Final Lockdown Pass Still in Progress
31 May 2011
The process of creating the final chapter-by-chapter lockdown correction documents continues — and, a few chapters behind me, John D. Berry continues to execute them. The first two books of Little, Big have always been slow going. By the time we had finished our first selection of art to inflect the pages of Edgewood and Brother North-wind’s Secret, back in the spring of 2008, it had become clear that many of the uses we wished to put the art to could not be supported by the density and definition of the digital images we had to work with — which is why in the summers of 2008 and 2009 we hired photographer Richard Nicol to take close to a thousand new digital photographs of details from about sixty Peter Milton engravings, with Milton’s kind permission and the assistance of the good folks at Davidson Galleries in Seattle. But because of the evolving nature of our art selections, once those new photographs were in hand we decided not to go back to replace the effected art detail’s source files in the first two books until we reached the final stages of production. Now that we are in those final stages, the workload required to make printer-ready the art in each of those first two books proved to be significantly greater than for each of the latter four books — and the workload on those last four is not inconsiderable.
While work has gone slower than anticipated, the pace is picking up and we’re making good progress. John Berry and I anticipate finishing the final lockdown pass soon; look for a new project update before June’s end.
Best Wishes,
Ron Drummond
Publisher