For many years, I’ve run this email list to provide interested readers with regular, but infrequent, updates on my projects, mostly books.

That will continue! You will not be barraged with more emails. I will continue to send roughly six to eight messages a year, limited to my projects.

Do nothing, and nothing changes—except the name of the list, now “True to Glenn’s Type.”

But You Can Upgrade

However, after years of also using Patreon as a leg in supporting my writing, I find I am a round peg in a square hole for what they offer to creators. Patreon feels best oriented for people who produce specific creative output on a regular basis, like cartoons, music, drawings, podcast episodes, or fiction. My non-fiction writing about printing, type, language, and comics doesn’t quite fit. (Thank you very much to the people who participated in my Patreon!)

My email host, Buttondown, makes it easy to add paid subscriptions to a mailing list, and thus, that’s what I’m doing. Instead of posting without a schedule on Patreon, I’ll post articles and essays each month as premium issues of this newsletter.

If that’s of interest…

Upgrade now

My suggested subscription price is $3 per month. You can click Change Amount and set a different price, starting at $1 per month.

The reason I am adding paid subscriptions is twofold. First, the topics I write about are quirky—and sometimes arcane. However, based on book sales, I know thousands of people are at least moderately interested in this subject matter. Finding support outside of crowdfunding campaigns for books is challenging, and it's difficult to secure a regular source of income that helps me underwrite the research for each new book or major revision.

Second, I have a large backlog of articles I want to write that fit the rubric I mentioned above, but I can’t quite find the time to pursue them due to other work. Having subscriber support gives me the spur and a deadline—I’m responsible to you. I expect to publish one new article per month, and possibly more. (But not so many that you suddenly become overwhelmed by me, either.)

Subscribers at $3 a month or higher will also get book excerpts, discounts for ebooks and print books, access to live video Q&As, access to special tiers in crowdfunding campaigns, and more as I develop ideas.

What Sorts of Articles?

If you’d like to know about the sort of things I have written about on Patreon, Medium, my blog, the How Comics Were Made newsletter, and elsewhere, here’s a short list of some of the best:

• The Typewriter Is Not a Typesetter: A 1919 wildcat typesetting strike led some magazines to conclude—incorrectly and briefly—that typewriters had finally reached the quality necessary to produce type for printing.

• Bogus! The century of paying typesetters to set copy that was thrown away. This long-standing practice of “bogus” copy took a change of eras to die out.

• Who Draws Doonesbury? Combating the recurring myth in a corner of comicdom: that Garry Trudeau hasn’t “drawn” Doonesbury since the early 1970s.

  

• Hard as Boilerplate: The literal origin of the term boilerplate and how it transformed quickly into a metaphor in printing and in legalese.

• Gray Areas: Newspapers and syndicates didn’t allow gray tints in cartoons, while magazines did, resulting in a very different look as the original artwork progressed through production.

I already have my next article in preparation, about the feeling of authenticity that a signed book evokes, using insights I have from the last few years of working with print books and signing them or arranging authors’ signatures.

Do Nothing and Nothing Changes

If you just want my project updates, do nothing. There’s no requirement to upgrade, and you will receive no additional emails beyond the roughly six to eight I send each year.

Your support as a subscriber to the project emails is extremely welcome!

If you’d like to do more, give a click below:

Upgrade now

Thank you for your consideration!

Best,

Glenn