The Independent Stitch

2.5 days' singing: The red book and a woven riddle

This past weekend the 18th Annual Rocky Mountain Sacred Harp Convention took place at the Wild Sage Common House (Wild Sage Cohousing) in Boulder, Colorado.

Sacred harp singing, also known as shape note or fasola, is a 200-year-old form of a cappella four-part harmony. If you saw the movie Cold Mountain, you heard two shape-note tunes in the soundtrack: "Idumea" and "I'm Going Home." The PBS special Amazing Grace, one of Bill Moyers' documentaries, includes a shape-note version of that old song. I've just learned that there's a new documentary on the tradition called Awake My Soul.

I won't describe the music itself further in this post, because I've already done that in an essay I wrote called "On moving into the hollow square." [10/1/07: I thought I'd linked to the essay, but it doesn't seem to have worked. I think it will now be available from the "Additional writing" part of the sidebar. Knock on wood.] The piece was originally published in a literary magazine called Many Mountains Moving in its Literature of Spirituality Special Edition, edited by Cathy Capozzoli.

Local singings are held in many communities throughout the year. A convention is a big singing that happens annually. There are lots of conventions. People travel long distances (and short) to attend conventions, which end up linking shape note singers from different regions together. Lots of people travel to as many conventions as they can, although I haven't been to any other than the Rocky Mountain convention, and then only when it's been in Colorado (alternate years are in New Mexico) and I haven't had a conflicting work commitment during its scheduled weekend (often SOAR, when I worked at Interweave Press). This year's convention was either the first or second full convention I've participated in, although I first sang shape note thirty years ago (seven shape) and singing regularly for the past twenty years (four shape). It gathered eighty participants from nine states (CO, NM, UT, IL, WA, GA, AL, TX, CA) plus England.

Someone passes a hat (or paper bag) for donations to cover costs. Local singers provide a bountiful potluck mid-day meal for everyone.

On the way to Boulder on Friday, I stopped at Shuttles, Spindles, and Skeins to get two more hanks of Crystal Palace cotton chenille so I can turn a big gauge swatch into a scarf. The actual project for which this swatch is preparation is a sweater for a friend who's allergic to animal fibers.

Friday evening, there was a singing school with Terry Wootten from Alabama, who, along with his wife, Sheila Wootten, joined us for the weekend. Singing schools introduce new singers to the tradition (although simply jumping in is also a normal way to begin) and give more experienced singers new perspectives on the music's history and variations.

On Saturday and Sunday, the convention ran from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., with a break for lunch and socializing each day from noon to 1. On Saturday, we sang 85 different songs. On Sunday, we sang another 80. That was the official part.

Saturday evening, a smaller group gathered to sing a few more. The convention was a "red book" or "Denson book" singing. The evening, unofficial session also sang from the "blue book" (Cooper book) and the "black book" (Norumbega Harmony).

Because my voice gave out, a few songs before everyone else quit for the night I retired to the guest room that I'd been offered the use of, in the lower level of the common house. I ended the day reading Meghan Nuttall Sayres' novel Anahita's Woven Riddle, which I'd discovered and picked up at Shuttles, with the delightful sound of the day's last music coming through the ceiling above me.

When I edited Spin-Off magazine, Meghan wrote several articles that I published. Her novel, which concerns a nomadic Iranian spinner/dyer/weaver, is an excellent read that incorporates, without being encumbered by, a lot of knowledge of Iranian culture and of the textile arts. The narrative structure itself resembles a tapestry. I enjoyed the book as both reader and writer. Although categorized as a young adult novel, it is, like all good books, not age-limited in its appeal.

I got the small rug in the photo above by way of Rubia, which mostly provides an outlet for sales of embroidery by women from Afghanistan. When Rubia's Jennie Wood came to the 2004 Denver Convergence, the biennial handweavers' convention, she brought some lovely rugs with her. . . .

 

Where are the editors?

Because I was out of town over the weekend, I've been catching up on the newspapers as I read the ones that continue to arrive in the gutter, occasionally making their way as far as the edge of the driveway.

I wonder why I continue to subscribe to our major local paper. This paper is owned by one of the national chains, is published in a city of about 120,000, and is the largest paper in a county of about 250,000.

One reason is that it contains Lynn Johnston's "For Better or For Worse." Although I can pick up the comic strip online, I was raised reading the funnies in the newspaper and I still like to find them there. "For Better or For Worse" is essentially a very extended narrative work, almost a graphic novel presented in four-panel daily installments and longer Sunday supplements. It's great storytelling, with every word and image carefully chosen and rendered.

Another is that I learn just enough local news to make the subscription worthwhile (even though, for reasons noted below, I take that news with a grain of salt). I don't watch or listen to television news, but I also don't depend on the local paper for coverage of national or international events. It doesn't offer much.

Because of this catch-up reading, or actually skimming, I'm impelled to comment on something that makes me wonder yet again about the quality of the information I'm getting from the paper.

Here's a sentence from a photo caption from Sunday's paper, added link mine:

• "Julian Kley, 12, rests his head in his hands for a moment's reprise from the pressure of the PSD Chess Tournament on Saturday at Colorado State University."

I suspect that whoever wrote this meant  respite or, perhaps, reprieve.

And here's a caption from today's paper, two days later, again with my added link:

• "Kimberly Auer, 20, left, from Austin, Texas, and instructor Laura Jean Martin prepare to repel off Potato Chip cliff at Vedauwoo Recreation Area, east of Laramie, Wyo., in August."

They're probably going to rappel off the rock. With as much climbing as folks do in this state, that error seems even harder to understand than the first.

If the writers and editors can't get these words right, how can they handle more complex news stories?

It occurs to me that maybe they haven't gotten to R in the vocabulary flash cards, except that not all of the similar problems I notice in this paper, which is the one I read most often, involve that section of the alphabet.

We do have alternative sources of local news, including a biweekly independent small-format newspaper and some websites. (I'm not discussing broadcast sources because we don't have cable, and without cable there's not much TV reception in this part of the world. We get about four semi-fuzzy channels with the rabbit ears attached to our 13-inch television—just enough signal access to let us watch occasional PBS shows and for my daughter to get hooked on Lost).

I relax my editorial standards for this blog (or I'd get about two posts up each year), but I spend a lot of time working to make sure that the words I put down, or other people's words that I'm responsible for shepherding into print, communicate as clearly as possible. Total clarity is not possible, of course, but we can at least care enough to try.

In the news and everywhere else, words matter.

__

P.S. Like every other writer, I'm likely to find odd words in my drafts—homonyms, transposed letters, almost-right words—because my thoughts go faster than my fingers, which do their typing or scribbling best to keep up. Writing and editing are different processes, although the closer you can get to the correct word while writing the better the final result. Nonetheless, that's why this post is called "Where are the editors?" Editing's where these glitches get fixed, whether you're reviewing your own words or someone else's.

P.P.S. If I were really editing this blog, you wouldn't be seeing such things as straight quotes in the display, either. I manually code the em dashes and a few other things, but then I move on to my real to-do list. . . .

Quick update: general busy-ness

Activities are coming along swiftly here, although nothing momentous is happening (that's okay).

The second batch of advance reading copies (ARCs) of Ethnic Knitting Discovery arrived from the printer late Wednesday afternoon, and by 7:45 a.m. on Thursday all copies had been assigned to their next destinations and packed for shipping, and were by the front step awaiting carrier pickup. There are twenty flat-rate Priority Mail envelopes in that box.

I'm done with ARCs for this book. We seriously need the real print run now! It's out of my hands at the offset printer and all I can do is wait.

Other things in the photo: I finally bound off the tops of the Opal socks (Rainforest collection, Ladybug color). This is the sock yarn I bought in at Knitting with Class Sitka in June. I worked one of the socks from the center of the ball and the other from the outside, as usual . . . I like to keep my socks in parallel so I always end up with two: toe, toe; foot, foot; heel, heel; and so on. Because of the printed color sequence in this yarn, and because of some luck-of-the-draw about where the strand started and ended, the colors move in opposite directions on the two socks. I'm amused. My feet need to be compatible, but they don't need to match.

The books.

I've been having one of those pick-it-up-put-it-down reading times when nothing struck me quite right.

What you see are the books I've read all the way through—or will have soon.

It's hard to see the full title on the library copy of Kabul Beauty School, by Deborah Rodriguez with Kristin Ohlson. I met Kristin last spring when we shared lodging during the American Society of Journalists and Authors annual conference; the book was just being published and I've been watching for an opportunity (i.e., a free space in my life) in which to read it. That moment finally arrived.

Debbie Rodriguez has a heck of a story and Kristin Ohlson is a dynamite writer who helped her tell it.

Debbie Rodriquez brought beauty salon equipment and skills to Afghanistan (lots of info on different aesthetics; Afghan beauty is not U.S. beauty). The world of U.S. beauty salons is more foreign to me than I'd likely feel if I sat down in a group of spinners who all spoke different languages. I get a hair cut, I blow it dry (or as dry as I have patience for), and I'm done.

The book as a whole gives one perspective on women's lives in Afghanistan; Rodriguez' impetuosity and intercultural naivete are both charming and alarming. The book and its NPR-reported aftermath both enlightens and raises questions about cross-cultural efforts and communications and the responsibilities we humans have of figuring out how to interact with each other without causing harm, always tricky regardless of the intentions.

I'm especially glad to know about Kristin's blog. She's a smart, caring, tough, and ethical writer. One of the problems with telling someone else's story (as Kristin did with Debbie Rodriguez's story in Kabul Beauty School) is that you don't get to tell your own story. Kristin's blog lets her do that, and I enjoy her own insights into Afghanistan, which are a recurring part of that blog.

I was also reminded of Jennie Wood's work with Rubia.

It's an ongoing challenge for every human to figure out how to reach out hands that help other people discover their own strengths—and how to accept the hands that are offered to us so that we can do the same.

The other book, which I've still got a dozen or so pages to read in, is Leslie Cabarga's Logo, Font and Lettering Bible: A Comprehensive Guide to the Design, Construction and Usage of Alphabets and Symbols. I've been reading a few pages every evening for a while.

I got the book as a lark; the book I was looking for was Learn Fontlab Fast (not that I have FontLab software, but I'm curious, and curious with a problem to solve that might require font-design software).

However, I ended up with this one, too, and it's been the book I haven't been able to put down. The pages are dense with information so between two and four a night is plenty. It's eclectic and opinionated and contains a lot of extremely practical information for messing around with digital type.

A page I read last night reproduced an imaginary dialogue that type designer W. A. Dwiggins published in 1938 in a prospectus for his Electra font. The dialogue is between Dwiggins and Kobodaishi, described here as the Buddhist patron saint of the lettering arts.

Now, I spent a lot of time last year reading about Kobo-daishi (spelling change reflects source) in another context: that of the Shikoku Pilgrimage, and wondering what would be involved in doing the pilgrimage. On foot, of course. It's possible that simply reading about the pilgrimage in depth, looking at the maps, and understanding its history and current state fulfilled my quest. Or not.

More on that later, most likely. Topics that have intrigued me for years keep coming into my conversation, sometimes after long lapses.

I'm always intrigued when I notice anew how everything connects, sooner or later. If you pull one (metaphoric) thread and keep pulling, you will ultimately—if you have enough time and the ability to sustain your efforts—find everything in the universe passing through your (metaphoric) hands.

A day off, part 3 of 3

This is the final post about my bike ride last Saturday. The first gave an overview; the second provided some of the landscape contrasts that struck me. Life along the trail, and what you can notice and participate in, is very different from the experience of driving from one side of the city to the other.

Of course, I see more when I'm walking, and even more when I'm sitting quietly. But biking's pretty good.

I've got a few snapshots of critters that I saw, although my tendency with wildlife is to watch and not photograph. I didn't get a picture of the best thing that happened: right in the middle of the city, what looked a whole lot like a red-tailed hawk flew about six to ten feet above my head. I've seen these hawks that close before and from that angle, but never both at the same time, so I'm not going to vouch that I've identified the bird correctly. I was pretty shocked.

I not going going slowly enough to catch sight of muskrats, which I most often find on a portion of the trail system west of where I was on this trip.

I didn't see any foxes, either, although we see them pretty often even in our neighborhood. I caught sight of one crossing the Target parking lot a couple of days ago. They're red foxes. Some are quite slight, and others look like they're almost as big as our dogs, in stature if not in weight.

