Posted May 8th, 2012 by Erasergirl
my free juice extractor came today….let me tell you why it’s a free juice extractor….a month or so ago i watched the first few minutes of Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead documentary on Netflix.. basically i watched enough of the documentary to scare the crap out of myself. I am indeed one of those folks who is overweight for no very good reason..just too lazy to exercise or eat properly. Joe Cross gave me the idea that i could consumer MORE vegetables and fruits if they weren’t in the original form. I am also one of those people, where many green things don’t sit well after being consumed. I like them well enough but getting the roughage INTO my body instead of the bad lazy food is part of the problem. I do intend to finish watching the film now….anyway…i sent out a message in my universe that i wanted to used juicer….and one showed up on my doorstep. A used one in decent condition, but when i looked it online to order the missing parts I found it was a recalled model…..and Hamilton Beach’s policy is to replace it for free…so I sent in the cut off plug and got a free one. Alas the FREE extractor has dismal reviews online and if i am guessing right this one actually may be reconditioned…it looks new..but i’m paranoid.
Anyway…..i read all the reviews and tried it anyway…it has work well enough to test drive..and see if juicing stuff HELPS me ingest the stuff thats better for me. and voila it did. so far….i grabbed a bunch of vegetables at the market and juiced some of them…and surprisingly ….not bad at all. I need more apples of course…nearly all recipes need apples…and ginger helps ..need more fresh ginger…it’s a pain in the ass of a process because it makes a hell of a mess to create 8oz of fluid…but if you get the hang of it, you can speed the process. Now i need to find a use for all the PULP…my mother 3 years dead is hollering in my ear that this is a waste of money to do nothing with the debris. I don’t have a garden to feed…but i am sure there are some recipes out there perhaps a bread that can use the fibers.
Long store short bad reviews or not it’s a good test drive…i had planned that once the extractor arrived i would go back to being vegetarian for the summer…that and cycling on the new rail trail should make me feel loads better very quickly. Tonight i have tickle in my throat and i feel a confinement coming on.
Posted May 1st, 2012 by Erasergirl
I think I have made some headway with this whole history thing. But each volume is turning out to have its own problems.
I finally uploaded the Wadsworth Lawrence – but the damndest thing is that I keep revisiting the older titles, to keep them all uniform. I had to step back and make plans for a uniform series, i had to decide on a series stylesheet…still making that up as I am going along. I pulled out my Bright Orange Chicago Manual of style, my replacement copy of Bookmaking, which turned out to be useless, as well as my original copy which i just found. Once I created ‘styles’ i am back tracking to make sure the earlier titles match the later titles. Baskerville 12, with 10 for block quotes and .09 between the paragraphs etc… names of publications are in italics because many of these books have embedded quotations and i think too many quotation marks in a document makes it look messy. I still wish Americans used single quotes as much as the rest of the world. Whenever I see double quotes I think someone is speaking outloud.
One of the titles I am working on as I go along is the collection of addresses given to the Methuen Historical Society..well the old one..that existed at the turn of the last century, the new one hasn’t published anything of note that I can find. I found a few of them in the basement of the library, untyped and forgotten. Harvard Library has SOMETHING on microfilm, but it’s not indexed, so I am going into see it on Friday afternoon…AFTER i speak to the rotary club and before i go to the Wilbur theater for the live recording of the Nerdist Podcast. At least that’s my plan for the day.
I am still toggling back and forth trying to keep up with the transcriptions of things I have already collected. One finished, one started and one in process. I started transcribing the above “miss park and her school” a 1906 address by Lizzie Currier, but every once in a while is a word I can’t guess. any ideas?
Posted April 22nd, 2012 by Erasergirl
That’s it…my next business card is going to say ‘Fixer’ on it for an occupation. I swear I think people just think up weird problems for me to solve. my first phone call of the day, asked me to rescue an injured turkey. An hour later I was crawling underneath bushes putting my new $12 collapsible net over this wounded bird.
By the end of the day I had put on a lot more mileage collecting a pregnant and taking it to a foster home. OT vey. My next business cards will just read “fixer of problems”
Posted April 21st, 2012 by Erasergirl
i suck at proofing..i have to do it multiple times…i don’t know if it is because i can’t SEE the errant punctuation mark, or i am just a lazy person who can’t be bothered with the details. I am still on track for 12 books ready by June..maybe not just June 1st. not big rush most of this stuff is over 100 years old, it’s not going anywhere.
