More on Grand Forks 150th

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been working with a fantastic group of students over the last two semesters to produce a new book to celebrate 150 years of the city of Grand Forks. The book will feature 150, 150-word essays on the history of the city. Some of these will be well-know, but other stories will be new and introduce new voices, visions, and narratives to the history of our community.

Last semester, a group of students under the direction of my newest tenure-track colleague Nikki Berg Burin produced about 40 of these essays in a class in the fall semester. This semester, my practicum in editing and publishing developed these essays, copy-edited them, and worked with me on page design.

While the book is a week or so away, we now have a page design almost settled. We decided to use a kind of unusual font for the main text, Vendetta, and then use more traditional sans serif fonts of the title of each entry and large, bold, grey numbers in a 60% tint to emphasize the playful number-oriented organization of the volume.

The students have a keen eye on page design and have asked for a few little tweaks to this before we finalize it. They’ve also started to proof the main text and we have a cover design draft. I’m excited to share our progress as we bring the first 50 essays together over the next few weeks!