How a Book Is Made

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/19/books/how-a-book-is-made.html

No paywall
https://archive.fo/DGH3z

It started as a Word document, pecked out letter by letter at a dining room table in Connecticut.
Now, it is 150,000 copies of a 626-page book called “Moon Witch, Spider King,” with a luminous cover that glows with neon pinks and greens.

While digital media completely upended industries like music, movies and newspapers, most publishers and authors still make the bulk of their money from selling bound stacks of paper.

Here, we will show you how vats of ink and 800-pound rolls of paper become a printed book.
The title we will follow on its journey is “Moon Witch, Spider King,” a fantastical epic that draws on African mythology, the second book in a trilogy by Marlon James.

Let’s watch this book get born.

*snip*

[SheltieLover]

1. Thx!

Bookmarked!

[Silent3]

2. For something more retro, see this documentary about the last hot-lead printing...

...of the New York Times.

I worked for a magazine with an intermediate level of electronic printing. There was a machine that would take small computer text files and output them as narrow strips of print-quality type. But there was still a physical page layout process, cutting up and pasting these strips on cardboard backing to create column and page layouts.

[Mme. Defarge]

4. Back in he day

I worked for printing company that still had letterpresses and a lead typesetting machine. I was the “stripper”, who made negatives and paste-ups and printing plates for offset presses. Loved telling everyone I had a job as a stripper.

[Mme. Defarge]

3. I spent the first half of my long career

in commercial printing and fell in love with beautiful paper and the smell of the press room. In 2018 I was on a river cruise in Germany and had the good fortune to make what I felt was a pilgrimage to the Gutenberg Museum in Heidelberg. The photograph of the outside of the building is my phone’s screensaver.