Whenever I see a fox, I am reminded of many nice things. One is a favorite book, City Foxes, by Susan Tweit. Another is a former soul mate of mine, an Australian Shepherd named Heather, who was so mellow that she and I, when out walking, could sit together and watch a fox near its den from probably twenty feet away without alarming the fox.

(An auto parts store has been built where that fox lived. And now the dirt is being scraped away for more retail space where a family of foxes lived near the main post office. In past years, caution tape was put up around the den when the kits were little so the group wouldn't be disturbed. I hope they've all found a new home in some of the open space that won't be built on.)

And yet another nice thing I'm reminded of is the photography of Wendy Shattil.  I'm almost certain it's one of her foxes I see when I fly Frontier Airlines. Her photographs combine with Susan's words in City Foxes, although I encountered Wendy's work first about seven years ago, when I was working a heritage preservation project in Park County, Colorado, and we were looking for images for assocaited publications.

Back to Saturday and my bike: the following critters are in the order in which I saw them on the return ride.

I saw a few ducks, mostly because I heard them splash down behind the curtain of trees along the Poudre River:

I didn't have my binoculars and my eyes aren't sharp enough right now to get past "one of the mallard-shaped ducks in female-mallard-type colors." Not goldeneyes, obviously, nor buffleheads. Nor anything else likely to be in this region that's distinctive enough for me to i.d. at a glance. (When I lived near the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I was great at knowing which ducks I was looking at, but I'm out of practice. And there were more fancy ducks there, which made it fun to learn to recognize them.)

What we have here that wasn't there is prairie dogs:

When I'm not in the car, I hear prairie dogs before I see them: they make a chirping sound. When I'm in the car, I see the dirt mounds at the openings of their burrows and then look for the upright-standing creatures. They often stand vertically on top of their mounds. The one above is scurrying along, probably to another burrow opening.

Horses live right in the middle of this city. There used to be a sign on the fence near this pasture that said something like, "Beware: The horses bite." It's not there now.

And here are some sheep at the Colorado State University Veterinary Teaching Hospital:

They're very close to one of the major cross-town roads, although you can't see them (or the horses, cows, or llamas) from the street. In fact, you could live here for years and never know the hospital consisted of anything but buildings. You can see them all quite well from the bike path.

And that's part of what I like about riding a bike around town: I get in touch with a much more diverse and less homogenized environment.

Many houses here have six-foot privacy fences around their back yards. It took me a while to get used to driving down streets lined with vertical cedar boards.

There's also much less interesting architecture here than there has been in other places where I've lived—Midwest, Northeast, Northwest. There are interesting buildings. There just aren't as many of them, and there are a whole lot of subdivisions that contain variations on a single theme. Many of them have covenants that require the residents to paint their houses in a specified narrow range of colors: generally beiges and grays.

When I first moved here, it took me a while to realize I needed to look at the sky, which changes every day.

I love walking, which is one way to experience my surroundings.

My bike has given me access to an additional set of intriguing things to look at and ways in which to see them.

Saturday was a good day off.

A day off, part 2 of 3

This is the second of three posts about my bike ride last Saturday. I've got a sampling of images here that show the contrasts in the landscape I passed through; the third post will talk about a few of the critters I saw.

On the way out, I simply enjoyed the ride. On the way back, I stopped to take photos. It was hotter; I was a bit tired from the first ride and then several hours walking around the fair. I enjoyed the short breaks to take the pictures.

On the right in this photo is the Poudre River, designated the Cache la Poudre River National Heritage Area, and on the left is the carefully manicured Link-N-Greens Golf Course. On the other side of the golf course is Lambspun, although see the next photo. . . .

To get to Lambspun by bike, you'd have to negotiate this (photo taken from the trail). I would have enjoyed a browsing stop at either Lambspun or My Sister Knits, but neither was readily accessible by bike without leaving the trail system, which I didn't want to do.

My favorite parts of the trail system look like the following photo. Most of the wooded areas around here follow the flow of water . . . either the rivers . . . or the irrigation ditches.

I think this is a gravel-mining operation, although I haven't been able to quickly find a map to confirm. There are large piles characteristic of excavation.

And a series of ponds not long after that.

Here's a marker of the high-water mark in the 1997 Spring Creek flood. I lost my big loom and most of my textile books and a bunch of artwork and supplies, but five people lost their lives when a wall of water swept through the center of the city.

I'd driven half a mile west of the most heavily affected area, through water that was suddenly up over the axles of my Ford Explorer and getting deeper by the second, not long before the flooding derailed a freight train.

This year was the tenth anniversary of the flood. There is now an extensive flood-warning system in place.

Here's the southern portion of the trail system. Dry vistas are characteristic of the area away from the river.

The trail itself varies along the route that I took from wide, smooth concrete (generally straight, flat, and suited for speed . . . although there are speed-limit signs) to narrow, bumpy, mended asphalt, and a variety of surfaces in between.

Near the end of my ride home, I was one of a group of six cyclists who came across a young man kneeling and bent over with his torso extended on the ground. A bike and bike gloves and a messenger bag were nearby. The fellow was conscious but not coherent, and did not respond to questions about whether he was okay or not. In fact, he didn't even raise his head, although the muscles in his arms and hands stayed tense and he did roar at one point.

One of the cyclists ended up calling 911 on a cell phone. Five of the group had traveled from the next town down the highway and needed to get back. With the assistance of a father and son who came along while we were trying to figure out what was going on with the young man, I stayed on the scene until the paramedics, fire authority folks, and police did an initial evaluation and transported him to the hospital for more thorough analysis and care. He needed it.

It was good to see the community response, both unofficial and official, get this person help. It was good to be a part of a group of strangers who didn't just roll quickly past a challenging situation and who backed each other up with regard for everyone's safety.

Next post . . . glimpses of non-human wildlife. . . .

A day off, part 1 of 3

This selection will come in three parts, because there are more images than usual. Of course, it's taking more several days to get it posted.

I actually took a day off last Saturday. This doesn't happen often. I wouldn't change my current job for any of my previous ones, even though it doesn't offer benefits like a salary, insurance, or paid time off of any sort. I can have all the unpaid time off I want! It's just not wise to goof off very often. The repercussions follow pretty darn fast.

