Keeping a Close Eye on Fonts

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! 

Big Prize for a Little Book

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)

Fond Farewell

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.

Little Books with Big Impact

Note from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley

With some frequency, North Dakota State University Press receives manuscripts that are not quite book-length but still significant studies or literary works. In the past, we’ve sadly turned them away. Our new series, A Little Book about North Dakota, provides the opportunity to bring such works to the public.

Several years ago, when I was conducting historical research in New Zealand, I spied the BWB Texts Collection, little books on a variety of New Zealand topics produced by Bridget Williams Books and prominently displayed in nearly every bookstore. Now, with dozens of “short books on big subjects,” the BWB Texts are affordable, easy to carry while traveling, and chock full of interesting content of interest to New Zealanders. Each book measures only a few inches wide and tall and generally has somewhere between eighty and two hundred pages.

Enamored with the idea of the little book, I posed the notion to my Certificate in Publishing students. One of the graduate students, Ana Rusness-Petersen especially liked the idea. She set out to learn everything she could about little books as her publishing research project. Her findings include aspects of contemporary trends in format, content, production, marketing, and distribution, which NDSU Press has ably adopted for this new series.

In March 2020, I set the idea before the members of the press’s Editorial Board, where it was met with much enthusiasm. I suggested Mike Jacobs—retired editor and publisher of the Grand Forks Herald—might serve as series editor, and the board members approved unanimously. When Mike accepted the invitation, the project began in earnest. Our series logo and cover designs are by award-winning graphic designer Jamie Trosen. Deb Tanner, also an award-winning designer and a long-time designer for NDSU Press, takes care of every aspect—aesthetic and technical—of the interior design.

These images are final cover design concepts for our Little Book about North Dakota series. We’ll use yellow for poetry, red for fiction, and green for nonfiction. The back cover wraps over to the front, exhibiting North Dakota’s borders and counties. The series volume number is visible in the lower right corner, and the series logo appears in the upper left.

 

Here is a sample of a two-page spread from our debut Little Book about North Dakota, featuring a full-color illustration by Mike Jacobs and one of Rogal’s poems.

Each Little Book about North Dakota measures 6” x 6” and contains a substantive and/or literary treatment of the history, science, social science, health, politics, literature, culture, or contemporary life in North Dakota. Did we think of every possible category? No. The possibilities for content are limitless, bound only by their connection to North Dakota.

Submissions of such works, which will undergo our blind peer review process for acquisition, may be sent to our online submissions portal at https://ndsupress.submittable.com/submit.

Our first volume, Field Notes, released just a week ago, is available from our NDSU Press online store, Ingram, Amazon, and your favorite independent bookseller.

Here is the cover design for our first volume, a collection of poetry called Field Notes, by Margaret Rogal. When the book is closed, it measures 6″ x 6″ and contains 120 pages, with color images throughout. All of our Little Books will be of this same dimension.

 

Tune in Today at 5:00

Note from NDSU Publisher Suzzanne Kelley

Tune in today for this weekend’s edition of Prairie Public Presents, and you’ll see author/artist/academic Denise Lajimodiere read from her newest book with NDSU Press: His Feathers Were Chains. The program is a recording of Denise’s recent performance at the Plains Art Museum, kicking off local programming for the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read.

I had the good fortune of attending Denise’s reading, with fabulous musical interpretations from musicians and composers at Concordia College AND drummers and jingle dress dancers. Here is a link to tonight’s program on Prairie Public and, below this message, you’ll find some photos I took on the night of the original performance.

A Ponder & a Podcast

a note from Suzzanne Kelley, Publisher, North Dakota State University Press

 

These cold and blustery northern plains days are perfect for sticking around the home-front, preferably indoors and near a fireplace. Friday is a work-from-home day for me, and I look forward to hearing the washer agitate and the dogs snore as I edit and write and read and ponder the business of publishing.

