is a side stapled 11 x 17 page sized broadsheet newspaper that actually reads quite conventionally despite being almost laughing low tech.

 The book trade , together with its spawn the bookseller and book reviewer , always claims that anything but a big fat hardbound book, with fully-justified paragraphs and evenly trimmed pages and published by a big publisher from New York, Toronto or London , simple isn't a 'real book'.

Who cares ?

Not if they don't go on to claim that only literature and  academic/scientific knowledge that is to be found in a hardcover book is actually real.

In the past most literature began in periodicals (think of Dickens' novels or of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novellas) .

Even today, most academic work is first published in periodicals.

No, the big city centred book trade merely made their claims that the only acceptable model of a book was something that had to be printed, bound and cut by huge highly expensive and highly complicated equipment, to virtually ensure that none of the legions of small town job printers, editors and authors could become their competition.

Just because a cartel says something doesn't make it true : do you believe everything Big Pharma or the Big Telecoms tell you ?

In fact, in terms of handling and readability , any aging reader with weak hands and fading eyes will tell you that the easiest book to read by far is a relatively thin (and hence light) paperback or magazine, stapled in the middle so it opens fully and can't 'break its back' and with left justified type so there is no unnatural word spacing.

This is why magazine readership remains high in the over fifty set even as they bail out from horrible-to-read 'mass paperbacks'.

Most children with small hands also agree and children's books reflect this.

In short, in no other culture industry is there quite as much cant and humbuggery about their main product as in the book trade - even Hollywood can't come close.

As a periodical publisher , I  don't intend to be part of this scam.

But since my magazine work is all in the Public Domain, others are perfectly free to perpetuate the book trade's wasteful and distorted standards by getting it published by one of the remaining Big Five FourThree Publishers.....

why STORY PAPERS, aka MUNROs

the STORY PAPERS


When a journal celebrates the story of Henry Dawson's 'agape' penicillin ,which he so freely released into the medical public domain 75 years ago, it is best to act similarly.

 So the journal articles of Dawson's project will go into the literary public domain ,as archived html blog posts and as print version story-papers.

(Read more about what exactly is a story-paper)

So, just like Dawson's agape penicillin, the "All Life is Family" series of stories will be freely available to everyone, particularly to people who could not normally afford to buy them.

Consider them more like "Tracts for our Commensal Age" than your typical commercial New York Times bestselling potboiler .

The story of Dawson's project is actually a pretty big story (almost as big as the global war itself).

 So rather like a short story cycle or roman fleuve , it will be broken into maybe sixty or so smaller ones, at natural internal climaxes.

This is all with the intent to make it easier to read or download each story-paper freely.

Each of those sixty or so story-papers will treat its particular chief protagonist fairly, but I hope the cumulative effect from the clash of their different takes on reality circa WWII, will provoke as much reflection as enjoyment in the reader.

The Dawson project stories can all be freely read , in their entirety , as scattered and intermittent posts and remained archived and available forever on this blog.

 Thankfully, the blog will have an index page to make finding all of them , in the proper chronological order, very easy.

Directing your mobile browser to my blog will be the best way to read them on tiny mobile phone screens.

But in addition, each blog post on Dawson's project will have a link to Google Docs, to download the free PDF of the story-paper.

Thus journal readers will also be able to download all the sixty or so stories ,as a 21st century story-paper.

A 19th century story-paper was simply today's tabloid newspaper but devoted 100% to non-news stories.

With no expensive hardcovers or binding or spine for a title, the story-paper was unattractive to regular booksellers but distributed to subscribers by mail, it was the cheapest way to get literature to a mass public.

Distributing Dawson's stories this way will be in homage to him and to my university's (Dalhousie) chief benefactor, story-paper publisher George Munro), who did so much to democratize print and literature for people of all incomes.

Like myself, Dawson also attended Dalhousie.

In addition he was raised in the same Pictou County Scottish Presbyterian tradition as was Munro.

Those these 21st century story-papers have been made into downloadable pre-imposed PDFs, for easy printing out as a complete chapbook-sized work, individually and without charge.

Because they are all in the Public Domain, like agape penicillin , you are free to copy them, pass them on or adapt them - even bind them into bigger 'books' and sell them for profit under your own name if you wish.

Just spread their message of hope, as if it was a penicillium spore in the wind.