I think I managed to go all of Saturday without working . . . well, I think I only worked an hour or two.

It's fall in Colorado, which means the days are bouncing between 90 degrees F (32C) and sweltering and 40 degrees F (4C) and overcast/rainy.

On Saturday and Sunday, the Rocky Mountain Sustainable Living Fair was taking place on the grounds of New Belgium Brewing Company. New Belgium is on the opposite side of the city. Fair attendance was predicted to be more than 7,000. I don't like crowds, and I don't like dodging for parking spaces.

There were biodiesel-powered shuttles going to and from the fair and one of the stops was about 2/3 mile from where I needed to start. That was an appealing option.

However, last year I got this:

Bike parking was going to be made really easy at the fair. The day looked like it was going to be beautiful—80s, not 90s. I figured that even if the fair was a mob scene and I decided to turn around and go home as soon as I got there, it was a good excuse for a bike ride.

Next, I'd rather not get run over by a car or truck and I don't like breathing exhaust.

However, with the help of an outdated map and some on-the-ground experience with the city's trail system, I figured out how to get from one side of the city to the other without riding on any streets. My aha! moment came when I quit trying to find the shortest route and looked for the one that was likely to be the most pleasant. It required about a detour of about four miles away from the straight course, but on a bike that's not a problem.

That's a one-mile (1.6 km) scale marker at the lower edge.

Throughout the the trail system, bikes are low on the right-of-way totem pole: they have to yield to both pedestrians and equestrians. The upper sign (cropped out) says "no motorized vehicles."

Most of the other people on the trail on Saturday were on bikes: recumbents, tandems, racing, meandering. I saw a few rollerbladers, some folks walking, a handful of runners. With a few notable exceptions (like one bridge crossing that involved about ten people), I had the trail to myself. No horses, although I've seen them in the past.

I traveled seven or eight miles and crossed five streets, three major (and controlled by lights) and two that were so minor that watching for traffic was almost a formality.

When I arrived at the fair, there was free valet parking for bikes in a secured area staffed by volunteers. I didn't have to use my lock, and I could leave my helmet, too.

And while the fair was full of people and booths (175 exhibitors, which I'd browsed online at home in order to reduce potential sensory overload), it was laid out well and felt leisurely and uncrowded while I was there.

I spent a few hours, saw several friends, learned that I still can't afford solar power (when I bought my house in 1991, one of its appeals was a south-facing unobstructed roof, in case I ever could convert to solar). Although I learned about this interesting alternative.

One of the promotional activities at a booth for Annie's was a drawing for a year's supply of organic mac and cheese. That would be a cool thing. The staff was taking photos of people willing to hold a white board with an idea about what they do to lighten  the load on the environment. The friend I was with at the time could say, "Lives off-grid." A picture might end up on the Annie's website some day that shows me holding a sign that says, "Belongs to www.greenpressinitiative.org. Look it up!" I came up with Green Press Initiative, and the young woman with the camera thought of the extra nudge. (The tie-dye t-shirt came from the Saturday farmer's market. Locally made by a guy who looks like he's still in the 1970s.)

I discovered Kombucha, which it turns out I like quite well. There was a beer garden with lots of terrific beer—which Stephanie would probably have loved, especially along with the abundant vegetarian food (non-veg food also available)—from New Belgium and Odell's, as well as mead from Redstone Meadery.

A small thing, addendum: Type and language coverage!

I'm a member of what's called the P22 Club. That means I sign up in advance with the P22 Type Foundry (and pay a fee) and over the course of the year I get a discount on type, advance notification of new releases, and a few other goodies. I've always gotten my money's worth (or my daughter's: a number of years she's given me a membership as a combined birthday/holiday/Mother's Day present).

This is kind of like receiving a very large punch-card at your favorite coffee shop or ice cream stand. This particular punch card has lots of flavors—over the years, P22 has grown to add IHOF (International House of Fonts), Lanston Type Company, Rimmer Type Foundry, and the Sherwood Type Collection. I've used fonts from all those groups. They also offer some fonts that I'm not quite sure I'll ever need, although they're fun to look at.

Today I received e-mail notification from P22 of an expanded version of a very plain (but not boring), extremely legible sans serif font that has massively extended language support. If you want to know what languages are included (approximately 5000 glyphs for each weight of the face should cover a few), take a look at this link and search on the page for "language coverage."

Yep, Lithuanian. And more. The face looks like it will work for the "nearly invisible" functions I have in mind for it, which require extreme clarity and legibility at many sizes, especially quite small. I won't know whether the font will really do what I want it to until I try it out, and I can't try it for real without buying it. This will definitely exceed my type budget (inveterate link-clickers may have noticed in the preceding paragraph that the basic set for this typeface can be obtained for about $40 and the extended version runs almost eight times as much . . . versatility has a price, and the large complement of alternatives required a lot of work to design). The array of glyphs does not, as far as I can tell, include Japanese, which will be required for one of the books in my future—but Japanese characters are also, oddly, somewhat easier to locate than Lithuanian ones, if not necessarily to use.

For the seriously curious, there's this resource: Unicode code charts. My three hard-to-find Lithuanian characters are in the Latin Extended A set. They are 0117 (Latin lowercase e with dot above), 016B (Latin lowercase u with macron), and 0173 (Latin lowercase u with ogonek).

Just so it's clear that I look for the best fonts for my projects, not just the best fonts within P22's linked sites:

The photo includes a handful of physical type catalogs, including selections from Emigre, FontShop, T.26, FontFont, AGFA/Monotype, image resource Veer (fond of these shirts, yet I will always buy type first—I can knit a sweater, but I'm not yet designing type), and, of course, Adobe. And then there's ITC, and Joe Treacy (love his TFArrow and use it a lot), and Leslie Cabarga (I'm reading his Logo, Font & Lettering Bible), and David Bergsland, and Storm. . . . (Hendel's On Book Design isn't a type catalog but joined the collection for reasons unknown.)

Most type catalogs are now online. That has advantages, including the ability to set a few words of your choice in the fonts you're considering, but I still like the paper catalogs. This Emigre publication is one of my favorites (beyond dog-eared). It says, "Now in full color!" on the cover:

You can see from part of the inside how that statement is true:

The matter of language, including calligraphy and typography (and chiseled letterforms, and symbols stamped in clay, . . . ) is a long-standing interest of mine. In eighth grade, I remember winning a couple of science fair prizes for a project that traced the development of both written and spoken languages.