Things went kablooey last week, over the weekend, and on into this week. There are five of us holding down the fort at the Press—none of us full time, and some of us just a very little bit of time, but all of us pulling our weight . . . except that two tested positive for Covid (and a third had a scare this morning) . . . and one of our designers injured her back . . . and our other designer was out of town . . . and I accidentally deleted ALL of my emails (which are slowly being recovered) . . . which meant very little went according to my master plan. It is only now, at the end of this week, with everyone returning, slightly bedraggled but smiling and ready to pitch in, that I feel like we’re in forward motion again. In fact, this afternoon I turned off my email, shut my office door, and left my office only to refresh my coffee. I got enough good work done to lift my spirits. Supply-chain challenges and Covid be damned . . . we can do this!

In fact, we have all kinds of exciting happenings to share in the coming days and weeks. Here’s one piece now!

Check out this just-out-today announcement—featured on the NDSU News page!—about our brand-spankin’-new podcast: NDSU Press announces new podcast | NDSU News | NDSU

Announcing our brand new NDSU Press Podcast!

 

Words by the Minute

note from Suzzanne Kelley, Publisher, NDSU Press

How fast do you read?

How about fifty pages in fifteen minutes? That is a pace with which I cannot compete, but Kyla Vaughan–an undergraduate at University of Wisconsin, Madison–consistently reads at that pace, and in the past year, she read 392 books, averaging more than 7 per week! Even when I shift from editor mode to just-enjoy-the-story mode, I cannot read that fast.

An exercise my Practicum in Publishing students will complete in a few weeks is to time how long it takes to read a chapter from the manuscripts they’re working from, and then to time themselves again when they are editing those same pages. In this fashion, they can mark an estimate for how many hours they need to block out in order to read and edit their manuscript projects. From my days as a freelance editor and from experience in teaching students to edit, I know that this exercise is an essential beginning to bidding out a job or completing a project by end of semester.

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.

The students think they are ready, and I know they are eager to begin, but we have some preparatory work to do. For example, in the upcoming weeks, they must become proficient at several tasks. Among those tasks are to:

  • practice awareness. Based on terminology coined by Karen Judd, editor and author, students will learn to attend to cognitive aspects of reading. Some readers are naturally observant, noticing and remembering where on a page some detail of a story appeared; catching that a name was spelled one way in an early chapter and another way in a subsequent chapter; watching for red flags of a factual nature. My students must double-down on being aware and observant.
  • become familiar with The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition. My publishing mentor, Mary Ann Blochowiak (long-time editor for The Chronicles of Oklahoma), tasked me with reading the first one hundred pages of the CMOS many years ago. This exercise formed my understanding of how books are published, physically and in accord with standards of practice. The reading assignment is a gift I pay forward to my students. Students will also be tasked with learning how to consult CMOS when formatting a manuscript for publication and when searching for guidance in matters of copyright, editing, punctuation, and proofreading. (Really, it’s all fun!)
  • learn to use standard proofreaders’ marks. As in all matters for book publishing, we rely upon the guidance of The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition. Using the CMOS Proofreaders’ Marks, we’ll practice posting carets, circling and underlining, and implementing various curlicues.
  • build a style sheet. We’ll draft a style sheet together for practice, and then students will be able to devise style sheets built upon their specific manuscript projects. Style sheets are records of the choices we make when editing. They are documents made to ensure the book interior is consistent throughout. 

This short list hardly encompasses all the actions students will take, but you can see they are in for some close reading in the coming weeks. As we carefully scrutinize every sentence, this will not be the year to set any book-reading records, but it is the semester to dive deep into the process of transforming a manuscript into a book. 

 

Related notes:

Article about Kyla Vaughan: “Need a New Year’s Resolution? Read a book a day. This undergrad did.” by Doug Erickson, University of Wisconsin–Madison, January 14, 2022.

Karen Judd. Copyediting: A Practical Guide. Menlo Park, CA: Crisp Publications, 2001.

