2 years ago I approached King Features about creating an Edison Lee Book collection. At the time, I knew nothing about what it would take to create one, or how long it would take. My editor, Brendan Burford, said he would look into it. Eventually, a pitch was made to Andrews McMeel, who kindly turned down the request. It’s a tough market for cartoon book collections these days, with most of the larger publishers shying away from working with smaller, less established strips. So, we decided to create our own.
Anne and I were driving back from the Reuben weekend in New Jersey when we got on the subject of an Edison Book. It was Memorial Day weekend, and we decided we needed to produce the most beautiful book we could come up with by early September. I was going to be appearing in Marceline for Toonfest on the 16th, attending our big NCS chapter meeting in Omaha on October 2nd, AND attending the OSU Festival of Cartoon Arts on the 15th, and I wanted to have the books printed for these events. We decided we wanted to include rejected strips, Edison puzzles, even an intermission. We also decided to include comments on some of the strips, which more and more cartoonists seem to be doing in their books these days.
I have a background in Graphic Design, but I had no idea how to create a book of this scale. I started out doing what I always do when faced with a project I know nothing about; I jumped in with both feet and started asking questions. The first thing I did was discuss the project with several printers. I considered online, on-demand book printers, but quickly found the options limited for what we were looking to create. I had worked with many Chicago area printers over the years, so I called two that I knew could handle a job of this size and started getting some quotes. We discussed size, paper, lamination, color, binding, etc. This was a necessary step before settling down to design the book. I went back and forth with both printers, adjusting the size and number of color pages based on their quotes, until I settled on a 11” x 8-1/2” horizontal, 144 page black & white book, which included 32 color pages of Sunday strips. I could have opted for a book entirely in color for just a little more money, but I chose to keep the daily strips in black & white.
The next step was to lay the thing out. The first thing I did was stop by the Walgreens near my office and buy a huge pack of colored post-it-notes. When I got to my office, I cleared one wall and started sticking the post-its up, one for each page, using the various colors to designate the various types of pages (Sunday strip page, puzzle page, etc). I think we looked at several dozen variations before finalizing the look. It was now the middle of June. I had two months to put together the entire book. I had no idea what I was about to get into.
To be continued next week...
btw—The Edison book is now for sale at the cartoon store on this site!!
