The Porcupine's Quill

June 8, 2010
 
Letters from the Porcupette:
The Big Count

Last night I dreamed about cardboard boxes. There was one on the kitchen floor, and I accidentally fell in — and then, when I hit the bottom, I fell into another box. And another! My kitchen floor was just a disguise for an unending stack of ravenous cardboard boxes that loved to swallow interns whole.

That's right.

It's inventory time at the Quill.

Actually, we just finished this afternoon. After two days of Elke, Jill and I sweating in the warehouse, counting books and reorganizing boxes, we finally have a (mostly) accurate list of what we have, where we have it and how much space is left for upcoming titles. Jill is, fortunately, a whiz at stacking and sorting boxes, so we have a surprising amount of space left over from the Big Count (my pet name for inventory time). The warehouse sparkles, and a box of left-over freebie books sits outside the shop waiting for a new home. Another unexpected perk: finding pictures of Tim and Elke when they were my age! (Jill and I decided that they looked like rockstars.)

On Saturday, I attended the Meet the Presses’ Indie Literary Market as planned. My co-conspirator was Don McLeod, the editor of the Devil’s Artisan (and a big wig at the University of Toronto library). We had a good chat about the Toronto Pride parade, the dwindling number of school libraries and the exploding number of students at library and publishing graduate programs (uh oh ... this is my future we’re talking about here). There were lots of visitors to the fair, and so in between talking publishing and eating the delicious burgers at Clinton’s Tavern, Don and I sold books!

Our most popular title was definitely Coal and Roses by P. K. Page, which, although it sadly did not win the Griffin, still attracted lots of attention. We actually sold out of this title — and then people turned to The Essential P. K. Page for a quick Page hit. George A. Walker’s A is for Alice was also very popular, and we also got a lot of questions about our new graphic novel series: Martha Chudolinska’s Back + Forth and, our newest addition to the series, Megan Speers’s Wanderlust. An old friend from high school even came to visit me at the booth and she went away with Sheree-Lee Olson’s Sailor Girl. And remember that little PQL contribution to the Market anthology I told you about in my last blog? It was actually (sort of) popular, too! I even did some shopping of my own, and in my lunch bag now sits a copy of Cordelia Strube’s Lemon (Coach House Books, 2009) — so far so good, and also served as a great conversation-starter with the representative from Brick Books (whose name, embarrassingly, I can’t remember).

Although driving in downtown Toronto nearly led to my tragic and untimely demise, I made it back to home sweet Caledon in one piece — just in time to recuperate on Sunday and get to work on inventory on Monday morning.

Tomorrow I have the day off, because I’ll be attending my convocation at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. I’m not too excited for the silly gown or goofy hat, but I am excited to say ‘thank you’ to the school — and, more importantly, the people — that taught me to have the guts to go after what I want in life — including an internship at a small press!

— Caleigh Minshall

June 3, 2010
 
Letters from the Porcupette:
Fairs, interns & cats

Tonight is very exciting for the Quill — the Griffin Prize is being announced and the late P. K. Page’s collection, Coal and Roses, is up for the award. At the time of writing this, there is about an hour and a half before Page’s relatives will find out whether they win $75,000 for Page’s beautiful collection. As Elke told me a few days ago, P. K. Page is surely watching. (Tim added that she’d probably be drinking in a bar, too, or at least that’s what one of Page’s closest friends says.)

But wait — let me back up a minute. On Monday we had another exciting visitor stop by for some lunch by the river. Jack Illingworth interned at the Quill a number of years ago, and now works as the Executive Director at the Literary Press Group. I had emailed back and forth with him a couple times in September before beginning work at the Quill myself, and have encountered several of his (brilliant) reviews on my forays into our PExOD database, but meeting him in person was still a real pleasure. Plus he’s getting married in August — how can you not smile at that?! Elke sent him on his way again with a pie from the Holtom Bakery, so I know he enjoyed visiting the Inksters too.

The Inksters were missing from the shop today, however. Jill and I held down the fort as Tim and Elke gallivanted around Toronto in anticipation of the Griffin award ceremonies tonight. (Don’t worry, the kitties are safe until the Inksters get home.)* I was a little nervous at first, since their absence meant that if I accidentally deleted an entire book, or exploded an entire computer, I had no one to bail me out. Fortunately (miraculously?), none of the above happened — not even the explosion — and, in fact, I managed to accomplish most of my goals, while juggling fax machine spam and telemarketers. The only hiccup was the weather: Jill and I had to go out and find Cho-Cho in the pouring rain (it only took about ten minutes, though).

