It's a book!

We've spent the last week putting the finishing touches to the Norman Nicholson biography.  Neil has been polishing the book design and tweaking the colours for the cover and I've been reading the book again and again and again for typos and punctuation errors.  Our big nightmare is that the book will arrive from the printers and we'll open it up and discover - oh horror!!! - that there is some really obvious mistake or omission on the first page.  So, for a week, the dining table has looked like this, and we've been eating outside or on our laps.

Putting a book like this together is complicated.  Neil is doing the text in InDesign and he's had to learn about crop-marks and gutters and a million things you don't realise you have to know about books!  We had to decide on what kind of paper to use (we've chosen book wove because it's thicker and has a nicer texture), whether to have the illustrations separately on glossy paper or in the text - we opted for the glossy sections, and what size the book should be.  We can't afford to print a hardback, so have gone for an 'enhanced' paperback - thick card cover with fold-in flaps and the big 'trade paperback' size.  Hopefully it will feel good and look good. This morning the files have been sent to the printers - a scary moment.  There's no going back now.

The little plaster object on the right is the maquette of Neil's latest sculpture, which he might now get time to finish!