Last year was a rare exception among adult years in it that it was a little quieter. This year was a return to “normal”: busy, fulfilling, and new projects a-blooming, although with a far tighter focus than almost any year in my career in which I didn’t have a part-time or full-time job or the equivalent contractor position.

Shift Happens

After several years of editing and project planning with my author client, Marcin Wichary, his book Shift Happens finally went from bits to atoms. Shift Happens recounts the history of keyboards, with Volume 1 devoted mostly to typewriters and similar things and Volume 2 covering keyboards from the dawn of computing through the glass and mechanical masterpieces available today. Every chapter is a story about some piece of history or aspect of keys and keyboards. Marcin did a wonderful job of researching, writing, photographing, and designing this massive work. Each hardcover volume is 608 pages long. This was his first time writing a book, first time designing one, and first time crowdfunding.

We went to Kickstarter in February 2023 to fund it, blew through stretch goals in hours, and raised $750,000 for about 4,500 copies. That allowed Marcin to have a larger print run and to add a third 160-page “making of” volume (in softcover) that contains the nearly 60-page index as well. The entire set arrives in a slipcase wrapped in a gorgeously printed design.

Most of the copies of the book have sold. We’re sitting on reserve units now against the potential of damage in shipment—so we can replace those for buyers before selling out—before releasing the final ones for sale. (You can sign up to get notified when we open those up to sell by signing up at Marcin’s site to get a single notification.)

Producing a book project that big wasn’t easy. Marcin handled all the design and licensing; I handled editing, from developmental work through to the final finished draft, and provided project management for crowdfunding, printing, and fulfillment; Marcin hired a proofreader and indexer as well. We went on press for nearly two weeks—about 100 hours total—at our printers, Penmor Lithographers, in Lewiston, Maine. (Yes, that Lewiston, that was later in the news. The folks at the plant weren’t injured, but everyone in that area will be affected for the rest of their lives.)

Books started shipping in early December after some delays by the slipcase maker—the final product looks gorgeous—and after our initial shipping tests revealed we needed a better plan to ensure books arrived without any dings or scuffs.

How Comics Were Made

I unintentionally started researching a book about six years ago, when I fell in love with some outdated materials used in print production, specifically in distributing advertising to newspaper and syndicating comics in the metal printing era. This led to me slowly acquiring newspaper comic strip detritus, learning about processes, and making a video for the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, which I mentioned in last year’s update. This video explained in an abbreviated fashion using public-domain images and video, and examples from my and Billy Ireland’s collection how syndicates managed to get a strip from an artist’s drawing board into hundreds or thousands of newspapers every day.

The video is online and ran continuously for several months as part of the “Man Saves Comics!” exhibition, which celebrated the 25th anniversary of the acquisition of Bill Blackbeard’s 75 ton, 2.5 million item San Francisco Academy of Comic Art collection. (The video started running again in a new exhibition about printing comics that opened 13 December 2023.) The library invited me out in April 2023 as part of a papercraft and printing day, which was a big hit. I returned again in early December 2023 for more research.

This has all led to my plans in 2024 for How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page, a book I’ll be crowdfunding this coming February with an expected shipping date of October 2024. The book will start with the first regularly appearing newspaper comics in the 1890s—the Yellow Kid, first by Richard Outcault—and then proceed through each era of technology and creation through to the hybrid of print and webcomics today.

I’ve both researched and looked at cartoonists’ and newspaper archives and interviewed contemporary artists, so far including Bill Griffith, Lynn Johnston, Derf Backderf, Barbara Brandon-Croft, and…about 20 other people! I’ll wind up talking to at least 40 folks…maybe 50 or more.

You can sign up to get an alert when the book launches on Kickstarter, and separately receive a regular but not frequent newspaper about comics history.

Take Control Books

What would a year be without a host of updates to Take Control Books? For the first time in years, I didn’t write any new book in the series in 2023, but I did update seven of my eight active books, in many cases producing new editions. (An update for Wi-Fi Networking and Security is coming in the near future.)

In 2024, my publisher/editor and I have some new titles planned and ways to rework older titles that have gotten very long as Apple and other companies have added features and hardware.

Other 2023 Events

• Flong chapter! I contributed a chapter to a book called Printing Things: Blocks, Plates, and Other Objects that Printed, 1400–1900 (edited by Elizabeth Savage and Femke Speelberg) on my specialty subject—flong! Really, about historical printing molds (called flongs or mats/matrices) and plates (called stereotypes) that were experimented with for centuries but became part of standard print production in the very early 1800s. This is my first academic work! The book will appear in late 2024 as part of Proceedings of the British Academy, published by Oxford University Press. (I wrote a more approachable account of how the flong/stereotype process worked and posted it on Medium; I update it regularly as I gather new information.) Due to good timing, I was able to see some very old flongs and stereotypes in London at the St Bride Printing Library and at the Stationers’ Company.
• Journalism: A new normal for me is that my reporting days are not quite over but in strong abeyance. This year, I wrote two long features: one just came out on 14 December (see next item); the other was sadly canceled (I was appropriately paid) because of a change in editorial requirements. I continue to contribute my Mac 911 how-to columns to Macworld and regularly write technology stories for TidBITS, but it’s a big change from a few years ago when I had features in the Economist, Fast Company, and other publications. The reason? Publications have shed freelance budgets (or entirely shut down), editors I worked with have left, and it’s harder to find unique topics as a freelancer. The wheel of change keeps grinding, resist it as we may.
• Yahoo! Pipes history: Commissioned earlier in 2023, I wrote a long-form history of Yahoo! Pipes, a web app that was way ahead of its time in 2006 by letting you drag and drag connectors and text processors into a workflow that could produce custom RSS feeds, output text, and do a lot of other mash-ups. It’s a much-loved and much-mourned service that hasn’t quite been replicated. (This was for Retool, a visual programming tool company that’s running a series of historical articles about tools in their field.)
• TWiT: Privileged this year to continue what started in 2022, becoming a regular guest on the videocast/podcast network This Week in Tech (TWiT), appearing several times throughout the year on the flagship This Week in Tech and on This Week in Google.
• Travels: I was away for home more in 2023 than at any other time in my adult life, as far as I can tell. We took a three-year delayed family trip to Europe; I was on press for weeks in Maine (see above); and went to Columbus twice to the Billy Ireland library (see above, also!); to the Small Press Expo, an indie comics event in Maryland; and to visit my older child in Boston, where he just started college this fall. Whew! The good news is that I hit enough miles on Alaska to gain MVP status (i.e., free upgrades). The bad news is, wow, that was a lot of travel. In 2024, more writing, fewer airplanes.