New List Host, Same Old Glenn
Notice the new list home? I grew weary of Mailchimp’s interface, upselling, and limitations and migrated this list to Buttondown. It’s a small operation run by a cheery staff who keep improving features.
New Newsletter on Comics History
To share my research—interviews, new photos and scans, and new discoveries—I’ve launched a newsletter for How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page. I’ll publish issues of the newsletter at least through its Kickstarter campaign (slated for February 2024) and its publication (around October 2024). Each issue will feature excerpts, images, or other stories of interest. You can subscribe or read the first issue in the archives.
I’ve been interviewing a lot of people: mostly cartoonists, but also a cartoonist-oriented agent, comics historians, and production people. This first newsletter issue includes excerpts from a recent conversation with Bill Griffith, the creator of “Zippy the Pinhead” (nearing 40 years in newspaper syndication) and the author of the new graphic biography, Three Rocks; The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created Nancy. I also read his memoir of himself and his mother: Invisible Ink.
Return to the Billy
I’ll be returning to Columbus, Ohio, in about a month for my third research visit to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at the Ohio State University. This time around, it’s a combination of looking at stuff and looking over scanned materials and materials I’m requesting to be scanned. I’ll have to (very reasonably) provide a sheaf of permissions and public-domain documentation as part of the university’s scanning policy, so that’s part of my book journey, too!
In 2024, I plan to make a couple of exciting trips to visit cartoon museums and archives in other parts of the country as part of my research journey.
A Wonderful 20th Anniversary of Take Control Books
Last month, Take Control Books had a short sale in which every book in the catalog was $5—including my eight active titles to celebrate 20 years in operation! Founded by Tonya and Adam Engst of TidBITS and bought a few years ago by its best-selling author, Joe Kissell, Take Control continues to set a high standard I strive to meet in providing useful how-to and background advice for an array of software and technology. The $5 sale celebrated the initial price: all books were $5 in 2003. (They’re now from about $5 to $15.)
The sale was an absurd success. It blew out of the water the best month ever for the publisher and me—for me, nearly 50% higher than the best previous months of sales. It’s an incredible help as a freelance writer, editor, and book author, and publisher of fairly niche historical and other work, to have this kind of support from readers.
Of course, you can still buy Take Control Books at various price points, including their regular discount of 30% off orders with three or more books, and a typical $5 to $8 upgrade prices for owners of a previous edition of a title.
I’m finalizing updates for Take Control of FaceTime & Messages and Take Control of Calendar & Reminders now. The FaceTime book required a ridiculous amount of updating for a single year’s worth of operating system changes due to Apple tweaking so many elements, particularly adding Apple TV to the set of devices that can handle FaceTime calls! For the Calendar book, we decided to make it fully compatible with iOS and iPadOS in this upcoming edition—that change was overdue, and we’re delivering.
Flexography!
My general interest in collecting inexpensive artifacts across the history of printing to study them firsthand and then scan/photograph them, upload pictures, and write about them continues apace.
I just received a flexographic plate from a 1973 newspaper front section. Like letterpress printing, flexography is a relief printing method: the plate has raised surfaces designed to take ink; when inked, the plate directly rolls onto paper. Letterpress was the dominant printing method from the mid-1400s to about the 1970s; flexography appeared in 1890 as a way to print onto an increasing array of substrates that weren’t paper.
Modern flexography from the mid-20th century onward allowed for photographic exposure, meaning you could take flat material, including already printed items, and produce a plate for relief printing. As prepress moved from metal to photographic exposure—in typesetting, first to CRT-based exposure and later to high-intensity light in phototypesetters and finally to lasers—printing companies and newspapers had the huge sunk expense of relief presses. Flexography provided a bridge.
The New York Times notably worked out a deal in the late 1970s to buy out many typesetters and printers and offer the rest of them jobs for life—the last person retired in 2016!—to effect a shift from metal to “cold” or optically exposed type and images. The newspaper converted its production operations years before they built new offset lithographic presses that were neatly matched. Flexography allowed the New York Times and many other papers to do one massive shift first, keeping printing on relief through flexographic plates, then investing in the press upgrades later. They switched to cold type in 1978—and offset in 1981!
You can read more about the New York Times deal with the union in this Patreon post; and about the Times conversion to offset in this one.
Nowadays, flexography remains in heavy use for cardboard box printing, consumer product packaging (plastics and other materials), and many kinds of printing that rely on odd substrates or require lots of solid areas of ink.