“Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley” has just arrived in our Indianapolis warehouse, and all the pre-publication orders will begin shipping soon.
Our offer for free domestic shipping ends May 13 at midnight. After tomorrow, the book will cost $8 or more to ship, depending on where you live in the United States. If you have been a customer of ours before, then you know that this free shipping is the only discount we will ever offer on a book. Our books do not go on sale.
On Thursday we load up a trailer with 3,013 lbs. of books and head to Handworks in Amana, Iowa. We are bringing as many books as our towing and payload capacity will allow. But because books are heavy, we might run out of some titles during the show. So stop by our booth early to avoid disappointment.
— Christopher Schwarz
No wonder its so windy here today. Sighs of relief from OH to IA.
What will be shipping cost to Toronto please ? Thanks
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Lee Valley will carry the book for Canadian customers. They should have it up on the website in a couple weeks.
Can’t wait to pick mine up in Iowa! On that note, I will be driving from Fort Collins, Colorado, “the Napa Valley of beer.” I will be bringing a bunch of our local brews (though sadly not a trailer load) to share & swap. Anyone have any requests? Chris gets whatever he likes if he promises to actually keep his shirt ON.
Just received my copy. Loved the photography. The writing was quite good, and really appreciate the nice printing and binding and luxurious matte dust jacket.
The (macro) design / typography was decent, but it would be nice if you’d tweak the (micro) typography a bit — try to use appropriate characters and nice options in fonts and not allow things such as breaking words across columns or even pages. Also, no widows or orphans, ’kay?
It would also be help if you’d use real prime symbols instead of uni-directional stick quotes.
If typography doesn’t interest you, please skip all of the following save for the last paragraph. Thanks.
Hopefully, someone at Lost Arts Press will take the following as constructive criticism:
Orphans: pgs. 4, 5, 32, 40, 52, 55, 60, 189, 194 (also an atrocious break (…ev-//er-new…)
page bottoms are ragged / not flush, so no reason for such, similarly, no formal grid, so it’s bizarre that they put the first line of a paragraph above two images on pg. 62, then continue the paragraph below them. Similarly on pg. 80, identifying head for Center Gauge appears vertically high than the matching photo, while the same for Drill gauge is pushed down below (on pg. 86 the same elements are consistent — heads are higher than matching photographs, but on the facing pg. 87 they’re inconsistent again). Lots of trapped white space throughout (e.g., pg. 106).
Bad breaks: pg. 27 top (…compa-ny logo.¶), pg. 33 (hyphenated a 2 line paragraph), pg. 76 (… “Russell Jen-nings.”¶), pg. 155, last line of second paragraph is (was.”), pg. 192 (…an ev-//er-flowing…), pg. 193 (…many of//us). The index formatting is beyond bad — I’m fairly certain it’s InDesign’s defaults w/ no adjustments and set in two too-narrow columns. It also ends on a short page, just 7 lines in a single column, almost over-whelmed by the furniture (book title and folio in the upper left corner of versos).
Also fractions are set as shilling style: 1/8″ (pg. 56), w/ a hyphen if after a whole number (pg. 59), a lowercase “x” is used to indicate dimensions rather than the proper symbol, × (pg. 57)
It’s really a shame that the micro typography couldn’t be as perfect as the text, the photography, or the tool chest which is the subject of the book.
Here’s a post which sums up what I was trying to communicate more clearly:
http://www.reddit.com/r/typography/comments/36zvjg/virtuoso_the_tool_cabinet_and_workbench_of_henry/crjb1cr