After a couple of hours of work, I’ve finished the Latin edition of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses and made it downloadable at Riverglen Press. There are actually two versions: the learner’s edition has large print and lots of extra space for making notes between the lines (as well as in the margins); the reader’s edition is normal book-size print and is meant for reading, not necessarily notetaking (though the margins still give plenty of room for that).

Now that I’ve actually gotten something up, I’ll start work on Pride & Prejudice. And I’ll dig up the Thai script card I made in the mission office and upload it, too…

I’ve started my first project for Riverglen Press: Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, in Latin. It’ll be a learner’s edition, for printing out and translating. I’m working off the Project Gutenberg text. Right now I’m in a bit of a rush, but here’s a tentative layout I threw together in Illustrator (subject to change, of course): 95 Theses. Next week sometime I’ll finish it up in InDesign. (I imagine it won’t take too long.)

I just tried installing my fonts (just Minion and Myriad) onto the lab computer so I could use them in InDesign, and it worked. This makes me very happy. And the nice thing is that it automatically deletes them when I log out, so I don’t have to do that myself.

I made a quick test PDF of a page from Pride & Prejudice and it turned out lovely. So now I just need to decide on a format… (By the way, in Bringhurst’s book — The Elements of Typographic Style — there’s a great section on page size and textblock size and all that. I highly recommend it.)

Today in my History of the Book class we talked about textual criticism, particularly that of the Book of Mormon (my professor, Royal Skousen, is the one doing the critical text of the Book of Mormon). I’d expected it to be dry and boring, but to my surprise I found it quite fascinating. Definitely something I’m going to have to look more into. (Part of my interest has to do with Riverglen Press and its future — I’d love to do editions of texts which I’ve actually edited, in a scholarly manner. ) And now I find myself with a desire to make a learner’s edition of the Latin Vulgate (which would work in perfectly with my class next fall). The Vulgate’s got to be public domain, but the trick is finding a public domain text of it (preferably without having to type it all in by hand, but I’ve done that before and I’ll do it again).

As for Riverglen Press, I’m going to see if I can copy the fonts I use (Minion, Myriad, etc.) to my flash drive and temporarily install them on these Macs when I use InDesign. In theory it should work, and if it does, I can start working on texts immediately. (And if it doesn’t, then when we get the iMac at work, I can come in before or after hours and use that. If I get InDesign installed on it, that is…)

I’ve started reading Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and it’s good (though it seems to have a slightly different tone from Alice in Wonderland — I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I like it). The absurdity is very well-done, in a Chestertonian fashion. With things absurd you have to be very careful, because it’s easy to blow it and come out as just stupid. But when it’s done right, it’s hilarious, and it makes you think. I love all the wordplays, by the way. So far there aren’t as many in Looking-Glass as in Wonderland, but that’s okay.

As far as the title of this post goes, we visited Tryst Press (a local fine printing shop here in Provo, though the website appears to be rather out-of-date) on Tuesday for my History of the Book class, and one of the books we got to see was a small edition of “Jabberwocky.” Quite cool. While reading it last night, I got a hankering to make my own edition, illustrated and all. We’ll see… Speaking of which, I’ve got to get started with some Riverglen Press editions. Having my laptop break has been a temporary obstacle, but I think I’ll still be able to make things happen.

It’s done! Translating Scripture is back from the press and I’m pretty impressed with the result — it’s just like it’s supposed to look. Phew! It’s crazy to see the months of work in InDesign come to fruition in a real, physical book I can hold in my hand. Bookmaking is getting even more addicting. (And in my History of the Book class today, we got to see a bunch of the fine printing books in Special Collections. Mmm.) I’ve been thinking about Riverglen Press and I realized that I probably won’t be satisfied only with making PDFs — I have to make real books, too. And so I will, eventually. In the meantime, PDFs will have to suffice. Speaking of which, I wrote a quick Perl script today which takes a Project Gutenberg eBook and fixes it up so InDesign can take it and use it. I just noticed that InDesign can import XML, though, so I’m going to look into that and see if I can give InDesign formatting codes via XML — if I can, then I can change the underscored italics in the ASCII into InDesign italics, all automatically. That’d be nice.

As for Riverglen Press, things are coming along slowly but surely. I’m deciding what font to use for the body text for my Riverglen Classics — probably Garamond Premier Pro or Minion Pro, I think. The main thing now is to learn enough Perl that I can process the Project Gutenberg text into something more usable for InDesign… (And I don’t think it’s all that much Perl, by the way.) With the Pride and Prejudice text, emphasized text is marked by underscores (”It’s _him!_” = “It’s him!“), and I wonder if there’s a way to turn that into something InDesign will automatically read in as italics. Probably not. But it would be nice if there were… Oh well, there aren’t enough of them to make it a huge nuisance. (I hope. )

Just realized that the Plan of Salvation thumbnails on the Riverglen Press site weren’t showing up (I was capitalizing “Small” but the filenames weren’t capitalized). It’s working now.

I intended to do homework today, but the Plan of Salvation cards were begging me to create a website home for them, so I did that, at Riverglen Press. I have 21 languages up so far, with a few more in the works. Now I just need to find time to set Pride and Prejudice… If I had more time I’d write more about it all, but I’ve got a lot to do in the next couple of hours…

The calligraphy bug bit me today. It happened when I saw the back of a greeting card — the name of the press was styled in some kind of chancery cursive, and it looked really good. Hand-lettering would give a nice feel to my Riverglen books (the title pages, that is). So I’m going to learn calligraphy. There’s a calligraphy class here on campus and hopefully I’ll be able to get into it this next spring term, but even if I don’t, I still plan to teach myself.

Beyond that, eventually I’d like to start designing my own typefaces which I could use for printing books. But that’s a ways down the road. FontForge could do it, I suppose, but it’d be nice to have a native Mac font-making app that isn’t $700 (ahem, can we say Fontlab?). I’m really tempted to write my own. But that’s a project that will have to wait, because I’ve got too many other things on my plate right now. Someday, though… ~wistful sigh~

One last thing: for some typographical coolness, check out Caligraft.com. Wow.