Every time I try to explain my concept about my project I discover something else I hadn’t planned on…I am now in the middle of transcribing a 1929 local history by a guy who wasn’t a very good writer and I ‘got right’ with the idea that I should clean it up for clarity’s sake. So, i’m using the same part of my brain that I use when I edit live people: “if i have to read a sentence twice to understand it, it needs fixing.” Just because it’s part of the original material doesn’t make it untouchable. The original will still exist in the universe…well some of them…some of the things i have collected for reprinting are original manuscripts, which may very well disappear over time, but since I am trying to create new editions for new readers, it is my responsibility to make sure it can be read.
Still haven’t stopped screwing around with Phelps’ Tenth of January…I added a dozen or so footnotes, a bio of the author..and the local special collections librarian is down with adding a into. But I still need the cooperation of an educator..that I am still trolling for.
But the cover I think I knocked out of the park. I finally found an illustration that suits the cover design but it is also from 1913 so I could appropriate it freely. I did photoshop it a bit to give it the look I wanted, but I think it gives you a good sense of the content without telegraphing the horrific ending to the story.
I spread the proof copies out on my desk and I am really tickled about the ‘LOOK’ of the line. I think it will make a good presentation. Though I finally stopped ordering proof volumes and have started downloading the proof PDFs and sending them to Fedex Office to be printed…$20 and a 10 day wait versus $4 and immediate availability. I just can’t proof properly off a computer screen…i’m old school, I need a piece of paper on a table top with a ruler and a highlighter…other tricks are to go backwards in the text, from index to title page. They say read it outloud, which never works for me, I am already reading it out loud in my head and my eyes just fill in the broken parts.
Another stupid thing is I had to buy more highlighters…I had given away a bag of them doing the great purge..
Posted April 13th, 2012 by Erasergirl
I spent the last few days with a tech from North Carolina controlling my computer trying to FIX different bugs in my computer that were preventing me from running Photoshop 7, which i desperately need, so i can run the half tone dot removing filter over some images I have swiped from various sources. I need to make them print worthy for the books I am producing. I am also having issues with Adobe Distiller compressing my images to 150dpi which is NOT print worthy, and the list goes on. So far he’s worked for about 15 hours for me and i still have no idea how much I will be paying him, he says choose your own amount based on the results..but i KNOW what an hourly tech costs so i’m stressing about how much i CAN afford to pay and how much i SHOULD pay….i think i should just send him my wallet…but that would be an insult.
For the last few years I had a virginal copy of Marshall Lee’s Bookmaking on the shelf in my bedroom. I had bought it new and shelved it thinking it would from across the room, somehow inspire me to produce beautiful books. But a couple of months ago, when I got on this cut everything in half kick….which i must admit i have been slack off on lately, I sold it. For a good price I thought as even used copies sell for about $20…this I know because I just had to rebuy it!!
Long story short..i know too late . . . I’m trying to produce the best looking copies I can, i keep running into issues, MOST of them, like the image thing, I have already have a fix in my tool kit for it. However adapting 19th century print styles for reading by 21st century readers, with their limited vocabulary, attention spans and eyesight, I’m dumbing things down just a little bit. I chose Goudy Old Style for the 19th century stuff, mostly because I can read it without my glasses and it still looks OLD. I’m also changing the words that end with -tre and -our to -ter and -or; these guys just can’t make the leap from US to UK. The other liberty I want to take is to take long swaths of text quoted from other sources and set it apart so it’s not just hidden in the text surrounded by quotation marks…the little editor in my head is screaming ITALICIZE! but I need to look it up and make sure I’m not being a dumbass.
Today I am holding my 1st hard proof of Pehlp’s “10th of January” short story. as you can clearly see from my blog posts, I just can’t proof from a screen, i have tried; but give me a paper copy and i’m golden. I took the liberty of giving the short story a subtitle so you have a clue about what you are getting into..now it’s “the Tenth of January, a tale of the Pemberton Mill,” it’s like an American Girl story, cept she gets trapped in a collapsed mill and burns to death…cheery no?
I sent the first draft off to be printed but I don’t think it’s enough. I am giving it footnotes with definitions for the words we don’t use anymore. Also included now is the wikipedia entry for Phelps on the back page. I am going to see if i can get the Special Collections Librarian/Pemberton Mill expert to help me add some more contextual material so that if someone wanted to READ this and never heard of the Mill Tragedy of 1860, they could catch up. I’m considering it all ‘added-value’ for my ‘touchable books’ series. I’m already considering myself a parasite making money of the long dead….wait a minute…i haven’t actually MADE any money. I think I found a flaw in my project.
Posted April 8th, 2012 by Erasergirl
Posted April 7th, 2012 by Erasergirl
i am still poking along at the new project…i really really need to take some time off and work on projects i have ignored. but i figured i’d share some information before i forget it.
