53. Progress Report on the Peterson Pipe Book
The First Cover Concept (January 2013) It's beginning to look like 2017 will, at long last, be the year The Peterson Pipe: The Story of Kapp & Peterson will be published by Briar Books Press. As some of you know, we completed the second draft of the manuscript in March 2016, and then began what I thought were going to be the quick final stages of editing the manuscript from the publisher and dropping in the illustrations. That ended up being only half the story. What I didn’t know in March was that the vast archive of illustrations and photographs my co-author Gary Malmberg and I had created, when set next to the text, would necessitate a second “writing” of the book—not a verbal narrative this time, but a visual one illustrating the text. Each photo or engraving, I quickly discovered, needed to move the story forward. We agreed that this part of the book would be my journey, although Gary has been there at every step, giving advice, providing more illustrations if the ones to hand weren't working, and serving as the best of sounding boards: "you’re totally full of s*it!” is a favorite among his refrains, and always perks me up when I’m down. Although we’d slotted as many illustrations as we could think of when writing the manuscript, sourcing them (“now where did I put that photo?”) and preparing them digitally (“this is going to need major surgery!") has been a much lengthier process than I imagined. I call this “visual writing,” although it’s really digital darkroom stuff. One example: Gary provided some incredible photos of Peterson Boer War pipes, but how was the reader going to understand them, inasmuch as they’re covered with wrap-around hand-carved writing? In the end, the answer was fairly obvious—create an image showing both sides of the same pipe, with the front of the bowl placed above and between. And that was two evenings' work. If you know much about writers’ habits, you know that most of them can only crank out the creative stuff for a few hours a day—even if they’re fortunate to have writing as their only job. Both Gary and I both have full-time day jobs—he in estate pipes, me as an English teacher. But given the nature of the writing game, we still turn in a full day’s time card most every day of the year. But the digital darkroom stuff is only part of what has kept pushing out the completion date. The other part involves the really the strange process of fitting illustrations to the written text. Sometimes there’s something missing (oops) or something that needs a tune-up (aargh). If you work on your car or do serious DIY work, you'll know what I'm driving at here. I'll give you two examples that cost quite a bit of time and effort, but were worth every minute. The first concerns Peterson’s industrial exhibition medals. Exhibition medals were a big deal for any business wanting to promote…