This was in the era when kids still did their own science fair projects completely solo (I hear things have changed).

Mine was a weird project because it wasn't "science" as anyone around me defined that word, but it was what I was fascinated by, and whoever was in charge of science fair entries may have let me slip through a crack in the categories. My area of interest was far closer to anthropology, which we hadn't heard of in eighth grade, than to biology, chemistry, or physics, to which we had been briefly introduced.

I had already established the habit of checking books out of the library and tracing letterforms (among others, Koch's Neuland, favorite versions of which today are Richard Kegler's from P22 (P22 Koch Nueland . . . yes, the spelling is correct) and Joe Treacy's (Neue Neuland, which has a lowercase; the original(s) didn't). I had already started to study (not in depth, of course) whatever languages were hidden between the covers of the books shelved in the Dewey Decimal 400s: French, Spanish, Greek, Hawaiian. One of my favorite books at home was an Encyclopedia Britannica dictionary that had five (or maybe more) languages, in columns across the pages: each word lined up with its closest equivalents in the other languages. I knew even then that each language was a different lens through which people could look at the world and see things from varying perspectives. I figured out later that language not only lets us express ourselves; it also helps create the ways in which we think. (This connects to knitting. Knitting is a language, or a connected set of languages: cables and traveling stitches are related to each other, just as Portuguese and Spanish are.)

If I'd had an adviser for the science fair project, I would probably have been told to do either one or the other: written or spoken language. Unadvised, I blundered happily along. The visual portion of my presentation covered written language and the supporting paper discussed spoken language, including dialects, jargon, and the ways language changes as it moves from one place to another.

I remember reading parts (maybe all?) of The Decipherment of Linear B by John Chadwick and The Loom of Language by Frederick Bodmer, both books then still in their first editions. I don't remember much about them, of course. It might be time to read them again. (I also read a lot of Mary Renault's books.)

I did well enough at the local junior high science fair (500 students) that I was sent to represent the school at the state science fair, held at the Museum of Science and Industry, which my father referred to as the Rosenwald Museum (its name until 1928). I apparently comported myself well enough there to be called up at the end of the fair to stand on the big curving staircase with a bunch of other kids who impressed the judges. I have the impression that the kids on the stairs were a small subset of the entire group of preteens with projects.

As your basically over-shy person, I don't have a clue how I got there. I must have been so immersed in my topics that when the terrifying judges came by my booth (something like a card table, as I recall) to ask questions, I managed to open my mouth and some phrases that  appeared to make sense fell out.

No, I don't have copies of any of the materials I prepared. I don't know if my recollection of the Great Hall and the staircase is correct. I was sufficiently overwhelmed by the whole experience that I may have made it all up; it doesn't feel like it was a real part of my life.

I have much more reliable and concrete memories of checking a book of typefaces out of the library—the lettering design books were located on the small mezzanine, more like a balcony, while the languages were below, in the stacks on the first floor. When I got home, I'd put tracing paper over a page of letters that I liked and slide a pencil lightly around the profile of each individual letter, to understand it at the physical level. I was careful not to press so hard that I'd damage the underlying book.

A dozen or so years later, I carved the letters of Bookman into plastic erasers that could be used as rubber stamps: uppercase, lowercase, and numbers. More than thirty years after that, I still have all the little bits.

The definition of sanity depends on the context. I didn't carve punctuation, fractions, or any of Bookman's wonderful swash characters.

If you have fine-tuned eyes for letterforms (or want to play at developing fine-tuned eyes, as I do), you might look at two versions of one typeface, as released by different foundries. Here's the ITC version of Goudy Sans, and here's the Lanston Type Company (LTC) version of the same typeface, which I used for the text in Ethnic Knitting Discovery [modifying phrase moved 9/14 to clarify which version of Goudy Sans I actually used: LTC]. Just compare the capital Ks to each other—K being a critical letter for a knitting book. I went with the LTC version, not just because of the K but because it seemed generally more fluid, like knitted fabric. Both versions are Goudy Sans, though. On the surface, they're the same typeface.

MUST GET BACK TO WORK.

Yesterday I prepared five charts for Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' book on Cowichan sweaters, a (future) revised and expanded edition of her Salish Indian Sweaters, published in 1989. Here's one of the images from yesterday's five, which brings the completed total so far to 155:

 

It's clearer in the print-publication version, of course. That file is 4 MB and this one is 90 KB.

MUST GET BACK TO WORK.

A small thing: type (plus tiny socks, and some reading)

Progress on Ethnic Knitting Discovery: waiting.

Waiting for the offset printer to produce the real copies, which are supposed to be released on October 1 and should arrive in the warehouse about then. This wasn't the plan, it's about two weeks later than the plan, but it is what it is.

Waiting for the digital printer to produce another twenty advance reading copies, because we need them to fill the gap that's resulting from the delay at the offset printer.

But "waiting" is not down time.

I'm working on making charts for Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' new edition of her book on Cowichan sweaters (it's coming, but not far enough along to have a publication date set). I'm having to limit myself to between three and eight charts a day, for the sake of my hands. Chart-making is intense repetitive-motion work.

I'm also working on the editing and preliminary layout for the next book in Donna Druchunas' series on basic (and some not-so-basic) ethnic-knitting skills: Ethnic Knitting Exploration.

A simple task for a Saturday night

On Saturday night, I was tired enough that I didn't feel up to starting the editing on chapter 3 of Ethnic Knitting Exploration (I've done the editing and preliminary layout through chapter 2), so I decided to skip to the bibliography. Bibliographies require attention to details but no sensitivity to ideas or phrasing or conceptual flow.

But they are not altogether straightforward, especially when you are working with material that comes from around the world . . . in a variety of languages.

Digression about the initial selection of the typeface for the body of the Ethnic Knitting series

I love type and lettering. That's one of the reasons I am doing what I do in my life right now.

One of the ways I make the long hours I spend at the computer more interesting is by indulging my love for type. Deciding what typefaces I'll set a book in can take several months of off-again, on-again experimentation and testing while I work on other tasks that come along more quickly. I need to come up with a handful of fonts that go together and express my vision for the book: a body font (for the main text), sometimes a different caption font, and fonts for the chapter titles and subheads.