Lately i have been trolling for material to reprint..following my nose on the internet or at actual libraries and special collections. There is a surprising amount of non scanned material out there, some of it is uninteresting..but then, i am a geek and i find even the dusty stuff fascinating. I keep my camera in my pocket at these places and when i see something i just start shooting it..and when i get home i toss it on my new 2 terabyte hard drive (knew i needed that thing) even if i know i won’t get to it anytime soon. (apparently Digital Hoarding is now a THING) btw I found some very helpful advice on collecting digital images of documents here subchaser.org/photographing-documents, but for the most part i am not looking to reproduce the document, just the words. I have been relying heavily on a couple of programs for doing this..one is free..FreeOCR v3 which is adorable…it’s is simple and powerful little tool, using a split screen to convert pdfs, tiffs, and jpgs to text..and if it can’t make it out..you can do like i do…just read it with your eyes and type it with your fingers. (i’m doing that a lot) the other program which is NOT free, i use damn near everyday..adobe acrobat..not acrobat reader…the actual parent program which costs money..sorry buy an older version if you have to, but DAMN that’s good stuff. It allows you to build and break down PDFs, probably a lot of other things, but that’s what i use it for. I think mine is from 2006, but it still works just fine.
I had my eye on reprinting a local history book from 1924. Now MOST of the time something from 1924 has fallen out of print from lack interest. As it happens this guy was a lawyer and in 1952 he actually renewed his copyright even though he never reprinted his book. That piece of information took me 2 weeks to figure out..only because i wasn’t really trying…yesterday i tried and figured it out.
Turns out that before 1922 everything is safe…between 1923 and 1965 it is a MAYBE. The copyright owner would have had to renew it On time..publicdomainsherpa.com/copyright-renewal.html was especially helpful in explaining this strange limbo zone…also how the US Gov has not finish digitizing the Copyright and renewal entries between 1977 and 1923 – yes they are going backwards. see www.copyright.gov/records.
Of COURSE the item I was looking for dwelt in this nebulous zone between absolutely safe to reproduce and the Sonny Bono land of ‘you won’t live to see it in PD’ land ….and i kept thinking no way did they renew it back in 1952 if they weren’t going to reprint it…but faster than the USGOV – the special collections library at Stanford managed to scan in the missing areas of the Copyright renewal entries…collections.stanford.edu/copyrightrenewals
and thus i found a listing that confirmed my suspicions that the 1924 edition was still under copyright – but i know who owns it now, The local history center, but technically they only own the parts that are different from the 1918 version. So big deal, i get to reproduce the longer much more illustrated 1918 version, and I will have a chat with them about the later material.
None of this is a big deal…I have PLENTY of other work to work on….as a matter of fact yesterday I condemned myself to writing a history of my city. No there isn’t one..there are a lot of books written about the edges..but not a one volume edition. While the local historian and I were poking through his collection, we found an old anniversary event program from 1923..and in it, is the typical Methuen wording “this programme was to have included a short history of the town, but we have been told that a complete town history is coming and may be published before this event, so instead here is a thumbnail sketch of our town during the Revolutionary War.” needless to say 90 years later there is still no appearance of this history of the town. that is SOOO my city in a nutshell.
Posted April 4th, 2012 by Erasergirl
Posted March 28th, 2012 by Erasergirl
when i typed the header, I keep hearing susan sarandon singing “toucha toucha toucha touch me” in the background. ….over the last few days i have been talking about my new ‘project’ to the local librarians who know me. I was caught off guard because i hadn’t actually planned beyond producing the books, i figured the marketing would take care of itself. Where i started with 3 or 4 target books, my list of titles that i WANT to produce has swollen to about 15, and that’s books i have collected the materials for…and then there are a couple i will need to write..so that’s like 18. I better get my shit together as i am really liking what i am doing and other people seem to like it as well ….this is never good this is when i usually shoot myself in the foot to get out of combat.
Remember, last week i had a little too much money kicking around and instead of paying a bill like a responsible grown up, i bought toys? well i thought i bought a toy…turns out i missed having a straight up camera in my pocket like an amputated limb. Once I started carrying it around I was snapping a LOT more than i have been with the damn Iphone which thought it CAN do a lot of things, it really isn’t as dependable and as easy as a camera.