This week, the excitement doesn’t even end on Friday afternoon. On Saturday, June 5, I’ll be repping the Quill in Toronto’s Clinton Tavern (Bloor & Clinton) for the Meet the Presses’ Indie Literary Market. We’ll have lots of books on hand, and also free four-page samplers (featuring poetry from The Essential Margaret Avison) for anyone who purchases a book — which you can then, after being taught how in a free workshop, make a book out of with samplers you pick up from other presses. It’s a pretty neat keepsake, and seeing as I spent a long time today getting our sampler to the Market’s standards, I hope you book buyers like it too!

I have one last Quill-related task before beertime. (See how I did that? You know, ‘beertime’ instead of ‘bedtime’? ... Summer has already leeched my brain.) You might notice that the blog title list on the right side of this page is getting a little long. I think it’s time to make an archive!

Let’s hope it’s not possible to explode a website.

— Caleigh Minshall

*By the way, Tim informs me that the shy cat’s name is, in fact, spelt ‘Leelee’.

May 30, 2010
 
Letters from the Porcupette:
Many mistakes

Sometimes days at the Quill go by without a hitch: few questions for Tim, even fewer mistakes, good weather and a happy lunch break. Then there are the less fortunate days: lots of questions, and even more mistakes — and most of them pretty embarrassing. After all my good days, karma bit back and this past week was full of whoppers.

One of my ongoing tasks has been to do the digital pre-press work for George A. Walker’s Book of Hours. This means I have to paginate his images and also create documents on the computer that will guide the style and printing of each galley (which is a sixteen-page chunk, or a signature, as I’ve already mentioned in this blog). I also have to print proofs of each page, to ensure that the images are aligned and sized properly — and it’s a lucky thing I did so, since that’s how I found out that I had accidentally scaled a couple of images so that they were not aligned properly on the page. How I had managed to scale them was a mystery, until I realized that the program I was using to print the images had had its defaults changed since the last time I used it, and its defaults were now set to ‘scale image to page’. Problem solved.

Another problem quickly arose, however. Book of Hours is going to be a 192-page book, or twelve signatures long. That means twelve galleys on the computer. Somehow, of course, as I was creating these galleys, I also managed to delete an entire galley — galley eight, if you must know — after I had created and printed all of its proofs — and then I apparently inaccurately numbered the remaining four galleys.

Wowza.

I’m still not sure exactly how I managed that. Linux is still very complicated to me and the smallest mistake can, I’ve realized, lead to serious, serious problems. Re-creating galley eight and re-numbering galleys nine to twelve will take up an hour or so of my time this week.

Speaking of serious problems, I accidentally deleted a file for P. K. Page’s Kaleidoscope, too. At this point in my nightmarish week, I was prepared to re-type all of the information by hand before asking for more help — only after realizing that I didn’t even know how to do that properly did I meekly confess to Tim my mistake. Luckily he was able to recover a back-up version of the file. The problem again lies largely in my unfamiliarity with Linux, and hopefully as the summer progresses I’ll become more comfortable in the commands necessary to navigate the system, and avoid these mistakes in the future.

In other news, I’ve also been assigned to write an article on George A. Walker for an upcoming magazine feature, as well as to investigate the mysterious National Directory of Magazines: What is it? What purpose does it serve? Why do they want the Devil’s Artisan to update its profile? I’m very grateful for these projects: it’s not even June yet and I have a nasty sunburn — I need to stay inside!

— Caleigh Minshall

May 20, 2010
 
Letters from the Porcupette:
The hunkeler

I’ve had a couple of firsts this week. Today was the warmest (29 degrees!) it’s been since I’ve come home from Kingston. We had our 10:00 am break outside by the river instead of in the shop. The shy one of the Inksters’ couple of cats, Lele (or Lili? — I just realized I don’t know how to spell her name), finally decided that I’m safe enough to sit with during lunch. And I didn’t even have to give her any snacks!

