Odds and Ends from the Publisher’s Desk

When I put together my list of tasks for my summer research leave yesterday, I realize that I hadn’t shared quite as much of my current work in publishing as I had hoped. 

The first one is a book of poetry which will appear as a collaboration between NDQ and The Digital Press. Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres is a collection of poems written by Clell Gannon and published in 1924. The goal of republishing this work is to recognize its centennial and to shine some attention on the work of this prairie poet. We also want to bring attention to “Midwestern Modernism” and show how regional voices, like NDQ, contributed to larger cultural currents. We have generous support from the Northern Plains Heritage Foundation to support cover design and copy editing. My Practicum in Editing and Publishing Class was responsible for elements of book design, some editing, and some elements of project management.

We’ve been trying to clean up the 1924 publication of the Gannon book and give it a bit more of a contemporary look without making it feel too current. The class identified a wonderful font to use for the text: LD Genzsch Antiqua. One of the students is cleaning up the line work (and more on that later in the summer) and that is giving us a bit more flexibility in our page design and a chance to to highlight Gannon’s art. You can see a few pages from the original below: 

Another project piece that has not appeared on this blog (as near as I can tell) is the cover for David Pettegrew’s epic Corinthian Countrysides: Linked Open Data and Analysis from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. This, I think, is our final cover design: