Today is the perfect day to contribute in large or small ways to the work we do at NDSU Press. ALL of our production, marketing, and distribution are dependent upon sales and donations. Your contribution is most appreciated. Please help us in our efforts to give region a voice.
Follow the link below to Arts and Sciences and choose NDSU Press Endowment. THANK YOU.
https://bit.ly/NDSUPressGivingDay23
#NDSUPress #NDSU #NDSUFoundation
Note from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley
Breanna (at right) and Megan scrutinize each font’s every twist and turn in their mystery collection.
Our 2023 Introduction to Publishing class has just returned from its Braddock Expedition. While at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, located on the grounds of the South Central Threshing Association, NDSU students were tasked with a number of activities under the tutelage of Leah Burke and Allan Burke. The museum collection of fonts is magnificent, replete with multiple cases full of alphabet and punctuation pieces. The fonts are mostly formed of metal, but some are wooden and large. A few of the font styles are italic; some are bold. Each case contains lowercase and uppercase fonts of a single type. Previous classes and volunteers have sorted the type so that there is only one style per case, a detail-oriented task that has taken place over time in order to organize the collection. Now, students and volunteers are tasked with the detective work of identifying the measurement and name of each type style.
Type Gauge Tool
There are tools–physical, printed, and digital–to help the students determine the size and style of the type case they are assigned. Beginning with the Type Gauge Multi-Tool, students insert a sample piece of type to determine the height of each font. Font heights are measured as “points,” there being approximately 72 points to an inch. A size 36 font is about one-half inch, and a size 12 (typically used for Word documents) measures at 12/72 of an inch, or, about 1/6 of an inch. (OK, that is enough math.)
Sara, shown here using digital means to narrow down her font identity search.
A digital resource our font detectives enjoy using is Identifont, one of many free options available for finding font families. Identifont asks questions such as, “Do the characters have serifs?” If the answer is yes, then the next question might be, “What style is the upper-case ‘Q’ tail?”
Each question the students answer leads them to the next narrowing-down clue, much like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure kind of book. Students can also make use of type-face identification books held in the museum library.
Ella and Mike study a printed font-style resource.
Once the students identify the font style in their type case, they have the great fun of setting type, using their fonts to name the type in their case, and thus building pages for a museum catalog in progress.
Some mistakes were made. It is not easy to set type to “read wrong” and “print right.” (Yes, these are the technical terms.) Here, we see that a first try at typesetting and printing the font identity and size needs a little work.
Fortunately, our mistakes are easily corrected. (Maybe not completely in the first try. Can you see the extant error?)
Check out this brief video, where you’ll see that Anish (in the blue jacket and yellow tee) and Abby keep at the task until everything reads right.
Mission accomplished!
Among other assignments on site this past weekend at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, all students had their try at identifying fonts, typesetting, and printing. Our hands-on learning experience illustrated how typesetting and printing were done at the turn of the twentieth century and provided a plethora of new-to-the-students terms for the art and process of letterpress publishing. (They also learned about the magic of Gojo.)
We so appreciate our community-university partnership, teaching students (new and) old ways of publishing, while providing aid to the collection management at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum. Special thanks go to Tracy and Paula Moch–who kept us fed and hydrated (and to Johanna for her delicious homemade brownies)–and to Allan and Leah Burke, who kept the training and tasks a’coming! Leah, in all those years of running the newspaper business, you may have missed your calling as a teacher!
We hope you’ll join us, July 27, 2023, for this historic event celebrating the appointment of Denise Lajimodiere as North Dakota’s Poet Laureate!
We’ve arranged for free transportation departing from and returning to Bismarck and Fargo for this single-day event. There is no cost to attendees. RSVP BY MONDAY, JULY 24, TO SUZZANNE AT NDSU.Press@ndsu.edu. There is limited seating available, so please RSVP ASAP!
Take advantage of our brief but significant summer sale! All titles are discounted 50 percent. Enter the code SUMSALE50% when you check out at our online store, and watch the dollars fall fall fall away! Our sale runs through Wednesday, June 28, 2023.
Shop now at our online store: Welcome to North Dakota State University!. NDSU Press (nbsstore.net)
Note from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley
We are pleased as punch to announce we have just been notified that Surrender Dorothy, by Brett Salsbury, has won 1st Runner-Up in the Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry in the Chapbook category!
Brett Salsbury, winner of the 2022 NDSU Press Poetry of the Plains & Prairies Award for his chapbook collection, Surrender Dorothy,”and 1st Runner-Up in the Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry in the category of Chapbook. Brett is a writer of poetry and prose who has split most of his life between Kansas and Nevada. His work has also appeared in Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, The New Territory, and Concrete Desert Review, among others. He was the 2022 recipient of the Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award in Prose.
Brett was our 2022 prizewinner of the Poetry of the Plains & Prairies Award, resulting in our standard publication contract, ten comp copies, author discount, and the hand-letterpress publication of Surrender Dorothy. This collection of poetry is the seventh in our series of chapbook publications, produced by the students in the Introduction to Publishing class, which meets every fall. The class is part of our Certificate in Publishing, which is offered to undergraduates, graduate students, and Project 65 students.
Introduction to Publishing students learn the art of letterpress printing. Here, at The Hunter Times Museum located at Bonanzaville, West Fargo, students feed paper through the antique Chandler & Price printer, examining each cover with close scrutiny. Not in the picture is Allan Burke, pressman extraordinaire, who provides history, guidance, and mentoring to our chapbook-printing projects. Left to right: Saraa, Ella, Levi, and Monika.
Individual cover samples and a bucket of ink.
We print the covers at The Hunter Times, and then we travel far west to Braddock, ND, to print the interior pages and assemble some 300+ copies at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum.
Past winners of the POPP Award are:
But Brett’s chapbook prize isn’t the only award we’ve garnered from the Eric Hoffer Awards. In 2022, our 2021 POPP Award Winner, Prairie Madness, by Katherine Hoerth, won Honorable Mention, and in 2019, Thunderbird (now out of print), by Denise K. Lajimodiere, also received Honorable Mention in the Chapbook category.
In other categories, Mammals of North Dakota, 2nd Edition, by Robert Seabloom, was the 1st Runner-Up in the Reference category, and David Mills’s Operation Snowbound: Life behind the Blizzards of 1949, won the Gold Medal in the category of Culture.
“The Eric Hoffer Book Award honors the memory of the great American philosopher Eric Hoffer by highlighting salient writing, as well as the independent spirit of small press publishers. Since its inception, the Hoffer has become one of the largest international book awards for small, academic, and independent presses.”
Note from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley
We are thrilled that our first Little Book about North Dakota has made it as a finalist in the Independent Book Publishers Association Benjamin Franklin Award Program!
With more than fifty competitive categories, IBPA recognizes “excellence in book editorial and design” and is “regarded as one of the highest national honors for independent publishers.” More than 160 book publishing professionals administer and assess the competition, including librarians, bookstore owners, reviewers, designers, publicity managers, and editors. That our first launch for the Little Book about North Dakota Series has made it to the top in the large category of Poetry is a huge pat on the back for our author, Margaret Rogal; series editor and illustrator, Mike Jacobs; and designers Jamie Trosen (cover) and Deb Tanner (interior). Dreaming up the series was the work of Suzzanne Kelley (editor in chief) and Ana Rusness-Petersen (graduate of the Certificate in Publishing). The NDSU Press Editorial Advisory Board unanimously endorsed moving forward with the series in March 2020.
Each of the three finalists are already winners as one will take the Gold Award and the others will win Silver. The Gold winner will receive an engraved trophy marking the author’s achievement. The winners are “announced to major trade journals, select libraries, all IBPA social media channels . . . and more.”
In addition, all winners (Gold and Silver) receive:
Recognition prior to the awards ceremony on the IBPA website.
Archived listing after the awards ceremony on the IBPA website.
Two tickets to the awards ceremony recognizing all of the award winners.
15% off all IBPA marketing programs during the book(s) winning year.
A press release template to use when personally announcing the winning book(s).
A personalized award certificate.
Special award stickers to affix to the winning books.
While this is the first time we’ve had a Little Book in the running, it is not our first star-studded appearance at the IBPA awards. In 2021 we won Gold with Denise K. Lajimodiere’s collection of poetry, His Feathers Were Chains, and in 2022 we won Silver for The Night We Landed on the Moon: Essays between Exile & Belonging, a memoir by Debra Marquart.
Help us keep tabs on this year’s announcement of the Gold and Silver winners by checking in at this website: Winners: Poetry | IBPA Book Award (ibpabenjaminfranklinaward.com)
For a more detailed essay about our Little Book about North Dakota Series, follow this link: Little Books with Big Impact | North Dakota State University Press (ndsupress.org)
All of our books are available at Ingram, Amazon, your favorite independent bookstore, and our online store: Welcome to North Dakota State University!. NDSU Press (nbsstore.net)
Publisher’s note from Suzzanne Kelley
Here you see visible proof of why moving our chapbook publishing project from the spring to the fall semester was a good choice. Iron Man Tracy Moch, with the South Central Threshing Association, illustrates how this winter is progressing as he works to gain access to The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, located in Braddock, North Dakota. As our spring semester draws to a close, we would have been hard pressed—with snow piled high—to conduct our letterpress printing project of printing, assembling, stitching, trimming, and numbering individual chapbook copies. Instead, our students in the Certificate in Publishing program now use the spring semester to acquire our next chapbook collection in preparation for publishing in the fall.
Facing east from inside The Braddock News Letterpress Museum. Thank you, Allan Burke, Pressman Extraordinaire, for this picture and the photo of Tracy. Between his work at preserving and operating The Hunter Times (Bonanzaville, West Fargo, ND) and The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, Allan has his hands full of good projects!
These days, as we hunker down in the wake of more blizzardy weather, we continue the process of giving first reads to dozens of manuscript submissions for our 8th Poetry of the Plains & Prairies (POPP) Award. Students learn how the acquisition process works for literary press prizes.
The first step is to learn how to navigate our online submissions portal at Submittable, a platform used by more than 11,000 organizations. Submittable is known to poets and writers of all genres as a place to submit their work for publication consideration. In a 2023 review conducted by FinancesOnline, Submittable ranked 3rd of 253 popular apps used for applicant tracking. I chose Submittable because of its familiarity among authors at large, its user-friendly design, and its price. Submittable is an easy place for students to see how publishers (and nonprofits and institutions offering grants and scholarships) are able to receive and track submissions, and it is a place where authors can keep track of all the presses and magazines where their work is being considered.
At Submittable, we are able to design our online entry forms. Here is what the form for submitting POPP Award nominations looks like.
Once manuscripts start rolling in, students in the Practicum in Publishing—taught every spring—learn how to assess manuscripts based on the aim of the POPP Award series and the mission of the press. They will each read each of the submissions, ranking them in accord with this call for submissions:
North Dakota State University Press seeks poetry submissions of any style for our annual Poetry of the Plains and Prairies letterpress chapbook publication. While authors may call any place home, their submissions must deftly capture the feeling of, as well as the reality of, living on the plains and prairies. Authors may submit any number of poems equaling thirty to thirty-five pages in length, with no more than one poem per page.
We accept new submissions for the POPP Award every year from January 17 through March 17. Answering a series of questions about the aim and mission for each submission, students—undergraduate and graduate, coming from studies in multiple disciplines—take part in winnowing the submissions down to about seven to ten finalists. Where submission selections are close, we meet to advocate for favored collections. Thus, the experience prepares students for work at other literary presses, where interns or other in-house readers pore through what they call a “slush pile,” discerning which manuscripts should go forward for further review and acquisition. Our finalist selections are then sent to the previous year’s POPP Award winner, who serves as our finalist judge and selects the winning manuscript.
Our team of students learn about the history and form of chapbooks in the Introduction to Publishing class. They take the POPP Award-winner’s manuscript, chosen in Practicum in Publishing, and they are introduced to the line-editing process, standards for book design, selection of cover art, building a copyright page, and developing marketing and publicity plans.
Instead of printing, assembling, stitching, and trimming chapbooks at the Letterpress Museum during our chill “spring” months, the hands-on labor takes place in the more accommodating fall months. How lucky we are to have the good fortune of reading poetry manuscripts indoors, while the snow piles up around us!
For more information about the Certificate in Publishing, check out our course descriptions for undergraduate and graduate students. If you are age 65 or older, and you would like to audit the publishing courses for free, check out the option in Project 65.
Destiny Manifested, by Bonnie Larson Staiger, was our first POPP Award chapbook publication solicited through competition. The award was first named Voices of the Plains and Prairies, and—in 2019—the award name changed to Poetry of the Plains and Prairies Award (the POPP Award).
Note from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley
We are elated/sad to announce that Oliver West Sime, our Graduate Assistant in Publishing, has accepted an offer to work at the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting in St. Louis Park. This move is a perfect fit for Oliver, and of course it is the kind of career move we hope for all of our graduates. However, that means his last in-person day with NDSU Press is September 28. We are redirecting e-mail regarding fulfillment, marketing, and publicity from Oliver’s email to ndsu.press@ndsu.edu.
Oliver’s presence will be sorely missed. A master’s in History student, he has also taken part in Public History activities, most recently aiding in interpretation and planning activities at a museum in Minot. His varied roles with Thunder Radio, KNDS 96.3—the student-run radio station hosted by NDSU’s Communication department that features independent and alternative music—landed Oliver front and center as example of how students at NDSU are at the center of hands-on learning.
Oliver at the mic, in just one of his roles at NDSU, captured for the landing page at NDSU.edu website.
Likewise, Oliver’s work with NDSU Press captures his hands-on, real-world, responsibility-driven experience, first when he earned the Certificate in Publishing, followed by his many opportunities to meld his goals and aspirations with the aims of this decades-old university press. The dual mission of NDSU Press is to publish the best books and to provide fabulous opportunities—through our Certificate in Publishing and its unique relationship with NDSU Press—to prepare the next generation of publishers, in whatever form that might take. In Oliver’s case, his experiences here put him in perfect position to work as Communication Director at a non-profit museum.
Practicum in Publishing book team from February 2020. Working on Half the Terrible Things, a novel by Paul Legler, are (left to right) Zachary Vietz, Oliver Sime, Nataly Routledge, and Kalley Miller.
As Graduate Assistant in Publishing, Oliver has overseen all of our shipping operations, and—requiring more creative thinking and professional writing—he has taken on the nomination of books for awards, creating press releases and other physical and digital forms of outreach, and traveling to conferences and book festivals far and near as envoy for the press.
Oliver Sime, pointing out our listing among other stellar university presses at the Western History Association conference, Portland, OR.
Oliver credits his research activity and experiences with the Department of History, KNDS, and NDSU Press for providing him the opportunity for a fully-rounded resume in his job search. We hate to see you go, Oliver, but we’re so glad everything worked out beautifully for this next stage in your career.