Yesterday, I also had my first experiences ‘hunkeling’ and gluing covers to the spines of books. We are just finishing up a reprint (one of many) of one of our most popular young adult books, Abby Malone, by Shelley Peterson (check out Dancer, Peterson’s first book, too). These two books are really popular with horse-loving teens (myself included, eight or nine years ago — hell, who am I kidding, I still love Mousie and Abby).

But let’s back up for a second. I know what you’re thinking: What on earth is ‘hunkeling’? Hunkeling is professional publishing jargon (well, jargon at PQL) for smooshing books. A German man by the name of Hunkel invented a machine, which, after a number of books are inserted properly, will compress the books until the operator releases them (we set a kitchen timer for around six minutes). For Abby, we can hunkel about twelve books at a time. And why do books need to be hunkeled (or smooshed)? When our books’ pages are first sewn together, into what we call ‘signatures’ of sixteen pages each, the book is surprisingly thick — there is space between the pages and between the signatures, and to save space for shipping and to achieve tight, straight spines, we smoosh the books so that they shrink in thickness.

The tight, straight spines are important for the next step I mentioned, which is gluing the covers to the book spines. The front, spine and back cover of a book is all printed on one long sheet of paper, and the part of this sheet that becomes the spine is specifically sized to match the size of the actual book’s spine — but only after the book is hunkeled. Although one person can manage this machine on their own, if they’re good (like Elke), it’s faster if two people do it together, and so after Elke showed me the ropes, we teamed up. Elke made sure that the book’s pages were flat against the platform, then she slid the book across so that the machine would pick it up, run its spine through the hot glue and then fold and stamp the cover and book together. My job? To ensure that each cover was placed properly on the book, and to catch the newly covered book as it is dropped out of the machine.

You can probably tell that my professional jargon ends with hunkeling. Hopefully by the end of the summer I’ll have some more accurate terminology for you.

In the meantime, the Habs are winning, a long weekend is around the corner and tomorrow is looking to be another beautiful day. Until next week,

— Caleigh Minshall

P.S. Don’t hesitate to email me if hunkeling, or anything else, is unclear!

May 15, 2010
 
Letters from the Porcupette:
IPPY awards and more

Only two weeks of work have gone by, and I already have exciting news to share: three PQL titles won medals in the 2010 Independent Publisher Book Awards, also known as the IPPY awards! Margaret Avison’s autobiography, I Am Here and Not Not-There, won Silver in the Canada-East: Best Regional Non-Fiction category, while the fabulous David Carpenter’s Welcome to Canada (which I am reading right now, actually) won Gold in the Canada-West: Best Regional Fiction category, and Kenneth Sherman’s What the Furies Bring won Gold in the nation-wide Essay/Creative Non-Fiction category. Powerful stuff, I know.

Other exciting news include the acceptance I received from Simon Fraser University for their Book Publishing Immersion program this coming July, and the confirmation that yes, I will be in southern France next year teaching English as a second language to high school students. So, all in all, not a bad week (the beer in hand helps, too.)

But what’s that? You say hearing news about my personal life is not, in fact, why you read this blog? That my personal life is kind of, well, boring? Oh, is that so? Well then, let me tell you about what I’ve been up to on the job.

I said at the beginning of this post that only two weeks have gone by — yes, two weeks, and already my to-do list is, as they say, on a biblical scale. (I should, however, at this moment take the time to acknowledge that my to-do list is not nearly so large as the lists of the big fish in town, that is, Tim and Elke Inkster.) Every day is spent on something new: one day I am uploading bibliographic data to Abebooks.com so that the little ‘Buy’ button on each book’s page exists and actually goes somewhere; the next day I am editing front-material for Walker’s Book of Hours; two hours later Tim is teaching me all the intricacies of digital pre-press (that is, preparing the pages of a book on the computer so that they can be printed). At the same time I am also contacting webmasters to update their links to PQL and working, at a near-frantic pace, on our application to the Ontario Arts Council for the Devil’s Artisan — the application is due on June 1, after all.

The work doesn’t end when I get home, either. I anticipate that tomorrow I’ll spend an hour or so uploading information from our old website to our new one, and that I’ll spend another hour on top of that contacting American libraries to tell them about new books they may want to purchase, based on what WorldCat says they already have in their collection (and based on the fact that three of our authors just won IPPY awards!). We have 124 libraries in our database right now, and those are only the libraries that have purchased a significant and recent amount from us; there are a whole lot of others on WorldCat that our database doesn’t even know about yet. I think that the art of contacting libraries may make an appearance in a future post — and I’ll be asking for advice as much as giving it.