The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Paul Legler. Half the Terrible Things. North Dakota State University Press, 2020.

 

Land of Sunlit Ice: Giving Region a Voice

note from Suzzanne Kelley, Publisher, NDSU Press

View from my front porch.

As I write, periodically gazing out my study window at a crisp, cold negative 24 degrees day, I revisit one of the first books I published when coming on board with NDSU Press. In a conversation with North Dakota Poet Laureate Larry Woiwode about his current work—back in the fall of 2015—we landed on the proposition of publishing a chapbook of poetry: Land of Sunlit Ice. We wouldn’t do it in simple fashion, but in alliance with newspaperman Allan Burke (the mover and shaker behind the Hunter Times and the Braddock News Letterpress Museums), the Iron Men of the South Central Threshing Association, and my Introduction to Publishing students. That inaugural project kicked off a series of publications, evolving into what we now call the Poetry of the Plains & Prairies (POPP) Award. January 17, 2022, kicks off our seventh call for poetry for this prestigious prize.

Hand-letterpressed covers, individually painted by Introduction to Publishing students, class of 2016.

Introduction to Publishing students from the class of 2016.

Pictured after installing a hanging propane furnace in The Braddock News Letterpress Museum in Braddock, N.D., are left to right, Ken Rebel of Bismarck, Tony Splonskowski of Bismarck, David Moch of Hazelton, Tracy Moch of Kintyre and Dave Duchscherer of Bismarck. They are all active in the South Central Threshing Association, Inc.

Getting off to a stellar start with this fabulous collection led not only to our chapbook series. The publication and the publicity surrounding our work led to our tagline: giving region a voice. I’d like to say that we thought of this all-encompassing phrase all by ourselves, but it came instead from an article about what we do, published in North Dakota Living’s article by Luann Dart “NDSU Press Gives Region a Voice.” At root, this simple tagline represents the mission of the press since its first conception in 1950. We are proud to continue that mission today.

But, what exactly is “region,” and how do we apply the term as a geographic and sensate parameter today?

Our mission statement declares that NDSU Press “exists to stimulate and coordinate interdisciplinary regional scholarship. These regions include the Red River Valley, the state of North Dakota, the plains of North America (comprising both the Great Plains of the United States and the prairies of Canada), and comparable regions of other continents.” We do this via publications in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. With our Contemporary Voices of Indigenous Peoples series, we sometimes step out of region, but on the whole, our mission represents region as defined herein.

Still, on the topic of “region,” enter once again Mr. Woiwode. In a recent interview, Woiwode addresses an ever-burbling question about defining our particular region, with a push to include our region as an outlier of the Midwest. To this, Woiwode responds:

Once, talking heads and weather-people on TV became commonplace, the Midwest started to stretch from Pennsylvania to Nevada—perhaps because media people don’t often travel from their studios on the coasts. Iowa and Illinois and Indiana are at the heart of the Midwest, with Wisconsin and southern Michigan and perhaps western Ohio as participants, but northern Minnesota and North and South Dakota and Montana and Wyoming are definitely not the Midwest . . . Nebraska clings closer to South Dakota and Wyoming than any midwestern state, and the grounding in evidence and practicality of the area comes naturally, because many resident families were farmers or ranchers for generations. Neither occupation runs on theory.

I rejoice at this clarification, for it fits my own recognition of our region, and it clarifies how “comparable” regions might well be defined.

Woiwode’s next statement also lands squarely with my understanding of writers of region, based on my own research in memory and collective memory.

My sense is that a writer’s first steps onto terra firma, the place where the writer learns to walk, whether prairie or high plains or beach or forest or the floor of an apartment and on to concrete and asphalt, that place is the locus of creative power, even if never referred to—it’s the center and source of the words that arrive from one who travels the distance of a novel or collection of stories or enough poems to generate the microcosm of a genuine interior. The rhythms and the texture of the language of that place will always be present in all the creative work that follows.