And I won't mind : because passing on their message of hope - not making money - is what matters.

Each story-paper will be illustrated by my own color drawings , designed to 'degrade gracefully' (as computer types are wont to say) into black, white and gray illustrations.

This is to make them suitable for economic printing on black and white printers or for reading on older ebook readers.

Both the electronic blog posts and printed story-papers have the advantage of being 'open all night' and of being readily accessible all around the world.

Now there is a big disadvantage in not making these stories into a conventional for-sale 'book'.

 Very few book reviewers, whether working for a big newspaper or running their own small not-for-profit blog, will review a free (and worse: PUBLIC DOMAIN !) series of related stories.

It isn't just book reviewers who vote for capitalist parties at election time either - you'd be surprised just how adamantly left wing and green reviewers favour for-profit books and authors and despise not-for-profit authors.

Altruism and book reviewing simply don't seem to mix.

I believe the reason is that even non-paid book reviewers all secretly hope to become paid book reviewers one day and they know that will be totally depend upon reviewing the sort of commercial books from publishers that buy ads in their employers' media outlet that ultimately go back to pay book reviewers' wages.

('Scratch my back and I will scratch yours'.)

No doubt the professionals were just as suspicious in 1940 of Henry Dawson's motives : what was really in it for him , beyond all that phony 'amateur' altruism ?

So I will have to direct publicity about the series' message past the professional and wannabe professional book reviewing community and onto any and all potential readers.

That will mean asking all sorts of people, from professors to pastors, to read it , talk it up, review it and to pass it on to others.....

Why visiting today's Washington DC could harm evoking its atmosphere of 75 years ago

pre-war WASHINGTON

Seventy five years ago (on the eve of WWII), sleepy Washington DC, particularly during the summer legislative recess, was a small part of the greater Baltimore Maryland metropolitan area.

Today, of course, (post WWII) the reverse is true.

Even the DC climate is changed and for once I do not mean thanks to global warming - I mean via the widespread advent of air conditioning. 

DC's skies are a different - dirtier - shade of blue, thanks to millions of local cars.

I attended and still visit Martin Henry Dawson's old university of Dalhousie almost daily - but I am under no illusion that the Dalhousie of 2013 is the Dalhousie of 1913 that Dawson first attended one hundred years ago.

Londonderry Nova Scotia still shows the slag mounds of 125 years ago but last year I couldn't see the extended town site, the huge steel mill and the dense smoke that Dawson's aunt and uncle daily saw 125 years ago, no matter how hard I tried.

This year, I re-visited the same Pictou town where Dawson's father got his only schooling,  but I was under few illusions the visit would really help me get a handle on what the education of 150 years ago was like - though I am convinced it was formative in influencing Martin Henry Dawson 50 years later.

Dawson , via his parents and his older brothers, was also influenced by whatever education his Gaelic grandmother got in the high north of the Scottish Highlands.

 However I doubt even an extended stay in her tiny home village (now a tourist haven) would help me understand the relationship Highlanders felt between nature and man 175 years ago, as important as it might be in forming Dawson's own unique view of that relationship 100 years later.

History writing is not at all like journalism

History writing is not travel writing or investigative journalism : it may even be seriously harmed by attempting to do either, in the vain hopes of making your writing "more real" and "more vivid" .

Instead a historical writer must do much archival hands-on research through many different accounts contemporary to the time in question.

This, together with deep readings of the best secondary accounts written by people with a lifetime feel for that distant place and era, is the only sure way to convey the long gone atmosphere of an unique time, place, person and event of even so called "recent" history....

When Merkel visits Dalhousie climate change project, Harper gets diplomatic "flu"

Harper sees a WARMIST !

The world media rarely get to see Conservative leaders quarrelling in public and it won't happen when "Angela (Merkel) Meets Stephen (Harper)". Not in public. Nosiree Bob.

But in private ? In private, Harper is furious that warmist Merkel has chosen to 'dis' his well known hostility to climate change by actually visiting a Dalhousie University climate change project being done with researchers from Germany 's Helmholtz Institute.

Promoting climate change !!! On his own turf !!! A fellow conservative !!!

Stabbed in the back !!!   WARMIST traitor !!!

As Evergreen Nova Scotia says, I bet his nurses had to be instructed to keep him away from sharp knives until Angela was safely beyond Canadian airspace ......