Reviving an analog book for a digital age

Getting any book out can be an ordeal.

Getting a large and complicated book out can be a bigger ordeal.

But reissuing a large and complicated book can be a Herculean task. Even — maybe especially — in the 21st century.

I just reissued a big book, “LOSER: The Real Seattle Music Story,” about the ‘80s-’90s Seattle rock scene. It’s 274 8.5-by-11-inch pages and over 100,000 words with more than 800 images.

That book originally came out in 1995. It was made using a combination of then relatively new desktop publishing technologies and older paste-up techniques.

The text was written on a computer and printed out on a laser printer. The text was then cut up into strips, sent through a machine that stuck heated “adhesive wax” on the back, and carefully attached onto oversize sheets of paper called “paste-up boards.” These sheets were lined with horizontal and vertical lines printed in a color known as “non-repro blue,” which wouldn’t photograph on black-and-white cameras or copiers.

Around the text blocks, all the monochrome images (record covers, gig posters, promo photos, live performance shots, newspaper clippings, newspaper ads and buttons) were carefully arranged, more or less on the same two-page spreads as the text discussing these groups. These images were curated and laid out by Art Chantry, then at the top of his fame as the Northwest’s premier modern-rock art director and poster designer.

When it was finally all done (several months after the start of production and two years after the start of research), the paste-up boards were boxed up and trucked down to the publisher in Portland. They, in turn, shipped the boards off to a printer. There, the boards were photographed on a huge “stat camera.” The resulting film negatives were used to etch thin, aluminum “offset plates,” which were in turn used to do the actual printing.

* * *

Four years later, in 1999, I tried to reissue the book using then-new “print on demand” technologies. The original pasteup boards had been lost. We had to make digital scans from copies of the original printed book.

This scheme had two major problems.

First, the text was rendered as images. It couldn’t be easily changed. And, over the years, many of the people I’d written about came forth with many (mostly minor) factual errors in the original text. The compromise solution I came up with involved the printer placing a little mark on the relevant pages, directing readers to a page in the all-new introduction listing all the corrections I knew to make at the time.

Even more problematic were the pictures.

Chantry, in trying to keep the raw aesthetic of the time, had the images in the original book re-photographed at a wide variety of “dot screen” levels. The photos with the higher-resolution levels, when digitally re-scanned and re-printed, generated ugly moiré patterns. In some cases, these patterns were so prominent you could barely see the images themselves. After many tries, we finally got at least adequate scans of most of them.

* * *

But for the new re-reissue, I wanted everything to be right.

Every page from the original book was scanned anew, at high resolutions.

At first, I thought I’d place new paragraphs with corrected texts over the paragraphs in the page scans that contained old errors. But I couldn’t get the “look” of the new to match the old.

So I had all the text re-flowed.

Except my Word files of the original chapters wouldn’t work in modern versions of Word. I had to re-save them as text-only, then add boldface and italic type styles back in.

And these files contained special marks I’d used to generate the original book’s index. When saved to text-only and re-flowed back into Word, some of these marks rendered as semicolons. I had to batch-delete all those, and figure out where real semicolons should go back in.

All this new text was digitally superimposed over the original text columns on the scanned pages.

But, again, the pictures were a bigger issue.

No matter how carefully I re-scanned them, some 75 higher-res images came back in print-on-demand proof copies with moirés. I had to learn a lot of digital editing tricks to “de-screen” the original dot patterns away.

Finally, after ordering more than a dozen proof copies (all printed out-of-state and individually shipped), I approved the book for online sale.

It took most of the year so far to get here, but at last the members and fans of this music (much of which has remained popular) have this nerdishly detailed and lavishly illustrated account of its origins.

CLARK HUMPHREY is a columnist on Seattle culture. “LOSER: The Real Seattle Music Story” is now available from miscmedia.com and other online sources. Bookstore distribution is about to begin.