Always the Horizon Fan Printing Tasks + Progress

A fan's wife made him this gift of a custom printing for Christmas.

← A version that a fan's wife had made for him for Christmas. I think I'm going to go for a smaller, cheaper paperback format first, thinking 5" x 8" (or A5, they're close enough) (looks like this: front, and showing thickness). I'll make a hardcover certainly, but since it will likely cost more, I'll do it after the cheaper softcover, to help get the kinks out. The hardcover might be larger, but, not sure what size. The fan's-wife size, above, feels awkward to me, to read, like it needs pictures or something (I've found a great source of pictures (see also), so it's a possibility.

Progress:

2023-03-14, -15: printed my too-small (I may go to 3" on the long side) gray image headers on a Fedex Office printer, on white and on slighly off-white ('Ivory' - they didn't have book 'cream' (? wot?)), and, they look terrible. (It didn't help that the ink was un-even.) I guess I'll have to get my own printer out of storage and buy some 'cream' paper to do trial and error with, either that or find all-new line-drawing / etching-style images. I think my instinct that for gray-scale, the drawings need to be more line-like, less nebulous (Romantic), is right. (I should really just do white paper and color images and be done with it. But I've taken on board that hard white paper is harsh, and less comfy, though I have lots of non-fiction books that are hard white.) Anyway, at least for the first image, strong edge detection, then inverting the image, makes it more line-like. Could add a threshold to clear out some of the fuzz. Don't know whether this will work for all the images, and I don't know whether it looks like just another form of garbage. It needs to look deliberately arty, not just like someone playing with Gimp. It's kind of the best gray-adaptation so far, though. Maybe trying to make large, atmospheric images look good as small, grayscale ones, is going uphill. If I keep going this way, I'll probably have to use different techniques on different images. This one, eg, needs for the lower lines to be as pronounced as the higher ones. A gradient of edgeness, or painting 'strong edgeness' around.
2023-03-05: Grayscale header images. They'll each be ~2 inches on the long side. Not very satisfied with them. 03, the 'evening on the river', is so speckly, and the hut / building (meant to be the Old Pub) is relatively hidden (it does look cozy, though). 07, the elephant, replaces the image of Polyphemus. For some reason I hate to rip that artist off - he puts such scientific work into his other pictures that he's not anonymous to me, so, though it's very unprincipled I don't want to just steal that guy's art. I replace it with an anonymous picture of a warrior elephant. It breaks the 'classical' style, but so does Murdoch's sword at the end, and the dragon.
Aside from replacing / re-touching a couple of these, there's nothing stopping me from laying the book out and printing.
2023-02-04: Realized a problem: Murdoch's original images are going to be too squished to see much detail in them. So, I either have to take a snip, or, find another image. He seemed flexible about that. Here's the book (best so far) - I let the image be as large as it is because it was only electronic, I don't intend to make printed chapter headers that large. Will details show (the two walking for 02, the house, for 03, the gravestones for 01) at 5.5"x8.5"? Sorreee, Murdoch, I know, I know (that it's taking forever). I would hate to have to scour for new images for chapter headings, if I can't use the given paintings. I guess I should confirm, how bad they'll be (ah - these thumbnails are only a little smaller than I envision the chapter headings being. These are 1.5" wide on my desktop, eyeballing a fiction book I think I could let them be 2" in the book. Still too small, un-modified). As line drawings (to get the gist of the image, what it represents - my latest thinking - think <- those, made negative (but ehn, some of the images don't edge-up well)), lightened up and maybe a little zoomed in - they might be fine.
It's occurred to me - but I should try - to take a plain old image of a 'Gladius Hispaniensis' and style it, see whether that beats Murdoch's plain ol' sword with the ribbon around it (it is an artistic, plain old sword, though, something that style transfer might not succeed at (edit: yeah, the fantasy isn't as good as the reality)).
Edit: Ah, now that I'm allowing myself to zoom in, it's curing a multitude of ills. Very good. And the first picture I played with, 03, for the old pub, was a tough one, which was deliberate, but maybe too hard.
2023-01-28: Well, this site, though spiffy, isn't the silver bullet I'd thought. In fact it's not that useful at all. It's not like having Albrecht Dürer (YouTube) redo your images like I'd imagined, though its default example is impressive. Dabbled with color-based techniques. These mushy Romantic images aren't going to translate well to grayscale, maybe. Just jack the contrast up? Tried thresholding to black, and white, it doesn't look good. I think I'll go to Fedex Office and print these images on whatever 'creme' / cream paper is (hopefully they'll know) and see how it looks. I've got a fiction book that's newspaper-y page quality, I guess that's what it is. Hmmm, grayscale to line drawing is next to try. Bleh. Filters -> Artistic -> Waterpixels isn't bad, it still looks painterly, but removes a lot of noise. I don't know. I've seen books with nice etchings.
2023-01-27: Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts, lithography. Guess I should start collecting and experimenting. Also, try stable diffusion again? (Just, look for /sdg/ on /g/)
2023-01-20--01-25: Making color look good in B+W, Color -> B+W in Gimp. II <- this latter is awesome. Color Channel Mixer with B+W is Colors -> Decompose -> Mono Mixer in Gimp 2.10.18. GEGL with c2g is: Colors -> Desaturate -> Color to Gray.
The images are generally atmospheric (I guess most are from the Romantic period). However, their small size in a header won't get the chance to 'draw you in'. I'd consider putting them on the left, facing page, but, they're mostly landscape aspect ratio and I think they'd feel a bit out of place. Or maybe inset on the right, larger, and not just a small 'header'? Or, maybe choose a detail in the images to focus on. This isn't possible with all of them. I'm just afraid that a piece of gray splotch won't look good. They need stylizing or something maybe. Surely there are programs that will do that (Jesus H. Nah, too much trouble). So far, staying with just a header. Oh, holy s*t!. Whoa - I could use photographs and stylize them! Like, for the hardcover, I could use Al Goldstein or some other porn Jew for one of the extra pictures in there. Too on-the-nose? Wild, wild, wild, the possibilities.
2023-01-18: Even lulu won't print color on cream paper (look how cheap, though! $4.11 cost for 100 pages at 5.5"x8.5"). Just do a black-and-white 'cheap + cheerful' edition? None of the 3 publishers (KDP/Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or lulu) will do color on cream. This is problematic even for the 'heirloom', hard-cover edition - do it on white, + thus (supposedly) be harder to read? If I go with B+W I'll have to 'tune' the chapter headers so they look good in B+W. Happily the frontispiece, the Sacred Clown with his head in his hands at Ebba's graveside, is not too colorful. I wonder, should I do color plates? Not for the 'cheap + cheerful' edition but for the heirloom one. Seems overkill to include a color plate for what were chapter headers, that Murdoch sounded like he was tossing off casually as placeholders. Just looked at Ingram Spark, and they don't do color on cream / creme either. So B+W (cream) for the cheap one, it is.
2023-01-07: It looks like lulu.com will let me print color on cream pages (but that's a casual listing of options. Barnes & Noble won't let you do color (any color at all) on cream, either, which reduces the likelihood that lulu will, when push comes to shove). I do want color in there. I said it'd be 'cheap and cheerful', but, I'm thinking this is probably going to be the only version most people buy, and I want it to be good. I don't want to force people to buy the hardcover to get color. Enh, maybe B&W wouldn't so bad, but it'd be a shoddy way to treat the classical paintings Murdoch used. (The hardcover will be all-out.) Who knows, if we're forced to go publisher to publisher, maybe some will be different variations.
Some good news is, I'm prepared to go ahead and lay the book out at 5.5"x8.5". See, AFAICT you have to pick the size before you lay a book out. If you don't like it or it's got too few pages for a good spine, oops, you've got to start again, you can't just change a couple of numbers and voila (that'd be LaTeX). I was afraid 5"x8" looked kind of 'Munchkin'-like. Well, it's dawned on me that the book had 100-ish pages (kind of few) at the theoretically 5"x8" LaTeX size, but for whatever reason the size LaTeX generated was actually much bigger, so a real one will have more pages probably even at 5.5"x8.5". And 5.5"x8.5" looks ok to me.
