Printer Porn

Tell the Turning (my illustrated collaboration with poet Tara Shepersky) went to press last week in Poland and our publisher, Stefan, has been sending the most delicious slew of process photos from the print house. I figured I’d post some of them here because I’m trying to get in the habit of using this space for visual stuff just as much as I use it for blathering in text about craft and money and comics and everything else.

SO!

Here’s our impressive and pristine stack of Munken Arctic paper! This is one of the few papers not currently suffering from extreme stock shortages in central Europe, leading to our unexpectedly-ahead-of-schedule print date. At a time when all sorts of publishers and indie creators are reporting a three-month average delay in production timelines, I’ll take it.

A towering pallet of pristine white paper.

Here it is all loaded into the printer. (I have an intense soft spot for the little vacuum plungers that lift the pages off one by one.)

A complex offset press housing a huge stack of blank paper.

And then of course comes the best part of any printing house update which is, naturally, the video:

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH! BOOK BOOK BOOK!

That leaves us with a HUGE stack of printed pages…

A huge stack of printed pages.

…which will then be trimmed and sewn together to create the final book.

You can get a closer look at some of the illustrations (including the cover and the special Field Offering postcards I designed for Kickstarter backers) in this sheet:

A black and white sheet with several illustrations aligned with text, all pages from the book Tell the Turning. There are crows and owls and spirals of kelp—all pictures of things from the natural world.

Basically it’s going to be here before we even know it and I think it’s going to look and feel incredible and I cannot wait. What a joy.

(I should probably also mention that you can preorder the book here! It’s currently on track to begin shipping October 20th, which is just around the corner.)

This concludes the first installment of the “post more visual content, you coward” challenge. Thank you.