Time for another beer. I spent today looking after my mother (who has pink eye) and my father (who has the flu), so I think I earned it. Wait, too much personal information again? Too bad. Before I go, here’s a last personal factoid: the busted family car, I’ll have you know, goes to the shop on Monday.

— Caleigh Minshall

May 3, 2010
 
Letters from the Porcupette:
And so it begins

I’ve been waiting to write this blog for a few months now — a blog about my first day of paid, full-time work at the Porcupine’s Quill! Three days ago I finished my last exam ever at Queen’s University, packed my two years’ worth of things, caught a nasty cold, substantially damaged the family car and then unpacked everything again when, three and a half hours later, I finally reached my parents’ house in Caledon.

Comparably, my first day of work went way more smoothly.

I spent most of my first day preparing the Fall 2010 catalogue. We are a little behind with production and so Jill and I spent hours stapling and trimming the catalogues so that they’d be ready for shipping to libraries, booksellers and so on (the catalogue is already available online — check it out.) The work is a little tedious, involving a lot of repetitive motion and potential loss of limb (the trimmer is sharp!) In fact, during the stapling especially, I achieved some kind of Zen-like, restorative, meditative state, which was, frankly, much appreciated after my moving day of horrors on Friday. I also discovered that stapling and trimming have two essential prerequisites: a) coffee to help my concentration, and b) gangster rap. Normally I don’t use my iPod in the shop because I like overhearing all the daily goings-on, but while stapling and trimming, iPods are essential. More specifically, iPods playing loud, aggressive, psuedo-gangster music (for me, that means Nas and Timbaland... what can I say, I’m not a gangster.) The ‘‘siq beats’’ matched the ‘‘stapler stomps’’ and ‘‘trimmer tantrums,’’ although, to be honest, the tantrums were mostly made by me and not the machine.

PQL is right on a riverbank, so Jill and I took advantage of that by taking our lunch break outside on the lawn chairs, watching an ambiguous critter frolick in the lake — we weren’t sure if it was an otter, a muskrat or maybe even an overly enthusiastic log. It’s absolutely beautiful out there and sometime this summer I’ll be sure to take a picture and put it up for all of you to be jealous.

In the afternoon I spent some time typesetting for the Wood Engravers' Network calendar. I used one of the PQL computers, meaning I had to spend some time searching for Linux commands since, ashamedly, I’m a Windows girl at heart. The typesetting wasn’t too difficult once I got the hang of saving and quitting vi, Linux’s text editor. Tim had already created the January 2011 page, and so all I had to do was copy and rewrite that document twelve more times (changing the dates and month, of course) for February 2011 to January 2012. I saw a couple of the wood engravings that will likely be featured in the calendar, by fantastic artists like Rosemary Kilbourn and Jim Westergard, and they are stunning. I love time management and beautiful things, so this calendar is already in my good books. You can find out more information about it in the Fall 2010 catalogue.

Tonight I have a few more tasks to finish, or at least start. A couple bloggers have emailed PQL about their interest in some of their books, so I’m going to head to their sites to see if there are any good phrases we can cite on our website. I am also going to do some research into an as-yet mysterious company called Oxbridge Communications, since they emailed Tim this morning. Updating this website with information from the old website will, sadly, have to wait for another evening. Tomorrow, it sounds like I will be doing a little more trimming and then — well, then it’s up to Tim!

By the way, if you’re in the Toronto area this weekend, there is a fantastic event called the Toronto Comic Arts Festival — and better yet, there will a few of PQL’s authors there, too! Marta Chudolinska, George Walker, Leon Rooke and Tony Calzetta will be speaking at a TCAF panel entitled ‘‘The Artist Book and the Graphic Novel: Converging Tradtions.’’ This panel is on Saturday, May 8th, from 10:00 - 10:45 am in the Novella Room of the Toronto Reference Library. Go to TCAF’s website for more details.

Expect another update at the end of this week, on topics ranging from how the family car fares to how much more beautiful PQL’s backyard is compared to yours.

Porcupette out!