2023-01-06: Grrr, can't use color ink on cream paper? So, it's either white (supposedly harsh) for what should be a mostly-for-reading book, or black-and-white chapter heading images on cream? Cue Spoderman ('Amazon, why you do dis?'). Could I do it, page by page? Nah, no way. This is a cheap process. So, what, require people to buy two editions? Grrr, this applies to the frontispiece as well. At least 'Chase the Sun' on the back cover can be color. Well, look, how committed am I to Amazon? Or, how much time are people going to spend reading it vs looking at it on a shelf? Guess the thing to do is to see what other people offer, at least.
2023-01-05: cream or white paper? Since the book is mostly text, and the chapter header images are small and the book is not about the images, I'll probably go with cream.
2023-01-04: allowed book sizes. Wondering whether I can script size changes in Scribus.
2022-12-30: (minor) Figured out the LaTeX, main text fonts last night - some minor variation on .. don't know what. Palatino, maybe. Mostly, had the thought that, if I did buy 50 copies, I could sell them at cost or give them away to alt-right e-celebs and they could mark them up and sell them! I would trust them, and hopefully everyone else would trust them. Their incentive is, that they could mark them up as they pleased. Don't know whether TRS would be interested, probably not. Red Ice somehow appeals to me for this. Who else? (Haven't spoken to anyone about this.)
2022-12-29: Went to a Barnes & Noble to reassure myself that small books look ok. They do. One size that appealed to me was Nadine Gordimer's July's People. (Don't look at what it's about, kek.) Also, lots of devotional books are very small (but you can read the spine on all of them. So my fears that it will have to look like a pamphlet are unfounded).
2022-12-28: Think I'm gonna use Murdoch's own 'Chase the Sun' image on the back (maybe at 50% opacity as a background for the text, but, I don't have much to write there, so probably it'll be foreground, not background). All because, if it starts out 'big time' on amazon, I want it to put its best foot forward. I may or may not (but probably will), put the unnamed (afaik) picture of the Sacred Clown mourning Ebba as the frontispiece. It'll be a bit disappointing to just reflect Murdoch's own art back to him, but, at least fans will get Murdoch art, which they may not have seen before. If + when it comes out, I think I'll buy, like, 20, (nay, 50!) copies and sell them on e-Bay, just to make sure they're available.
2022-12-27: Procured two candidate images (one, two) for the back cover, from an obscure artist, 'Stabilo Diffusino 2.1'. He's been criticized for being mechanical and for understanding grammar at the level of Nim Chimpsky, but a) he's willing to do it and b) he's better than I am. ('k jokes are lame.)
Could talk about the ethics of using machine-generated art on a very human book, but, where am I going to get custom images from, not being an artist? I coulda just not said anything, but, that's faintly counterfeit. It's obvious this doesn't have a deep enough understanding (of course it's still impressive).
Anyway, if anyone wants to contribute a possible picture for the back that's in keeping with the theme of the book and is normie-friendly (I don't want to use the sonnenrad mountain sunrise below because I want it to survive for as long as possible on amazon), either email it (bottom of page) or post it to /pol/ and put the words "murdoch murdoch" or "always the horizon" in your post, and I'll see it. If it's in good faith, I'll credit a family-friendly name / handle of your choosing, and if I use it, I'll do it in the book. I reckon there are a few days while I put together the various formats of book. I would say, waiting for lightning is on the front of the book so that's out, but maybe standing among the ruins at the beginning, or standing on a hill post- The Nothing drowning the city, or The Nothing looming - Aphrodite floating above the Sacred Clown, her hair as though in water, approaching the castle of the Semitic Vampires - any part you think is good and iconic of something major in the book, and visually interesting. Thanks if you try this.
2022-11-26: 5"x8" first chapter Scribus throwaway version. No page numbers, paragraph break is too small, not the right font (need to reinstall the several fonts I chose for the book - the machine is a new install). Anyway, the size should be lifelike, 5"x8". Argh, it's the right size on the screen in Scribus, but despite the .pdf 'knowing' that it's 5"x8", it displays larger, both locally and on the web. Anyway, that was a recommended size for novellas (a classification for the number of words in AtH), but, is it too small? Does it look 'cute', or just pocket-sized? It looks like an Anglican prayer book, which has some charm. A tall birthday card envelope is a better description. The text is a little .. not pinched, but ones eye wants freedom to roam further (imo). You spend all your time switching lines. 6"x9" is more common for fiction. Regardless, comparing it to the press-of-a-button LaTeX version makes me respect LaTeX (the current best version of AtH), for sure. The LaTeX version is also theoretically 5"x8", but it displays larger. When I shrink its window down closer to 5"x8", the font turns tiny, so, that version is misleading as to what a physical book would look like. The idea of being 5"x8" is to give it some thickness I'm sure, otherwise it risks looking like a pamphlet, and more importantly, having no room to write the title on the spine. On the other hand, what's more important, readability, or having room for the title on the spine? (Well, maybe you'll spend more time looking at it as your special object on the shelf than you will reading it.) We will see what we see.
2022-11-24: I (previously) put in italics for emphasis for what I thought was clarity, but, this style guide says to rather re-write the sentence to put the important words first. Ehn, I do it rarely (and Murdoch, never).
Am using Scribus now, it seems simpler, doesn't change as often, the people making tutorials about it are clearer, and there are more of them. I have a handle on adding pictures to the top of pages, too. Truthfully, all the concepts are the same, just, InDesign was more daunting.
2022-10-15: Worked on the page formatting.
2022-10-13: ( <- Image not going on the back cover, but it is close). Did a good thing. It probably didn't work, but I'll do it again properly and hopefully it will.
2022-10-10: There aren't many articulate quotes about 'Always the Horizon' on /pol/, (but I'll steal some quotes from it from Writer Anon). But as you can imagine there's plenty of praise for the Murdoch Murdoch series.
2022-10-08: No progress, thinking out loud: Really like this image (or something like it) for the back (from: here). It's got a sonnenrad on it though. It's the horizon, and it's the sun, sort of like at the end of the book. And mountains sort of represent the unknown, and hey, the 'insurmountable mountain'. And abstract - where we're going, at least on the timescale Murdoch is talking about, is abstract. Yeah, I love it. But, muh sonnenrad :(. If it's listed on amazon it'll get reported fast, I'm sure. I'm not helping, telling my every move, but I flatter myself probably, thinking antifa / the ADL care that much. But it doesn't matter, it would get reported if given such wide exposure. I wonder whether the 'fan's wife' did her book as a personal printing. That's most likely what it was - any 'press' that has to interact commercially with ... anything else, would be forced to drop the book. Wonder whether I can cut a deal with Antelope Hill or Imperium Press. "Heeeeeey - can you publish and sell this, unofficially?" Or more plausibly, "Could I rent your press and your services, and you print this for me, and offset your charge to me against the profit you make from sales?" (And hope I break even ;).) (I wonder how they survive as 'nazis' in this commercial / financial landscape? ZOG must not control everything.) Even if they did print it, they're not 'on demand', they'd have to print 100, 1,000, whatever, and hope they sell. So it'd be risky for them. Should I lie, say, "Why yes, I am Murdoch Murdoch, and I sign over my copyright!" Me and the press would wink at each other while we did it :).
The sonnenrad doesn't change much, actually - without it it'd look like the Days Inn logo, or, Paramount Pictures :|, but any press that wanted respectibility would have to take it down. Wonder whether: maybe lulu.com is the way to go after all. It isn't distributed or advertised, but it's listed. Could .. I .. make it personal but share it with my friends on the internet who have the link? I bet I can, somewhere. It would be more survivable that way, for sure. And it could have a sonnenrad on the back cover.
There is the option where I take delivery of the books myself, and tell people to write for one. But we'd have to dox ourselves to each other. Reaaally no good. (Are there companies that will hold, but then also ship, stuff? They'd certainly add their fee / take their cut. (edit: yes, shopify and squarespace. I believe).) Could I hand this over to someone who's known, but trusted? Who people would trust with their dox? This is a variant of the 'services of' Antelope Hill or Imperium Press model, only, they'd just hold them for me. I can't think of a figure who's universally trusted. Red Ice? Let them make a profit on it, for their trouble? Why the hell not, they need money and are a worthy cause.
2022-10-07: I said lulu, but I just watched this comparison (YouTube). KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing, which also does hardcopies), which will surely reject printing the book, or Ingram-Spark which takes more work? Maybe KDP won't read it. It's the easiest and has good distribution so, maybe try it. The biggest task is coming up with the back cover. A picture of some scenery from Guardian? Something dark and red from a classical painting? A (dark :) ) scene from the book, inside the castle? That very interesting cyclops? Quotes about the book and the show are both on-topic. The Sacred Sword? A different sword? A sun? (Hah - lots of art with sonnenrads on /pol/ - they'd almost certainly make the book unpublishable though). I like the Sun idea though. A stylized sunrise. There are a million pieces of sunrise art on google. A moth? They're not that commonly beautiful, and are moths that significant in the story? As long as the picture is good, and well-suited.
2022-10-06: Looks like you don't want to start just with a cover, but with a cover for your chosen printer. Self-publishing is its own world. Gonna stick with lulu.com to start with.
2022-10-04: Fiddled with the cover. I don't think yellow looks good for the spine text. Better, the lightning bolt red, maybe.
https://www.bookdesignmadesimple.com/book-spine-design/
https://creativepro.com/setting-vertical-text-in-indesign/
I don't really have good material to put on the back. Quotes + praise are the obvious thing, can also use praise for the MM series. That frontispiece image of the Sacred Clown (hey, who's to say it's not? :)) but it's used once already.
2022-10-02: Succeeded in making the back cover black. Considered putting a picture of the author back there. Would be a joke, but jokes get old, and then they can be annoying (eh, maybe the pic is kind of sweet, too. Or in the wrong mood it could be seen as mocking, which is no good.).
Thinking of using canva.com, would blow InDesign away for ease of use, but, I'm not sure I can upload my own fonts ('Felix Titling MT', for the spine), which is a must.
Professional cover designs cost $400 - $650, ain't going to do that.
Murdoch's front cover for AtH sets a tone for the rest of the cover - dark, with red and white (sound familiar? ࿕). Yellow text on the spine? It's tempting to hearken back to the show, but that's lame, this is Murdoch doing something different. I think too intense of colors won't look good on a book, but what do I know? Maybe it'd stand out on a shelf ('Mom? What's a Semitic goblin?' 'Put that back, honey'). Maybe matte black as in the Fan's Wife version above makes it not so bad. Looking at online publishers, got a foretaste of the price of the book - $11 for a softcover, of which $4 - $5 goes to me. Say I can get rid of that, $7(!) Probably (+$3,4 =) $11 with inflation (I say that, because it quoted InDesign as being $20 / month, whereas it's ~$30, so I know inflation will have set in). Which is pleasantly low, maybe $16 with shipping. Ah, but that's probably without pictures. Still, it's a promisingly low starting price. Considering Barnes + Noble (where Black Pilled did his) as well as lulu. Yes, we'll burn through publishers, but we know that going in.
2022-09-29: Don't want to be tacky and tie the book too much to the show, but I would like to use that Tannenberg font if it doesn't stick out too much from the other fonts. But it might :(.
2022-09-28: Have a Windows 10 laptop with InDesign (the industry standard book layout software apparently) installed, and am learning paths and layers, oh my. Got called out, and, well, it's motivating to know that people still care. I do want to have it done by Nov 5th, the 1-year anniversary of its release. That said, if any anons work in publishing and know how to put books together, and you want to do this in your spare time, I can get you the materials and tell you what I want. (Of course, the book is not mine, you can make one any way you want.) Absent such volunteers I will press on.
2022-08-14: I tried installing Windows 10 but it's not straightforward to burn the Windows image to a DVD for some reason (is it .iso, or not? I don't get it). Anyway, I'm going to get a cheap Windows 10 laptop and continue to work on it from there. I was afraid, anyway, that Windows would not respect my existing partitions and try to 'take over' the machine - I know it used to do that anyway. Win10 machines are selling for cheap right now, not that I want more electronic junk to cart around. I'm moving this week, so hopefully I'll be able to put it together, starting this next weekend. Y'know, two more weeks :(.
2022-08-09: I haven't stopped. I've tried jamming things into LibreOffice Writer but have gotten frustrated again. InDesign I have running on Windows 10 in a virtual machine, and it's slow, and I can't copy materials into it and emailing them is a pain. But, it's occurred to me that I can just install Windows 10 on either an external drive or a partition, and run it all natively. So ... I hope to be able to make reliable progress soon.
2022-07-30: have the latest fan text in LibreOffice with the right margins. Choosing the fonts, adding the caption to the frontispiece.
https://www.indesignskills.com/inspiration/25-perfect-fonts-for-books
https://www.indesignskills.com/inspiration/fonts-for-books
https://blog.reedsy.com/book-fonts
2022-07-16 Uploaded latest versions:
- 'Fan Printing' version -- Easier to read, edited by Writer Anon, and then by myself.
- Murdoch's original language -- lightly edited for spelling, with some of the typography fancied-up, but entirely Murdoch's language. Given the same nice format as the 'fan printing' version above.
(The images are large in these e-versions because I doubt anyone's going to try to print them, and because they're nice images, worth looking at.)
To do for a hardcopy: shrink the images, fix the 'Red Dragon' image's aspect ratio (ugh, all of them - the Sacred Sword's is off, too), and add 'stuck-into-the-binding' ('gutter') margins. Add a caption: "'Chase the Sun' by Murdoch Murdoch" to the frontispiece.
2022-07-09: Pretty much done with my second pass (over WA's second pass :| ). I've also been marking up Murdoch's original with LaTeX, because, as much as getting it to .pdf as I'd like is a pain, I love the fact that it's so explicit, and pure text - it should never lose or introduce funny characters between format conversions. What it generates is very repeatable, and I can use pandoc to convert it to .odt or MS Word or anything else. I currently think the large-size edition is going to be Murdoch's own, relatively untouched language - just the minimal editing for spelling (and LaTeX markup). People will want what Murdoch wrote, I think. (That said, I try to preserve what Murdoch wrote in WA's + my edition, just, made more readable.) All the changes and versions are at the bottom of the page, they're always uploaded within an hour or so.
2022-07-02: Still working on it. Chapter 1. Mostly, just really appreciating Writer Anon's 2nd pass. But I do dip my own changes in, they're all visible as I go. I'll say again that I love what WA has done with it. I had been thinking that the bigger, hardcover, many-pictures version would just use Murdoch's original text, because, I'm sure, people just want something authentic etc, but, at the moment I think the text is so much better - clearer, without getting rid of all of Murdoch's 'old-timey' / archaic flavor - that I'll use the same text for both. I'm writing up questions / justifications for changes /to WA/ as I go. I'll send the email when I'm done I guess. Apropos of nothing, the end of chapter 1, 'asking for the impossible-to-surmount mountain', reminds me of 'To Dream the Impossible Dream' (YouTube) from 'The Man of La Mancha', a musical version of Don Quixote. Wonder whether Murdoch was familiar with it.
2022-06-23: Got Writer Anon's 2nd pass yesterday (see below). And, have InDesign installed. I'll probably bite the bullet and rent the nice book template.
2022-06-18: Have the chapters in LibreOffice Writer. Need to do front matter, table of contents, figure out LaTeX's font, and, get the fonts for the Negro in chapter 7, and Nihilism, implemented. Back cover (maybe), and, some friendly quotes about AtH and MM the show.
2022-06-16: Writer Anon wrote a couple of days ago, and may be able to help with the LaTeX formatting, but, I'm going to muscle through with LibreOffice writer just in case. I am reminded that 'shipping is a feature' and it's time to get something out.
2022-06-11,12: Jamming AtH into Libre Office Writer format. Lots of settings. And LaTeX still looks better ;_;. Looking for where LaTeX identifies its fonts so I can use them.