Genius. That rhythm and texture, that locus of creative power in a work about region—these are the golden threads of what we seek in our publications, from chapbooks of poetry to the magnum opus of a book about turkeys that we have now in production.

 

Related notes:

Submissions to the Poetry of the Plains & Prairies Award will run January 17 through March 17. We seek collections of poetry, 30-35 pages in length (one poem per page; single poems may extend beyond one page) by a single author. There is no submission fee. Send manuscripts to NDSU Press Submission Manager (submittable.com)

Land of Sunlit Ice, by Larry Woiwode (2016, out of print). For more information on our chapbook projects, view Thunderbird & The Land of Sunlit Ice, produced by Sandbagger News.

Larry Woiwode has been North Dakota Poet Laureate since 1995. Born in Carrington, ND, he spent his early, formative years on the land in the farming community of Sykeston. He is widely (and wildly successfully!) published with poetry, novels, biographies, essays, and memoirs.

Woiwode interview quotes from Middle West Review, Volume 8, Number 1, Fall 2021, p. 206.

Congratulations to Zach!

from Suzzanne Kelley, NDSU Press Publisher / Editor in Chief

It’s been a long haul this year for everyone, so when one among us still reaches his goals and in fine fashion, his efforts should be recognized. With this note, we celebrate Zach Vietz’s magnificent finish to his academic program as he is now among those who hold a master’s degree! After an articulate and splendid presentation describing his thesis project, he fielded questions from his committee admirably. I am especially gratified to note that Zach’s research is in the field of publishing. He not only contributed his physical labors and publicist’s acumen to the activities of NDSU Press, he is adding to the corpus of knowledge about publishing.

In addition to his academic program, Zach has served NDSU Press for two years as Publicist and Graduate Assistant in Publishing, and he is a graduate of the Certificate in Publishing. We’re delighted for his accomplishments; we’re sad he will be exiting the program. 

As announced by the chair of Zach’s committee . . .  

Please join me in congratulating Zachary Vietz on his successful MA Thesis defense earlier today. His thesis is titled, “Independent Press Awards: Diversity in Young Adult Literature Awards from 2010-2019.”

Zach’s MA committee members are:

Dr. Amy Gore (Chair), Assistant Professor of English
Dr. Suzzanne Kelley, Publisher at NDSU Press, Assistant Professor of Practice
Dr. Alison Graham-Bertolini, Associate Professor of English

Much thanks to his committee for their service, and many Huzzahs! to Zach for his accomplishments. I’ve attached a photo of our smiling faces.

Best,

Dr. Gore

Post-defense grins by all. Congratulations, Zachary Vietz!

NDSU Press Party Flier

6th Annual NDSU Press Party, March 4, 7 p.m.

from our friends at North Dakota State University Relations…

The annual NDSU Press Party, scheduled for Thursday, March 4, will be held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The event, now in its 6th year, will feature readings by four NDSU Press authors and a presentation by the NDSU Press cover designer.

Participants are asked to register.

NDSU Press publisher Suzzanne Kelley is set to begin the party at 7 p.m.

“We’ll miss our Cat Sank Trio musician friends and the delicious hors d’oeuvres from NDSU Catering, but we’ll relish the opportunity to hear our authors share their inspirations for—and some passages from—their newest publications,” Kelley said. “Attendees will learn the secret code for discount prices and we’ll interrupt the program briefly for some giveaways, too.”

Her welcome will be followed by readings presented by:

• Denise Lajimodiere, who wrote “His Feathers Were Chains

• Paul Legler, who wrote “Half the Terrible Things

• Jamie Trosen, graphics artist, will give a talk on book cover design

• Carolyn Dahl, who wrote a book of poetry titled “A Muddy Kind of Love

• Timothy Murphy’s family and friends will read from his book “Hiking All Night

The NDSU Press Party is expected to conclude about 8:30 p.m.

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