— Caleigh Minshall

January 24, 2010
 
Letters from the Porcupette:
A day at the shop

This is, admittedly, a very belated post, but I thought some of you might be interested in how I spent one of my first work days at the shop on January 5th.

The first thing I learned didn’t have much to do with book publishing (or at least, not directly). The first thing I learned was that, despite being a small shop where only three people regularly work, there is a constant hum — or what could alternatively be understood as ‘clanking’ — in the background from all the busy machines. It’s surprisingly soothing. And that wasn’t all the background noise, either. Erin is a small, community-minded town, and PQL gets a lot of visitors. Friends stopped by every hour or so to chat up Tim and Elke and ask questions about business. The shop bustled, and the porcupette hustled.

(It is also perhaps important that I clarify I mean this in the ‘‘to proceed or work rapidly or energetically’’ sense, not the ‘‘to earn one's living by illicit or unethical means’’ sense. Har, har.)

I spent the majority of the day updating our website on The Hills of Headwaters. The Hills of Headwaters is devoted to attracting business and tourism to our region, which includes places like Orangeville, Erin, Caledon, Mono and Shelburne. There’s actually a huge artist community in this area and so the website is useful in collecting all of these local attractions in one place for people who are planning to visit.

Updating the website was fairly easy, if a little tedious. The Hills of Headwaters makes it easy for local groups to create and update their own content, and so although there was a lot of dated information to correct, the hard part was actually tracking down the current information rather than going through the process of uploading it. You’ll see now that there are some fantastic images of our current titles this season, and upcoming releases for the Spring. You can also find a list of awards and prizes our books won in 2009 (a fairly extensive list, if I may say so!).

This website is also important to attract visitors during the Hills of Headwaters’ Doors Open event, this year being held on July 10th. We invite everyone to join us in the shop and see how our traditional presses work from start to finish, and last year we even gave out free copies of our booklet, A Brief History of McMillan Mills.

You might also notice on the Hills of Headwaters website that one of the Frequently Asked Questions is concerned with interning at PQL — and that the answer is not very encouraging! The fact is that all of the obstacles to internship listed in that section are true, and I have the privilege of interning here in large part due to the lucky coincidence that my parents live in the area and I have access to their car. Since starting this blog, I’ve heard from a few people looking for employment or internships, and unfortunately for the most part it’s just not feasible. But don’t lose hope — check your phone book for small publishers in your area that might want some extra (generally unpaid) help, or consider working at an independent bookstore where you can also learn tons about books and sales. I’ve been in contact with Nancy Frater from Orangeville’s indie bookstore, BookLore, and she’s been such a blessing in terms of information and support. (It’s also a great store, with really great staff, if you’re in the area.)

After finishing up the Hills of Headwaters, I worked on a few other tasks, like updating this very website with information on our older titles. I may go into more detail on this job in a future blog post, because while it seems on the surface pretty simple, it just gets more and more complicated the more I try to explain it. I’ll just say here that although the actual process is mind-numbingly boring, it’s still fascinating to explore PQL’s older titles that may be overlooked in favour of the brand new ones. On another day I might let you in on some of the goodies I (re-)discovered during this process!

I’m back at school now and busy with all sorts of school-ish things, so my blogging for the next few weeks may be sporadic. Before I go, though, let me just post this poem by one of PQL’s past interns, Amanda Jernigan — it describes much more eloquently the PQL routine than I could ever hope to. It’s featured elsewhere on the site, but I thought it deserved extra spotlight. (As a note, Simba was Tim and Elke’s border collie.)

Routine

For Tim and Elke

‘The world of publishing,’ you told
me on my first day on the job, ‘is mad.
Well — what did you expect?
There is no money in it: what we’ve sold
this summer wouldn’t buy you lunch:
which is what editors are out to — in both senses.
Authors? Unavoidable expenses.
Printers? An eccentric bunch,
but mostly daft (myself excepted).
One more thing: the public doesn’t read.’

All this no doubt intended to dissuade.
Instead, intrigued (and obstinate) I stayed —
and saw, against the fickle post,
which might bring money or disaster,
there was coffee at exactly ten o’clock,
the local gossip at the dairy, toasted
sandwiches in paper bags, and last
year’s bulbs reliably emerging. And though
we were behind, the press would slow
unfailingly at four, for Simba’s walk.

