FINAL PROOF NEWSLETER: STACKING PAGES
The shop smelled like burnt toner and McDonald’s this week, which is to say, we’ve been elbow-deep in the guts of the Konica Minolta C659. The Uber Eats app has a comfort foods tab that I turn to in times of struggle. It’s there for me in 30-35 minutes, 20-25 if I make it a priority. I hope you have something in your life that can be there for you in 30-35 minutes, be it a person, a hobby, or a smelly bag of factory-farmed meat and potatoes.
The Fiery was sulking, the print dialog was giving me the silent treatment, and whole sheets of Neenah were coming out dusted in loose toner like they’d been through a coal chute. A Fiery controller is a thing you don’t know about until you drop several thousand dollars on a used copier that used to apparently print the loose papers of a medical-industry CEO (it’s locked up like Fort Knox). The machine has its own way to print but it takes forever and it can’t do too much customization. So when the Fiery was down, things slowed down considerably. But a nice guy from New Jersey drove in early to beat the traffic and swapped out my second used Fiery in two weeks.
After a few rounds of cursing, paper catalog tinkering, and a hard reset of the spooler, we’ve got the machine humming again. The kind of hum that tells you you’ve survived another little battle with the forces of entropy. The law of the shop seems to be that “If there is a printer, it will break.” We will see how long we can defy the laws of nature.
Meanwhile, progress marches on. The Spy has now been printed one hundred times over — a neat stack of freshly cut and sewn text blocks waiting for leather, book board, or whatever disguise we throw on them next. One hundred isn’t a million, but it’s a signal: we’ve crossed the threshold where a book stops being a lonely prototype and starts breathing as a run. Keep an eye out for the Signature Edition of The Spy, coming this fall.
Next week I will be dropping the first episode of the 7th Floor Press Notes, my first video dispatch from the shop. It will take you inside the steps we are going through to build our first signature edition as well as show the ground work for the companion Forgotten Files that will be released simultaneously. We’re also trying to get social media up and running so check us out on Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, and YouTube. I know there are other ones, but after a bit of sniffing around at them, I’ve determined they ain’t worth the effort.
On the airwaves, we dropped the latest episode of the Smoke and Hat Podcast this week. We talked shop, yes, but also the broader stage — the world’s news, the alliances cracking, the headlines that read like half-forgotten le Carré chapters. It’s the same kind of reporting you’d get leaning against a bar in some port city, glass sweating in your hand, while the guy next to you mutters about what’s really going down behind the curtain.
So: the press is running, the book is real, and the broadcast is live. From the 7th floor, that’s the week.