Dustings #63

/

There is a moment of sheer terror I face once a year. It’s the moment when my new book gets delivered to my publisher’s house. I meet up with him there and we crack open the first box. What will we find? Will it look as we planned or will it be totally jacked up in some way I didn’t expect? You might think, “Well, Andy, don’t you see some sort of proof copy of the book before they print all of them?” No, not really. There is certainly some way to do this, but my publishing schedule is so tight that taking the time for this step never seems worth it. So we just look at a pdf proof and roll the dice from there.

I think I have PTSD from my second book, Magic For Young Lovers. I can’t remember if I told this story before. Probably. But anyway, the cover for MFYL had a silhouette of a couple looking at each other.

It seemed like a fairly simple cover. But what no one at the book printer mentioned to us was that some of the detail on the cover was too fine for the pigment stamping process that we were using. So when the books were delivered to us, instead of looking like they do above, they looked something like this. (This is just a bad photoshop recreation)

So details in the hair and lips were covered over. And it was clear pigment was in areas it shouldn’t be in because the stamping process debosses the image and there was splotches of color all over the raised areas as well. (You don’t need to be able to picture it. Just trust me that it looked jacked up.)

So when I opened the first box of books to see how they came out, I was like:

So what do you do at that point? It’s not the sort of issue you would get the printer to fix. Even if you did send back a pallet of books, you’d end up waiting weeks or months to get them back. Do you just ship the book off to people and tell them to deal with it? I had no clue. What we ended up doing was getting some small knives and razor blades and painstakingly scraping off the excess pigment on the areas of each and every cover where it shouldn’t be. It sucked.

That’s why book #3 had such a simple cover. I wasn’t going to fall into that trap again.

I got my balls back with book #4 and we did our most intricate cover yet.

With the upcoming book we changed the type of cover, printing and binding we did with previous books. So I was once again holding my breath when we cracked open the box to see what we would find. I was relieved to see the books looking almost perfect. (There was an issue of something not being perfectly centered on the spine due to the inexactness of the book printing/binding process, but I can deal with that.)

All in all, I think the new book looks dope, and I’m excited for supporters to receive their copy.

I’m waiting for the shipping supplies to arrive. An email will go out to supporters collecting their shipping fee and current address next week. Then the books will be sent out over the course of the rest of the month.

(For those who have been wanting a supporter slot for upcoming seasons of the Jerx, I will be launching the new support structure later this month. I’m not going to be adding any more full-supporter slots. But some current supporters are very likely to drop out due to the change in structure. So if you’re interested, that will likely be your time to grab a spot.)

Supporters will also be receiving the next Jerx Deck.

It’s a very bad marked deck. A concept I first described four years ago in this post. But unlike the deck I mentioned in that post, the markings aren’t small. They’re simultaneously obvious, and also completely incomprehensible. It does work as a marked deck. It’s just a terrible one.

If anyone ever accuses you of using a marked deck you say, “Are you kidding? Have you ever actually seen a marked deck? They’re really not like you imagine. The type of marked deck where you can just immediately know the card by looking at the back is the stuff out of movies not real life. In reality, marked decks aren’t that useful. I think I have one I can show you. Hold on.”

You come back holding a deck.

“Okay, first thing to do in order to determine if someone is using a marked deck is to check the case. By law they have to mention that it’s a marked deck on the card box. See here?”

And you take it from there to explain to them how a “real” marked deck works.

Our boys over at Vanishing Inc are going to solve the Ukraine issue this weekend in the only way it can be solved… with a virtual magic convention! So long, Mr. Putin, your days are numbered!

Actually it looks like a good line-up and it’s a good cause. The schedule is here. And you can sign-up here.

I mean, what else do you got going on this weekend? A date with some attractive guy or girl you won over with your charming personality? Let’s get real, we both know that’s not the case. Your options for this weekend are either this, Elden Ring, or that thing you do where you go to a public bathroom and you “accidentally” forget to lock the door so you can get your sick thrill when someone walks in on you with your pants around your ankles.

How awesome would it have been to see Tom Mullica redo this scene, except with like 40 cigarettes crammed into his undoubtedly disgusting mouth? That would have been the best.