You’ve been typecast (excuse the pun)
quixotically; on pressback, Zephyr
Antique laying waste forever
to shoddy bindings, box-stores, bills.
Yet I have seen this battle done
with neither swords nor slings — nor quills.

On Friday nights you swept the shopfloor clean.
Against the wrack of publishing, the sanity of routine.

Amanda Jernigan, 2005

Porcupette out.

— Caleigh Minshall

January 4, 2010
 
Letters from the Porcupette:
What authors should know about interviews

The second part to this blog’s title is ‘‘(at least interviews with Caleigh)’’.

There are only a finite number of stories in this world, and they’ve all been told before. There are also a lot of books (and television shows, and movies, and video games) competing for the attention of readers — of, if we’re being completely honest, buyers, which might be the more important fact here. When you’re in an interview, your ultimate goal should always be to shout to the world, ‘‘Hey! This is why you should care enough about my book to invest your time and money!’’ Your interviewer (and maybe someday this will be me!) already knows that your book is worth caring about; they wouldn’t be interviewing you otherwise. But the reasons for why your book is wonderful still need to get written down.

So where do you begin? I’ll try to help out by prompting you with questions, but at some point you need to start providing good answers. If you want to be helpful but you’re still having trouble expressing why your book is worthwhile, sit down with a piece of paper and brainstorm as many reasons as you can think of for why you wrote the book. The first ten, fifteen, even twenty reasons might be really stupid, but that’s okay. Eventually you’ll start getting to reasons that matter — reasons that might matter to other people, too. You don’t need to bring this list to your interview (at least not to an interview with me), but having those reasons in your mind will help guide you through the interview and serve as a jumping-off point for any question that has you stumped.

Also — and this is cheesy advice, but it’s true — try to be yourself. Relax. Your exact words may not even end up being used, depending on the purpose of the interview, but a genuine sense of who’s behind the book will shine through the description in a positive way. Readers like to know that authors are human, so be human: make mistakes, laugh about them and always feel free to say, ‘‘Wait, slow down please. I didn’t mean to say that; let me rephrase!’’ It’s your book, even down to the promotional copy (which is what I’ll ultimately use your interview for), so take ownership of it and say what you think. (And then respectfully defer to your publisher’s greater experience and wisdom when the two of you disagree, of course...)*

Think of anecdotes that could make the book’s creation process more personal. Tell me about where your ideas come from. Tell me about who you imagine will read your book, and what you hope they’ll get out of it. How did you imagine this book would look like when you started, and how did that vision change (or did it)? Why this book, why right now? And, of course, always feel free to tell me about why you’re happy with PQL. These are all details that will help me to tell someone (gracefully) why they should part with their hard-earned cash for the story you have to tell.

These aren’t things you need to worry about while you’re writing your book (although that’s your business, not mine). While you’re writing, focus on the writing — selling only comes after we’ve got a good book to sell.

You might be wondering where all of this promotional information goes. I’ve mentioned tipsheets before, and here’s where I’ll finally explain them. A tipsheet is a 7-12 page document full of information that booksellers might like to know: short and main descriptions of the book (which is where most of my and your effort goes into), author and/or artist biographies, information on previous sales, marketing, bibliographies, unpublished endorsements and even images from the book itself. These tipsheets serve a number of purposes. We present them to the Literary Press Group at their semi-annual seasonal sales conferences, which take place around two months before the ‘sales season’ begins. LPG’s sales representatives use the information in the tipsheet to entice book retailers to place advance orders on each book, which helps us in turn to maximize our production efficiency. All of this takes place around 8-12 months before the release date. The usefulness of the tipsheet doesn’t end there, however. The tipsheet will populate our catalogue listing of the book, and, eventually, the information in the tipsheet will also be inputted into our database. Our database then feeds that information to places like amazon.com, amazon.ca, Baker & Taylor, the Library of Congress, Barnes & Noble, the University of Toronto Press (which feeds Chapters Indigo), and many others. The tipsheet, you can see, turns into a pretty big deal. So do your interviews.

I hope you find this helpful when thinking about ways to make your story stand out from the crowd. Before I go: Happy New Year! Here’s hoping 2010 is full of good writing, be it physically bound, in an e-book or scratched onto a good ol’ scroll.

*I’m only half kidding.

— Caleigh Minshall