Glenn Fleishman Interrogates the Past

50% Off Seven of My Take Control Books!

It’s time for a Black Friday sale at Take Control Books starting today…uh, Beige Wednesday?

Take 50% off 16 Take Control titles, including seven books by yours truly, five of which were just updated this week for the latest changes in iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Windows 11, Wi-Fi, and related topics!

No coupon is needed—just click through! The sale ends on Monday, 29 November 2021 at 11:59 pm PST.

Bookselling

Seven years ago: The Magazine: The Book: The Launch: The Party

Lynn had a note pop up on some social media service I am no longer part of reminding her that the book launch party for The Magazine: The Book (Year 1) was seven years ago today! This was back when I was running The Magazine, and thought one path to longevity was to produce a beautiful book each year that would appeal both to subscribers to the digital edition and to people who were intrigued by the variety of subject matter.

Food and general non-fiction writer Matthew Amster-Burton did a magazine-themed comedy set (seriously, and it was hilarious). Marian Call and Seth Boyer performed her music, along with accompaniment on harmonica from her stepfather, a noted advocate for eating (cooked and prepared) bugs. The event was at the wonderful Ada’s Technical Books and Café, at which I hosted several talks in podcasts over the next few years.

The party

Bookselling

A Great Holiday Gift and Museum Updates

The year has nearly fled (and thank goodness), but I continue to soldier on with projects.

Six Centuries Book as a Gift

Earlier this year, I produced my book Six Centuries of Type & Printing. It was set in Monotype hot metal, printed by letterpress in London, and bound in Germany. The book starts a bit before Gutenberg in the mid-1400s, looking at previous efforts to spark a fire on making multiples, and then focus on how that German inventor pulled together many different elements to create the blaze that still burns. I take you through all the innovations of the last 600 years, up to the digital era, and explain nearly lost elements of printing history.

The book is a great holiday gift, and I can ship immediately in the US (first-class mail) and worldwide (UPS expedited). Make a note in the Delivery Instructions field at checkout if you

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

Publishing

New Book, New Podcast, Finishing Museums

A quick update on the latest in Glenn!

I launched the Tiny Typecast, interviews on location and remotely about how type, design, and printing’s past informs the present and guides the future. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app; if you can’t find a listing, paste this podcast URL in your app.

The topics will be wide-ranging, but I launch with an interview of the folks at Letterform Archive in San Francisco. It’s an incredible collection of graphic design history that’s in active use by modern-day designers as well as historians. I loved it and can’t wait to visit them in their upcoming new location. The second episode is a talk with Keith Houston, author of The Book, about the long-running success of the book format (the codex), and how little has changed, as well as our expectations of what a book is

Bookselling

London Kerning Reprint

I’ve sold out of the first printing of London Kerning, and I’m accepting pre-orders for a reprint edition…

March 21 update: I hit the target! The second printing will be shipping around April 10. Place an order for your copy right now!

You can also purchase and immediately download the ebook edition.

Bookselling

Protect, Secure, and Network Yourself with My New Book

I’ve just released A Practical Guide to Networking, Privacy, and Security in iOS 11, the latest version of a book about those three topics that I’ve been updating for about seven years in a couple of different versions.

My intent is to give you everything you need to manage networking—Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular, Personal Hotspot, AirPlay, AirDrop, and more—as well as all the ins and outs of what Apple does with your private data and how it controls and restricts access by third-party apps and Web sites to you while you use an iPhone or iPad. I also explain how to pick good passwords, turn on two-factor authentication, use passcodes and Touch ID, and find your missing iPhone or iPad.

It's a reference work—you probably won't want to read it end to end! But whenever you have a question about any of these topics, it’s

Bookselling

Take Control of Slack Basics! First Chapters Free

Read Chapter 1, Introducing Slack, and Chapter 2, Getting Started with Slack, at TidBITS, free.

I've been using Slack for a year, and fell in love with it right away. It's part of my flow of communication with publications with which I work and part of the social fabric I share with fellow nerds on a podcast network and other writers. Slack is group chat with searchable history, plus a lot more.

This love led me to write Take Control of Slack Basics, a book that arose from my interest in understanding the details of Slack, which has a very nice Web app and well-designed native apps for all major platforms. I kept learning new tricks and discovering them, and thought that I could pull this all together for people whose workplaces, social groups, academic institutions, or other organizations had decided to use Slack—and they felt lost or undertrained

Bookselling

There's No Back in the Amazon Store, Only Front

I visited the Amazon Store today, its first permanent bricks-and-mortar rollout. The store falls under the purview of a former Amazon co-worker from back in the day who I admired very much. It's really a lovely place. It seems to have captured a lot of the charm of what Barnes & Noble used to be like, before they lost their way, with a very strong whiff of Seattle and a sense of appreciation of the book as a form. That, even with Kindles, Fires, an Echo, and much more centrally located and throughout the store. This is a book bookstore that happens to have some electronic gear and electronic aids.

Prices are omitted almost everywhere. I spotted a handful on electronics. Books have no prices on the shelf tags. There are omnipresent Kindles to look up the price, but it's odd to my eye that even though the books are

Bookselling

A Kickstarter Failure, But Books Available Immediately

The crowdfunding campaign to produce a second anthology of work from The Magazine failed to fund: we reached about 60% of the target, but I believe getting people on board was trickier this time for a variety of reasons, including that we are about to halt regular issues of the publication.

However, we have a couple hundred copies remaining of our Year One hardcover anthology that were printed in April of this year. It's a great collection of about 25 stories across a huge range of topics. It's cloth-covered book with a dust jacket, and a full-color interior. We'd still like to create a second anthology, and selling down our inventory of the first-year collection would go a long way to letting us figure out that plan.

The cost is just $25 including shipping within the US, and it ships immediately (via Amazon fulfillment). That's the price offered in our

Bookselling

The Magazine is making a book (again) and shutting down (what?!)

My labor of love the last two years has been The Magazine, first as its hired hand and then, in May 2013, as its owner. The sad truth has been that, while profitable from week one, the publication has had a declining subscription base since February 2013. It started at such a high level that we could handle a decline for a long time, but despite every effort — including our first-year anthology crowdfunded a bit under a year ago — we couldn't replace departing subscribers with new ones fast enough. We're a general-interest magazine that appeals to people who like technology, and that makes it very hard to market. "Pivoting" to a different editorial focus would have lost subscribers even faster. (Ads wouldn't work; we simply don't churn out enough content for that model. I wrote this a year ago and it's still true.)

So we lasted as long as we

Bookselling

Art Prints from the Book Campaign

I've put up for sale art prints that we offered as part of our Kickstarter campaign last year. We have a few left of both the cover print by Amy Crehore (with no type on it, just her painting) and of Olivia Warnecke's moths and butterfly illustration. Both are printed on archival paper in limited editions. Amy's is additionally signed and numbered. You can purchase from our Tugboat Yards page.