A favorite site is MyFonts.com, where I can try out sample words in some of the typefaces I'm considering (not all faces are on this site, of course, although many, many are!).

For knitting books, it's good to take an especially careful look at the uppercase and lowercase K and the lowercase G, and the 1/l contrasts (one and lowercase L). The word knitting always appears in my sample string. I'll also set words that are particular to the book I have in mind: qiviut/Qiviut (for Arctic Lace); The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and The Andes (for Ethnic Knitting Discovery); Lithuania, Iceland, and Ireland (for Ethnic Knitting Exploration); Cowichan and Salish (for Priscilla's next book).

I look at the type's feel in conjunction with the material I'll be presenting, and I also look at notes about the designer, consider the regional connotations of the font, and dig somewhat into other details that enrich the experience for me . . . and may lead me to better type and a more congenial design.

Type, like knitting, comes from all around the globe and has deep history. I enjoy connecting the two. Type also is full of weird stories, like any human creative endeavor. Sometimes I get quite distracted and have to pull myself back to the task at hand. That happened Saturday night, and it happened again a few minutes ago while I was collecting links for this post. MUST get back to work. . . .

Techie note 1: One of the fonts in Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' Knitting in the Old Way is URW Alcuin, designed by Gudrun Zapf von Hesse. Most Zapf-identified fonts are the work of her husband, Hermann Zapf.

I want character in the letterforms, but I don't want them to detract in any way from the contents of the book. Some people say—and I mostly believe—that type that does its job well is invisible.

However, my philosophy goes in a slightly different direction. My ideal typographic treatment will encourage people to pick up a book and begin reading, and then it will feel comfortable enough that they will continue to read. The end result, if I've done my typographic job well, is that people will feel like the book they are holding is friendly.

Both legibility and readability play critical roles in my quest. Legibility refers to the clarity of individual letters. Readability refers to the comfortable overall flow of the text.

When I've narrowed down my selection of typefaces, I begin setting sample paragraphs of the actual words and paragraphs, or as close as I've got to those things when this process begins.

I can't select type until I have a trim size set for the book. I can't set the trim size until I know the dimensions of the largest chart that will be in the book. Before considering type, I need to have made preliminary decisions about the text blocks and page margins (although they often change as I work with the type). Readability comes from the interplay between line length, typeface selection, type size, spacing between lines, and other factors. There are certain optimal character counts per line that the eye can scan easily, and so on. These factors all constrain my choices about where the type will go and what it will look like.

The only way to tell how my particular combinations will work, though, is to test, tweak, test, tweak, test again.

In going through this process for Ethnic Knitting Discovery, I surprised myself by selecting a sans serif font for the body, or the primary reading text. If I have a default typographic position, it is "use serifed faces for general text." (I do have several default positions. That's one of them.) But I kept being drawn to LTC Goudy Sans, which is a sans serif face ("without serifs"). It has a calligraphic feel that in my opinion gives it the readerly flow that serifs often contribute. It also felt right for the material, and for the overall visual effect I began to imagine that the book would have: illustrations (which didn't exist yet), page layout, and so on.

(Aside: I also seek out typefaces from independent foundries that produce high-quality fonts. In typefaces as in yarn, there are the equivalents of mass-produced acrylics and generic superwash worsted-weights and breed-specific strands suitable for certain knitterly purposes.)

To shorten this story, I ended up setting the main text of Ethnic Knitting Discovery in LTC Goudy Sans Light.

However, that typeface's numerals are a bit too idiosyncratic for the row and stitch numbers on charts, so I dug around in my type collection (my type budget had been blown by this time) and settled on Gill Sans for those purposes and a few others, like some of the captions and parts of the tables. Gill Sans felt reasonably compatible with the Goudy Sans, and it was sitting on my machine, suitable for the task at hand, licensed and ready to go.

Back to Saturday night and the bibliography

The bibliography in Ethnic Knitting Discovery is set in LTC Goudy Sans, not Gill Sans. When I came to the bibliography for Ethnic Knitting Exploration, I discovered that neither LTC Goudy Sans nor the version of Gill Sans I was using contained some of the characters I needed.

This citation I could manage (except that with my editor's hat on I'm still tracking the publisher's name):

The fonts that I'd been using contain the two non-English characters I needed:

But then I came to this citation:

It requires the following non-English characters, which were not available in either LTC Goudy Sans or Gill Sans:

Saturday night got a little less productive and a lot more interesting.

Techie note 2: All my fonts have to be suitable for high-resolution print reproduction. That means they are PostScript Type 1 or PostScript-flavored OpenType. TrueType and TrueType flavored OpenType are only on my computers if they are required by the operating system.

Techie note 3: If you have a few odd characters and they only require diacritical marks in places your font hasn't provided them, you can play with baseline shifts and radical forced kerning (character spacing) to kludge together substitutes. That wasn't the case with all of the characters I needed. Kludging characters is also time-consuming and makes the text harder to edit, if that's necessary.

I did a web search for a version of Gill Sans that contains the required glyphs. It may exist, although I haven't yet found a link on any Gill Sans supplier's site to a full character listing that would let me know with certainty.

Techie note 4: The character set called ISO-Adobe supports "most western languages including: Afrikaans, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Gaelic, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Sami, Spanish, Swahili and Swedish. This is the standard character set in most PostScript Type 1 fonts from Adobe." Just because a character set supports Icelandic, Norwegian, and Sami does not mean it will accommodate Lithuanian. The Adobe PostScript fonts that I have either don't have the Lithuanian characters or hide them so effectively I haven't been able to find them . . . accessing glyphs (distinctive character forms) is relatively easy in InDesign, but still not a no-brainer except, perhaps, for professional typographers who have enough of the approximately 100,000 Unicode options memorized.

Wonder of wonders! I discovered that the necessary glyphs were available in Myriad Pro, an excellent font that was on my machine. Myriad Pro does not, however, fit with the font combination I'm using in the book. It's a perfect placeholder and temporary fix for my problem.

I'm not sure what the ultimate solution to this little complication will be, but I don't need to come up with an answer for at least six months. Meanwhile, the bibliography is set in Myriad Pro and I can change out the font when I come up with something else.

