This afternoon I settled upon a name for my new virtual press: Riverglen Press. (The website’s not up yet, though — give me a few more days.) Quire Press was a nice name but people would have problems spelling it, and “Riverglen” has a British feel to it.

Printing seems to be in my blood. In my History of the Book class, I’ve been reading about all the old printers (Gutenberg, Caxton, Aldus Manutius, Ben Franklin, etc.) and it’s like eating dessert. Recently I’ve decided that I was named after Ben Franklin, in fact. I have no idea if that’s actually the case (I suppose I ought to ask my parents…), but I claim him as my printerly predecessor, at any rate. And reading about William Morris founding Kelmscott Press has been a great inspiration. I can’t describe this compulsion to print and make books (and charts and documents and other printed material), but it’s real and it’s strong. And deeply satisfying.

It’s done! I finished up Translating Scripture, exported the whole thing to PDF, and sent it to the author, who’ll take it to the press tomorrow morning on CD. It’s a great feeling to be done — I’ve been working on the book for the past few months, and these past two weeks have been intense. I guess I’d better start doing homework again…

Now that I’m done, it’s time to move to my next project: the Project Gutenberg eBooks. I’ve got to balance my time between this and Beyond, though. And yet I don’t think it’ll be much of a problem — these texts won’t be too hard to set. Eventually I want to set Middle English and Old English and Latin and Coptic texts (and texts in other languages, too), perhaps learner’s editions that people can print out and take notes on (wide margins, lots of space between lines, etc.). I’m even thinking that I may do a Bible someay, just because all the old printers did them.

But not quite yet. We moved the deadline to tomorrow morning so we could review the book (Translating Scripture) again and fix any remaining problems. As soon as we send it to press I’m sure the inevitable dread will set in — what if there’s some glaringly obvious error we missed? Oh well. You can only do so much.

As for my Project Gutenberg typesetting project, I think I’m going to call it Quire Press. (From Answers.com, a quire is “A collection of leaves of parchment or paper, folded one within the other, in a manuscript or book.”) I came up with a preliminary regular expression in vim to fix the lines (%s/\n\([A-Za-z]\)/\1/g) but it’s not quite perfect yet. (And besides, I want to do it in Perl.) Pride and Prejudice will be the first book I produce and Phantastes (George MacDonald) will be the second.

Okay, I’m getting really excited about this classics project. I went on Project Gutenberg’s websites and found that they only have a little over 100 PDFs (118, I think), and all of the ones I looked at were…less than satisfactory. Most likely machine-generated, in fact. And while I can see why they’d want to do that (it’s fast and easy), it’s not beautiful, not by a long shot. Beauty has to be handcrafted.

So, the process will go something like this: take a PG text (I’m going to start with Pride & Prejudice), run it through Perl to prepare it for entering into InDesign, and then design it in InDesign. I’ll produce two editions of each book: one for onscreen viewing (pages in sequential order), and one for printing (I just discovered InBooklet, which will let me do the impositions so the pages get printed where they need to be). I thought about designing each book differently, and that’s still a possibility, but I think this’ll be more of a “Modern Library” kind of thing (all in a set). Time to come up with a name for this new virtual press… Oh, and these will be downloadable for free, of course. I don’t care about money at all. (Which is why I’ll be poor till the end of my days, of course, but at least I’ll be happy.)

As for selection of texts, like I said, I’ll start with Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. From there I think I’ll move to lesser known texts, however. My second book will be George MacDonald’s Phantastes, and I’ll probably continue on with some of his other books (The Princess and the Goblin, etc.). I’d also like to do some foreign-language editions — Old English, Coptic, Latin, stuff like that. But that will have to wait.

In my History of the Book class today, a riveting idea took hold of me: take Project Gutenberg texts (of classics) and make them into beautiful books with InDesign, and put them up for download as PDFs on my website. Why? It’s nice to have freely available versions of the classics that are beautiful as well (and could be printed out if one so desires), and it’s good practice for book design. The texts are out of copyright and the texts are set (i.e., I don’t have to edit them), so all I’ll have to do is design them (copyfitting and all that), and that doesn’t take nearly as much time. I can’t wait!