So when you open up a hardcover book, there's the jacket, and then you open here, and this first piece of paper and you probably have never noticed this before, especially in, like, normal - normal books, where it's just a blank sheet of paper. It's different. It's a different stock. It's a different weight paper.
It's heavier paper than the rest of the book. This sheet of paper is actually one sheet of paper that like, it covers the whole thing, it's glued onto the whole thing, it's part of the book binding process. Here's a book you may have heard of called The Fault In Our Stars. When you open it, the end pages are a color.
They're this color. They're this like dark, uhh grey kind of color. They're... I've got another example down here.
This is Arlo Finch and the Valley of Fire That opens to this nice maroon end page, cause they're just a sheet that is glued on as part of the book binding process to make everything sturdy, basically. This is The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon and it has this big beautiful sheet of paper with, ah, an image, uh an icon from the book And then we have things like patterns like this, uh, cool lookin' thing that I don't know what it is but it's cool lookin' and sort of reminds you of the book this is Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss Finally, I'm going to show you the end pages for What If which is an illustrated thing by the guy who does XKCD about like answering weird hypothetical questions Its end pages are this illustrated thing and that's not super surprising cause it's Randall and he does illustrations and they just sort of complied a bunch of cool stuff to make into the end pages for that book. And there's also, this is a cool thing about this book, The dust jacket is printed on the interior. This is a cool map of the, what the world would look like if the oceans started to drain away.
All these things are things that people do to make books cooler so that when you open them, you will be more likely to see something that's like, "Oh, that's exceptional, maybe I will think about this book a little bit longer." Right now, the only copy of my book that I have is this uncorrected galley, an advanced reader's copy, I think is what that- advanced reading copy is what that stands for, and it, on the inside, has like information about me, 'cause these are for booksellers and libraries and, uh, so to try to like help them make the decision about whether they want to buy or how many copies they want to buy for their store or for their library. And throughout this video, I've probably probably been saying both "end pages" and "end papers" and possibly "end sheets," I don't think I've said that. But end papers and end sheets are the same thing. They're the piece of paper that goes over the ends of the book.
End pages isn't a thing. I just say that because (mumbling) it sounds like a thing, it sounds like it should be a thing, but it's not a page of the book, it's literally a piece of paper, or a sheet of paper. Anyway, I. Got an email from uh, my publisher and they were like "what do you want for your end papers?" And I was like "what's an end paper? I don't know what that is.
Ah, is it an end page? I'll call it that forever, from now on" and, uh so I went to some bookstores and I just looked at a bunch of end papers and thought about that and what I would want, and then I was like "can we do an illustration?" And to be clear, like, this has been part of the book binding process for forever, and like there's a history of cool weird like all the way back into early book binding of cool like, cool end papers. So I, you know, I liked the idea of just doing a color but then I also really like taking any opportunity to give work to designers who I like so I was like "how much money do I have for this?" And they were like "this much" and I was like "can I have more?" And they were like "no" and so we worked together and uh, they gave me this much money and I then gave - I. Put in more money than that so that we could have some really cool end papers. The, uh, I reached out to a designer who had done just like sort of, because he's a fan of John or, like me, or of Nerdfighteria in general, done some cool art before, goes by the name Tekst on the Internet, T-E-K-S-T, uh, his actual name is Jason and I said "what would you do?" And he gave me some ideas I really like his work because he, like, he builds images with words um, which I think is metaphorically resonant.
I also really like it when art is spelled out for me so I don't have to to be confused because that's just how I got a really literal brain sometimes, uh so I'm a fan of that, I'm a fan of his work. He has done lots of stuff just for our community in general in the past without us even asking and so I wanted to work with him on some what I was hoping would be some pretty exceptional end papers. And I think that what we ended up with is absolutely so good. I almost said absolutely remarkable.
It's true you can tell, but I- I didn't do it, I avoided this, I have noticed that I have a tick about absolutely remarkable, and I need to work on that because people will make fun of me from now on, for that phrase. So he sent me some ideas for what that might look like. I responded and sort of said "this is what I. Like about the-" and he was really thorough, and a great guy to work with Um, you know it's really great to work with people who have been in, like doing freelance stuff for a long long time.
We started to get some stuff back and forth, I thought it was really cool but like not all the way there, and then, uh, you know, more and more iterations, and I was happy with where we were, and then like there was a little bit of radio silence and suddenly, like BWAHH this image appeared in my inbox and it was like this took it to a whole new level and it I mean I basically said, you know, like, maybe we can put in some more detail here and there and then the level of detail that eventually got added was just intense. He's written a big long blogpost about this, I mean, not that long, about like the process of working together him and me, and about his process of doing the design and what software he was using and how this all came together and you know, like, all of- none of this was done by a computer program, like every...It looks kind of like, procedurally generated or something, but indeed he laid down every building, every window, every water tower, everything. I mean it's so good. And I love getting a little look behind the scenes at how something like this comes together so I thought I would offer that to you and I'm really excited that this is going to be the end papers for the US.
Edition of the book. I don't think that it's going to be used in any of the other editions. They, uh, different publishers do different things. I don't really understand how it works to be totally honest with you.
But I wanna say thanks to Jason and I wanted to say this is how something like this comes together and that's why there are end papers. It's a functional, structural thing of the book but then it also gives you a creative opportunity and say thanks to Dutton for making a book and helping me help Jason help me make end papers, I guess..
No comments:
Post a Comment