I may need to find another companion font for the LTC Goudy Sans and swap out all of the Gill Sans in Ethnic Knitting Exploration for whatever that other font is . . . if I can find something affordable. I came out of my Saturday evening type quest with several leads to follow up later. I'm pretty darn sure I don't want to mix three sans serif fonts, using one solely for the bibliography.

Whatever my solution is, it will probably be invisible to most readers.

(By the way, to the extent that space permits, Nomad Press books contain colophons that let the type-curious know what decisions I've made about the typefaces. I usually run out of room and need to give less information than I'd like to. But there are clues.)

Tiny socks and reading notes

I finished a pair of Little Coriolis socks from Cat Bordhi's New Pathways for Sock Knitters, Book One (bright  peach, next to the turquoise Little Sky socks). The Coriolis sample's toes are just right for a baby but way too boxy for my long feet. And I'm not a big heel-stitch fan, although because I'm working through these to change my perceptions of socks I did knit heel stitch on the Coriolis socks, as instructed, thinking all the time about substituting Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' short-row heels and toes on this particular design (although Cat offers other toe and heel options in the back of the book, some of which I might find suitable). I didn't have those impulses on the Little Sky socks.

Also, I am reading Susan Strawn's new Knitting America, of which much, much more in future posts. It's wonderful.

A few odd photographs and captions were inserted during design and production (including the staged photo of the older woman and toddler on the cover). Be prepared to notice and dismiss a handful of peculiarities of this sort (you'll recognize them) while luxuriating in the true abundance of Susan's text and images.

I'm writing a review for Spin-Off and will also go into greater depth here when I have time. Meanwhile, I'm reading steadily without rushing. And I've already read the book in an earlier draft, so I'm reading AGAIN. It's an extraordinary piece of work, and finely done.

Techie note 5: The type's pretty invisible. Body is a serif font that someone else will be able to identify; I won't take time to analyze and puzzle it out. Character count per line is good for extended reading, as are type size and leading (vertical spacing).

 

Small socks, freight, editing/layout, and a phone

I've finished my Little Sky socks from Cat Bordhi's new New Pathways for Sock Knitters, Book One. Other experimenters, like Kristi, are way ahead of me, even though many started after I did, because they are zoomier. Sometimes I plod. But I get there and I enjoy the view along the way. The small socks were most amusing to knit. I chose not to rush them. There's more than enough rush around here with deadlines.

In other news:

1. The fifth print run of Arctic Lace has not only been completed by the printer but appeared in our driveway on Wednesday—a mere 1300 pounds in 33 boxes; yes, I moved and stacked them all (plus the  21 boxes, or 800 pounds, I moved on Tuesday to make room; sheesh).
2. On Tuesday, we offered independent bookstores advance reading copies of Ethnic Knitting Discovery. We had 25 ARCs available. All had been spoken for by midnight that day. We now have a waiting list and I'm printing a second batch of ARCs. The real books are on press but their schedule has been delayed due to a rush of jobs at the printer, so we need more interim copies.
3. I've had to slow down on making charts for Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' Cowichan sweaters book, but only temporarily. I'd been working on them too steadily and I need to use different muscles in my hand for a bit.
4. So I switched to editing and preliminary layout for Ethnic Knitting Exploration, the next book in the Ethnic Knitting series, for which author Donna Druchunas got me the final text files last weekend. Donna's just starting to gather ideas for a website dedicated to ethnic knitting. One of the suggestions was to list related events (before) and reviews of those events (after). I'm currently getting psyched about the Scandinavian knitting conference in early October. Unfortunately, it's impossible, both physically and financially, to take ALL the workshops.

There's more, but I can't think what it is right now.

Ah. As of last night, I have a working cell phone for the first time since mid-July. I'd had a particular phone since last August and by the middle of this week it had been replaced three times, after a total of 47 cumulative days without service. All the breakdowns happened under warranty, but that doesn't help when it takes between three and seven weeks to get the phone back from the service center (after many phone calls and, ultimately, a complaint letter to the president of the manufacturing corporation).

So when the third replacement phone in less than six months arrived Tuesday and also didn't work for more than fifteen minutes, the wireless service provider swapped for a different company's phone. This swap is ordinarily only supposed to be for the same model, and it does, unfortunately, have a cost attached, even when the warranty is in effect.

I have great hopes that the new phone will  function reliably. We have basic service, for emergencies and to allow minor conveniences like letting my daughter know I'm running late or letting her ask me to pick up something at the grocery on the way home. With so many weeks of broken phone in less than six months, the previous model was not meeting even our most minimal needs. Fingers crossed that the new one will do the job.

Next I'm starting on the Little Coriolis socks from Cat's book. I'm looking forward to trying a large enough pair of socks for me to wear, although I want to work them in a fine enough yarn that I'll really get a sense of how they work on my feet. For now, these little samplers let me play with the combinations of techniques happily and quickly.

The standard against which I measure all socks is Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' short-row heel-and-toe socks from Simple Socks, which I love, both to knit and to wear. So far Cat's "sockitecture" concepts and the accompanying techniques feel between my hands like they're in a similar satisfying, elegantly simple, flexible design family.

Ethnic Knitting Discovery: Printer's proofs (formerly known as "blueline")

Bluelines and other press proofs

In the old days (this post will contain a few references to them), you'd send a book to press and a week or so later you'd receive an overnight package containing what was called the blueline. This is a proof of what the printer's going to start producing thousands of copies of as soon as you give your okay.

Blueline appears to be archaic enough at this point that even Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for it, although it wasn't that long ago that I reviewed actual bluelines instead of laser proofs, which is the current equivalent. Things have been changing fast in the printing industry.

A blueline was produced from the film that would be used to make the book's printing plates. Unlike architectural bluelines, which have blue backgrounds and white lines, printers' bluelines had blue type on an off-white background. The paper was slick enough that if you needed to make corrections or annotations, you'd need to use a fine-line permanent marker or a grease pencil.

With the evolution of printing technology to what is called "computer to plate" (CTP), or "direct to plate," there is no intermediate film step. Whole highly skilled departments of printing companies (including the strippers, who stripped the film into frames that held the pages in the right positions while the plates were made . . . wow, was that precision work!) ended up doing different types of jobs. This has all happened pretty invisibly to the rest of the world.