I have spent the last two days collecting materials for future volumes. LOVE that camera. Using my formula, i am taking MY cost for printing and ordering the book, so far between 2.50 and 3.50 and i am doubling it. THAT’s the wholesale price for 10 copies for the local museums, libraries and giftshops…then they can double THAT price and use the books as a decent fundraiser. i am even in talks with the coffee shop on the corner, but i need to spend 100 bucks on a display unit..i will need to sell 50 books to make that back, so no way am i making money. And so far…i have only given copies away..the local libraries can have their 1st copy for free…and considering the well worn and badly reproduced copies on their shelves? they will be coming back to buy an easy 10 of each I am sure.s hanging out with special collections librarians…the folks who mind the books you aren’t allowed to take out of the library. And these are the folks whom i do not have to sell on the idea of producing a line of what i am calling TOUCHABLE books. In the last 20 years our civilization has been digitizing our reference materials like mad. however we spent nearly no time using these digital versions to create touchable books so folks can HAVE them. Don’t even START with me about those fucking Print On Demand producers…they are churning out what can best be described as bound photocopies for USURIOUS rates…i mean what the fuck? the writer and subjects have been dead for 100 years, you used a machine to scan the book, and another machine to print it, a minimum wage slave to box it and you want THIRTY fucking bucks? that’s ballsy….but i digress.
Today I made the final clicks on the Vox Populi volume which I can bet right now …NO ONE will buy. I will give one to the Lowell Library but aside from that…it was just something i liked. I read the pieces i liked them…i had to practice Indexing anyway..and the cover is a work of art. I found the actual 1840s papers on microfilm, printed one of those really bad copies that we surprisingly still produce in the 21st century, then i photoshopped the hell out of it. I think it looks awesome considering…i even added the paper’s internal advert as a frontispiece. It reminded me, i need to start using the cover art as frontispieces so that folks can see the whole illustration.
That was then, now i have a few more titles on the hotplate. I am aiming to stay with methuen/lawrence titles until i run out…since those are the sales venues i have..then i can spiral out with interesting local titles i find. i started pairing up short pieces and some of them have to wait until i find something to pair it with. Tonights victim is..or rather ARE two pieces by the same author. A local historian in 1896 did a reading about the Merrimack Valley and then in 1900 did one about the Fall of the Pemberton Mill…so I am pairing them, adding an index…and after talking to the librarian I am going to add a little backmatter to bring his Pemberton Mill info up to date….it makes me feel that I will have earned my $2.50…$8.95 suggested retail price.
Posted March 26th, 2012 by Erasergirl
i just spend a few straight days putting together another local history, they are addictive….the more i can get my hands on the more i want to reprint. i am even looking into a getting a free standing rack..i know the coffee shop at the corner will carry whatever i can produce…damn sight more interesting than postcards.
While i was putting this one together i made some decisions about the series as a whole. once i do the most prominent titles, i want to double back and do what i did with the Vox Populi volume. Find more smaller pieces to publish standalone or paired with like items.
And Indexing is key – most of these titles don’t have an index so if you are just using them for referencing you have to skim the whole thing to find what you are looking for. You could of course just use Google books…but the appeal of doing local histories is that people are likely to buy them just to put them on the shelf. which brings me to my other decision..This last volume had a lot of wasted pages in it. those engraved portraits were on plates..with blank backs. so that’s two pages for one picture and a paragraph (we won’t even discuss how they were just sprinkled through the book in no particular order) basically i extracted them all and dumped them alphabetically in the back two up on a page so i am getting 4 images into the same space they used for one. including an index i think i can keep the page count under 250…and the cost UNDER $20…hopefully well under. I’m not making all that much money on these but then i didn’t write them…i am just reformatting them and reprinting them. Mostly i am doing this for my own amusement…that’s much more important to me than most things.
After I get enough of these under my belt, i think i need to put together a Methuen History since we don’t have a decent one. and i have a few folks who want me to do some more NEW titles. the reprints should balance out the NEW titles nicely.
I figure ‘research’ is looking at old material with new eyes. I had made this cover for the Vox Populi edition that i was tickled about …and I opened the box yesterday to all the shiny books and started reading the actually article ON the cover of the Vox. Turns out that ‘The New England Factory Girl’ (1848) is a three part short story about a 15 year old girl who leaves her home to work in the Lowell Mills to pay for her brother’s college. That’s as far as I got in my transcribing, i am not reading ahead. Anyway, i googled it and didn’t find an immediate evidence of it being reprinted…and there’s plenty of text to produce a small volume so into the queue of books I am publishing it went. Actually it went on top of the pile. Along with the Elizabeth Phelps short story about the 10th of January 1860, a story of a mill girl who..spoiler…dies in the Fall of the Pemberton Mill…for those who don’t read that much 19th century history the Pemberton Mill was the 911 of the industrial age. an entire building at the height of it’s production collapsed and killed about 100 people and wounded a lot more. Don’t worry the mill owners actually MADE money on the insurance and it was back in production within a year or so.
