I laid out my book last night. Whew. I've exported a couple of sample spreads because I'm so proud of it.

Basically, I decided on Bembo. Bembo for the text and Univers Extended for the titles. That was the hardest part and the most crucial decision because the flow of the text varies a lot with subtle font changes and it would require re-positioning all the photographs. If the text moves even one page I have to re-import and place all 100 photos. That’s how Quark works.

It’s about 150 pages and there’s about 60 full size photos (a big gorgeous picture every 3 pages!) and about 40 little thumbnail folios. I decided that I wanted to put in some of the reference or documentary type photos that aren’t that interesting art-wise but help show the stuff I’m writing about. I like how they’re little visual navigation guides within the text. If you know what’s going on, you can find a section of the book by looking at the thumbnails.

Rose calls them "visual gossip" and I think that's a really cool thing to call them.

I was planning on scanning a bunch of the scraps of paper that I collected on my journey also. I have train tickets and matchbooks and stamped documents of all kinds. I thought those would be neat as folios also. Right now I just have photo thumbnails but I may work on scanning those little buggers.

I haven't decided about using a border around the photos. This is the way they are on the website but I'd initially planned to go borderless for the book. But looking at it laid out with borders for so long is changing my mind. If anyone has a suggestion about this or any thing else book related I'd appreciate it.

I'm also not sure about the font for the timestamp. It's Russell Square and I think it might be a little too techy. The process of writing this stuff and putting it out so people can read it has been immensely technical. Webservers, laptops, stylesheets, browsers, XML, spellcheckers, autocorrecters, the Indian Telecommunications Infrastructure, digital scanning, unsharp masking, DV taping, pirating $20,000 worth of fonts off the Internet. It's all been a huge learning experience. Except for running the printing press and doing the chemical processing of my film, I've done everything. And that font is a tiny homage but maybe it doesn't work. Don't know.

The main work of design is done. Now I need to collect all the scanned images, resize and otherwise get them ready for printing (no small feat) and find a damn printer. I’m worried that all the little thumbs will double the cost of my book. That may be a struggle to justify and I may have to toss them. Anyhow, I’m hoping for <10 dollars a book printing costs. I know, stupid.