Bluelines are no longer blue, but the processes of dealing with the proofs at this stage of the printing process remain the same and are still critically important.

Drop everything: the proofs are here and need to be turned around

The blueline, oops proof, arrives via overnight FedEx. Ideally, the printer has told you when to expect it but in reality you usually just estimate when it will appear and stay ready to drop everything. This is the blueline (PROOF!) of Ethnic Knitting Discovery that landed on my front doorstep on Friday.

Printers vary in how they package their proofs. This printer uses heavyweight plastic wrap to keep the proofs bundled together and safe inside the cardboard box. Inside that wrap is everything we sent them to produce the book along with everything they've generated from which they will print it. Our materials being returned include CDs, laser proofs, and, in the old days, photos that the printer would have scanned and stripped into the film at the right sizes and in the right locations . . . or so one hopes . . . "right" is one of the things that's checked at this proofing stage. Their materials included for us to check consist of a proof of the cover and a proof set of pages, not trimmed to size but ideally in the correct order and with all of their elements present and in the correct format.

We sent away a small FedEx box. At this point, we get back a large FedEx box.

When we cut and pull away all that plastic wrap, this is the first thing that we see:

Each proof set in the box—cover and pages—has a sheet of paper like the one above. These are the critical pieces. This is the critical information:

I hope that's legible. The gist is that the job is being HELD until the two pieces of paper are returned, with signatures, to the printer. The normal schedule is this: proof arrives; drop everything and check it; return approval to the printer within 24 hours. Ideally, you check the proofs and get them back in overnight FedEx the same day you got them . . . and certainly no later than the next day. Thus the whole proof-approval process should go start-to-finish, door-to-door, printer-to-publisher-to-printer, within 48 or no more than 72 hours.

In the old days, we returned all the materials in the box to the printer to use as references when printing the job.

In these new days, we don't need to physically return anything if there are no changes. In that case, we can fax in our approval forms. If there are only a few changes, we can drop a new single-page PDF or two on an FTP site, or even e-mail them if the files are small enough.

Once you've signed off on the approval form, you have to live with any errors that were in the proof that show up in the finished books.

Changes at this stage are expensive, so you make any changes that are truly important but the book should definitely have already been well proofed multiple times before it reaches this step in the process.

You should mostly be looking for printers' errors. Since we started sending books to press in PDF format instead of as what were called boards (skipping a long digression here), there are fewer errors because the printers no longer need to strip as many things into position (which introduced lots of opportunities for them to be out of position).

Nonetheless. . . .

You check the pages and the cover proof for everything. You check them on their own, you proofread everything on the cover again (even though you've seen this stuff too many times), and you check them all against the laser pages you sent to the printer.

And then you check them again.

You do this fast and thoroughly.

And then you sign the papers, add—if necessary—a list of the pages with changes and what those pages are (mark changes on pages, too: redundancy of notification is good), and send the stuff back. You've released the proofs, given your approval, and it's done.

By the way, on this set of proofs I still haven't seen the second color on the text, because there's no economical way to proof a two-color job. For example, I opened the title-page spread of the proofs and thought, "Gee, those leaf forms would be really nice in green . . . I missed an opportunity to make this book look even better because I didn't make them green. . . ." Well, I did make them green! The color just doesn't show on this proof, although the proof's on paper that's closer to what the real paper will be than any I've seen so far.

Cover proofs are notoriously approximate because there's no economical and accurate way to proof color printing, although if you work with a single proofing system for a while you get to the point where you can guess approximately which aspects of the proof are "off" and can therefore guess whether what you're seeing is good enough.

Gremlins

Of course, as soon as you fax in your forms or drop the return box in FedEx you discover an (or "another") error.

Possibly an author writes to say that there is a mistake on page such-and-such which everyone has missed for the last two years. When you go look at the page, maybe it turns out the author is simply nervous and is reading the formula wrong and it's really okay.

Possibly someone who has an advance reading copy (ARC) calls to mention that on page 107 of that version of the book two of the charts are missing their titles.

That last one actually happened yesterday on this book. I went to look at the newly approved proofs and the yep, the titles were missing from the lower two of the three charts on what was about to become the real book, as well as the ARC. I looked at the laser proofs that we had sent to the printer and yep, the titles were missing there, too. That's why we keep all these copies and keep them together: to track down the point at which things went awry.

At proofing stage, though, you don't worry yet about WHY. You pay attention to FIX IT, if possible.

So I opened the production files for the book, located the missing titles (they were on the page but had inexplicably disappeared behind the top swatch photograph), made a new PDF of page 107 and e-mailed it to the printer with a note saying that if this substitution could be made on the first print run that would be great, and if not we'd catch it on the second run. I added in that note that we would not need to see an additional proof for this change. (We'd only get a proof of the single page by itself, not in context, so it's pretty meaningless.)

Because we have a crackerjack proofreader who wouldn't normally miss this sort of thing (or a gazillion others), I pulled the proofing pages out of the archive box and looked at page 107. All appropriate chart titles were in the correct locations when the pages were proofed.

I'm convinced that there are gremlins who come add glitches to printing materials after they have been checked until everyone's blue in the face and are, truly, perfect. From proofreading forward, I open the files as infrequently as possible and make as few changes as I can in order to keep the gremlins from doing more than a minimal amount of mischief.

(This was less of a problem in the days of galleys, waxers, and boards . . . inadequately adhered type could drop off the boards, but elbow grease acted as insurance: rub 'em down really hard and they'd almost certainly stay put . . . boards that had been stored for a while were vulnerable, but freshly prepared boards were quite stable.)

And then. . . .

So when you've done the best job you humanly can, you let go.

And start thinking about where the heck you're going to put another pile of boxes in the garage.

Speaking of which, the fifth print run of Arctic Lace shipped from its printer last Thursday and may appear as early as tomorrow and right now there's no room for another thirty cartons in the garage (sixty more are going to the distributors). The freight company's supposed to call ahead, but we usually only know we're about to get a delivery when the truck pulls up in front of the house.

And in about three weeks, we'll also have thirty or so more cartons of Ethnic Knitting Discovery to find room for (again, the bulk of the run goes to the distributors).

I can tell what I'll be doing with the rest of this Labor Day: moving and re-stacking the existing boxes to make room for another few thousand pounds of books.