Thank you, xkcd, for summing it up so succinctly. I just can't get behind the e-book thing, but haven't had the guts to say they're for chumps.

Flipping pages, browsing bookracks, dog-earing your place -- these are too much a part of our society to be given up all that quickly. There's more to a text than the text; holding an actual, palpable volume in one's hands is part of the pleasure.

An unsurprising sentiment from someone who recently started a paper magazine, I'm sure, but nonetheless.

Got an email from the WNYBAC folks the other day. They've got another demo on the way, and I strongly recommend it.


"Wednesday Feb. 25th (6-8 pm) we will be having our Punching & Cutting machines demonstration which was previously postponed due to a snow storm.
Paper Drills, grommet machines, corner rounders, and a trusty Guillotine are but a few of the resources we have to make paper yield to your will. Some of these machines will always require WNYBAC staff assistance, but many others are just fun to put holes in paper. Get a tour of these tools that can help put that final touch on your book edition project.
Just RSVP to info@wnybookarts.org if you wish to join us."

I don't know if I'd really call it marketing. There's no conversation about "brand" or "penetration" or anything like that. (Note the use of the word "conversation" as opposed to "convo").

I set up a twitter account, so if you simply MUST know the latest, this is the place to get it.

Also, i set up a facebook group a little while ago, which, I'm happy to announce, has members that I do not know personally. ^^

Last Wednesday, I stopped by the WNY Book Arts Collaborative for a demo of this... thing. It's called a Ludlow, and it involves a wall of drawers, molten lead and something called antimony. I was shown how to make the shiny new coolness pictured above.

Surrounded by some very hep cats in the mad scientist basement of this place, I was struck the relevance of what happens there. These people make print the old fashioned way by choice, an activity which I thought would seem quaint or eccentric. Handwriting means less and less now, as our choice of fonts becomes more important. These guys know why certain things in the written world are as they are, and how they got to be that way.

You've got to stop down there.

I can tell you this -- trying to get a magazine out during the holidays while buying a house and moving is... let's just call it challenging.

The latest GF - vol 2 - is ready to go, with three new writers no less. And so, the process of distribution and word-out-getting begins anew.