Glenn Fleishman Interrogates the Past

Gratitude for a Year Finally Ending

I’m grateful this year is nearly over and I’m grateful my family has remained safe during 2020—and that we’ve all managed to keep ourselves occupied. It’s a hard lift, and I know exactly how privileged we are, as I can read and see around us how many people are struggling. That fact keeps me hard at work, knowing what a gift it is to have a purpose, and thankful to all editors, patrons, podcast networks, product purchasers, and colleagues I’ve had the chance to work for and with this year.

A Little Help by Taking Control

I put at the top of my list of 2020 achievements releasing two free ebooks with Take Control Books. Joe Kissell is the stalwart publisher, running the business with his wife, Morgen. Not only did Take Control provide a significant percentage of my 2020 income, as people are

Books

Three Major Ebook Updates

I’ve been a very busy bee, writing two new books and updating five more just since early August. The latest three are out today from Take Control Books, a trio that relate to the iOS 14/iPadOS 14 update several days ago and the upcoming macOS 11 Big Sur release that Apple hasn’t yet scheduled.

Upgrades are available to all buyers of any previous edition. If you’re a new purchaser, you can add all three to your shopping card and get 30% off—Take Control’s standard discount for 3 or more books!

Take Control of iOS & iPadOS Privacy and Security (254 pages, $14.99). I’ve been revising and expanding this book across a decade now (and across six names!). For the last five editions, I published it myself, and now it’s back at the Take Control mothership.

The book covers all the ins

Telecommunications

A New, Free Book on Zoom, and an Update to My Long Zoom Book

The Take Control folks and I keep trying to find ways to help people who have had to shift abruptly from working in an office to working at home—sometimes in jobs that never allowed or enabled remote work before. Zoom has been a big part of that, because of its robust free tier (up to 100 people in 40-minute sessions) compared to other offerings in early 2020, like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Cisco WebEx, and Bluejeans (now part of Verizon).

Earlier this year, as the pandemic first raged, Take Control released my free Take Control of Working from Home Temporarily ebook. A brisk 70 pages, it was designed for people thrust into home work getting their spaces set up, established boundaries, and learning to handle remote work. That‘s still available—at no cost, forever—and I hope eventually to have a more in-depth, separate paid title focused more

Books

Go from Zero to Zoom with My New Book

Go from zero to Zoom with my new ebook, Take Control of Zoom!

It’s a guide for everyone, since we’ve all fallen into Zoom as the easiest tool across operating systems to video chat and handle business meetings and classes for school. It’s a rich and powerful videoconferencing service, but it can also baffle, frustrate, perplex, and irritate even the most experienced digital tool users! This book untangles Zoom, making it easier, more fun, and more efficient to use.

My book teaches you how to get set up and configured if you’re starting from scratch. But if you’re already using Zoom, that’s just a tiny part of the book. The rest is devoted to improving your physical space for better on-screen appearance, examining audio and video options, configuring your account and Zoom apps to meet your needs and for privacy and safety, as well

Books

Six Centuries of Type & Printing Now Available

A book over a year in the making, Six Centuries of Type & Printing, is now available for purchase. Starting a few years ago, I began to research printing history more intensively, and then stepped it up alongside my project the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule. In collecting type and printing artifacts for these museum collections, I also gained terrific hands-on insight into key aspects of the development of the mass production of metal and wood type and advances in printing technology. This included previous visits to museums of printing and a trip to M&H Type (part of the Grabhorn Institute) in San Francisco last June.

I spent months writing this 64-page book, which starts well before Johannes Gutenberg in examining previous inventions of movable type and mass production of book pages, before diving deeply into how this member of a Mainz, Germany patrician family seemingly invented

Books

Ebook out for Six Centuries of Type & Printing

The ebook edition of Six Centuries of Type & Printing is now out and available for purchase! The letterpress edition is moving towards hot-metal composition and printing in the near future. You can pre-order a bundle of the print and ebook editions, and receive the ebook edition right now.

What’s the book about? If you ever wondered how the craft of printing was invented and how it evolved, this book answers that question and many others. Starting with Gutenberg, Six Centuries of Type and Printing traces the development of type design, type manufacture, presses, and printing through the present digital era with many stops along the way. The book explains how many aspects of printing and type remain the same, despite a shift from metal to photography to bits, across almost six centuries of constant improvement.

The book download is a bundle of three formats: PDF, EPUB, and MOBI

Books

Book, Book, Book! Three New Books

It‘s been a busy summer, and I have three new and revised books to show for it. Two came out today!

Connect and Secure Your iPhone and iPad (for iOS 13.1 and iPadOS 13.1) is the sixth edition of my ebook about making your mobile devices as safe and secure as possible. Download this excerpt, which is a full chapter on Personal Hotspot, significantly changed in iOS 13.1 and iPadOS 13.1.

The book, renamed this edition to be more concise, explains how to connect to various kinds of networks, manage your cellular data usage (including a new Low Data Mode), use AirDrop and AirPlay, understand Apple’s anti-tracking protections in Safari, make smart privacy decisions, use a VPN for extra security, enable two-factor authentication to protect your Apple ID against hijacking, and work with the updated Find Me service to track lost devices and potentially

Books

Apple ID Troubles? I Can Help with a New Book

The Apple ID acts as the pivot point around which Apple’s ecosystem turns. It’s an account that you use to manage iCloud, purchases, subscriptions, and lost devices, among a dozen other purposes.

This account covers everything in the Apple ecosystem, but it’s also difficult to work with, as Apple made it quite inflexible. You can’t merge accounts or split elements out of them. You can’t transfer purchases, nor can you make purchases with a single account in multiple countries, if you live and travel in multiple places regularly.

My new book, Take Control of Your Apple ID, distills everything I’ve learned over many years, including from thousands of emails I’ve received at Macworld in writing the Mac 911 Q&A column. I know the problems people have experienced, and how to solve them—or whether they can be solved at all.

This

Letterpress Books Available (Limited)

Folks, last year I printed by letterpress a 64-page book that contained six reported articles on typography, printing, and language I’d written in the previous couple of years. This was part of my design residency at the School of Visual Concepts. Every page in the book was painstakingly printed by hand. You can watch a time-lapse video of me printing.

To fund the costs of this project, I ran a Kickstarter campaign that offered a numbered edition of 100 copies to backers. It was a great reciprocity: the project I wanted to create would produce books that funded the project! That edition was bound by Jules Faye, and I’ve just finished sending out the edition of 100 to those backers.

I have a limited number of additional copies of this book that are essentially identical, and will be marked as author’s proofs in the colophon instead of

Books

A bunch of books by Glenn

I wrote and produced three books in the last year, and I thought it might be a good idea to highlight that they’re all immediately available as ebooks, and two of them in print editions.

My latest, London Kerning, I’ve written oodles about: it’s a journey into England’s typographic and printing past told through current collections in hard-to-visit archives in London, and through contemporary type designers and letterpress printers there. The second printing just arrived from the printer, and you can purchase either an ebook or a print copy—or both!

Last year, I produced a letterpress edition of Not To Put Too Fine a Point on It, a collection of my reporting stories on intersections of printing, type, and language. While that edition of 100 sold out, I will have some author’s proofs available later in spring. But you can purchase an expanded ebook

Personal

2017 in Review

At the end of a year, I often like to summarize what I accomplished in it, because it goes by so fast it’s hard to realize how much I’ve gotten done at the time. This year was quite busy!

In January, I ran a Kickstarter to fund a project I carried out as Designer in Residence at the School of Visual Concepts (SVC) to print a letterpress book of my work. It funded quickly, I printed the book in the summer, and just mailed out 30 of the limited edition of 100 several days ago. It’s called Not To Put Too Fine a Point on It.

You can get an ebook version of this set of reported and researched articles on type, printing, and language directly from me. The ebook version is expanded to 10 from the 6 articles and essays in the letterpress edition. (Download a

Books

Three books: disease, a canal, and typesetting races

My work schedule and intensity often prevents me from focusing enough these days to read books, something I find frustrating, and am working to revise. The flip side is that I read thousands of pages of books online this summer and fall in researching articles, and that was absolutely delightful.

I have completed three books recently, and I'm recommending them all.

Doctor, Doctor, It Hurts When I Read

The first is Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them (2017, end notes, bibliography) by Jennifer Wright. Jen is delightfully funny on Twitter and also a force to be reckoned with in fighting against misogyny and cruelty. Her book on plagues seemed like a funny match to her public personality, but I enjoyed it from beginning to end. I'll say that she tries to ease us in. The book is written in a sometimes aggressively peppy and