Thinking, that adding pictures (like Edward Poynter's "Faithful Unto Death") would make a larger book more palatable. If not done perfectly, though, they might get in the way, too. And you'd need a couple dozen of them.
Would I get in legal trouble if I used a picture of Al Goldstein (porn king), bald, for the Semitic goblin in his castle? Artists plz respond ;).
2022-06-09: AtH service will resume, after I've switched over to InDesign. (Don't judge me too harshly, tech bros, LaTeX is global macros that change global variables, and the book is formatted on top of two layers. Changing things is like walking over a floor of mousetraps.) If I succeed with InDesign, it'll mean I can't open-source the code for it (probably? Or at least, everyone who wanted to change it would have to rent InDesign. But, that's the way the cookie crumbles.)
2022-06-07: ath-fan-2022-06-07.pdf - the cover is a proper .pdf, and, the separating line stays square on the ends. Remaining: Table of Contents (ToC), making the page wide enough where the binding is going to be, reducing the wasted space at the top, at the chapter's beginning (though that's not a problem in the big scheme of things, it's only a bit of paper, x12. Aesthetics, really). And pull them to the left (11 and 12 hit the edge of the page). And the nice font that used to be on the title page is gone. Need to make those Felix Titling, or whatever the nice one was. LuaLatex is supposed to be better at fonts, so that's good. Get rid of the date, there.
2022-06-04: ath-2022-06-05-01-10.pdf - no longer has two forewords.
2022-06-04: Here is an example, close-to 5"x8" book, front, and showing thickness, that approximates what the paperback will be (~100 pages). Too small? Not large enough to be a satisfying 'piece of Murdoch Murdoch'? Well I guess the idea is to be cheap.
2022-06-02: Finally got gimp to draw a line and center it, so, a version with a near-final cover is up. Next is back to LaTeX to fix the too-large chapter headers (too large for a 5" x 8" page). (Gah, why does the line 'pinch off' at the beginning?)
2022-05-28, 29: A "getting there" version. (todo: settle on cover, ToC, find a way to shrink the Red Dragon pic, center 'Dedication' and 'Foreword', make the beginning-of-chapter headers smaller, also, pull them to the left (11 and 12 hit the edge of the page). Make the Negro and Nihilism voices wrap properly (may not happen). Maybe add a glossary / notes (things like Parian marble - ehn - too much?). But, getting there. I'm grateful that LaTeX has been holding out.)
2022-05-27: Played with the size and placement of Murdoch's name on the cover (designers, if you want to take a crack, the font is: Felix Titling MT by Monotype, and this is the 'blank' image).
2022-05-23: Writer Anon is making a 3rd pass, which he thinks will take a week. (Murdoch is always welcome to chime in, via the "post an image to /pol/ tagged with 'always the horizon'" method, as well as directly contacting Writer Anon - his email address is still in that thread.)
I'm happy to report that 39 people (unique ips) looked at this page in the last week - I haven't alienated /everyone/ with the long delay. And about 300 looked at the AtH main page. Rest assured, when the book is done it'll be on the front page for maybe even longer than the usual week.
Snapshot of a 'basic' LaTeX AtH, that's reliably re-creatable. The font is too small, the pages need numbering, it needs a table of contents and other frontmatter, but, it's got 'lettrine' (big letters at the chapters' starts, anyway).
2022-05-22: The LaTeX editors just basically let you inject LaTeX more comfortably, they're not WYSIWYG that generate LaTeX like I'd hoped. Am trying to build up from the bottom, now - get something that generates correctly, then add in special effects (so far so good). If all else fails (but what deadline?) I can make a more plainly formatted book (which I don't prefer), or, rent Adobe Framemaker and redo the book in that.
About the size, recommendations are for 60-70 characters per line, and > 80 is right out. Well, my example 10"x7.5" book has up to 100 characters, and I can feel the difficulty of such long lines. So, I don't know about that size. Maybe I'll make the hardcover version also be 5" x 8".
2022-05-20: Thought Google Docs imported from .pdf perfectly - but I was just seeing the .pdf. At least it brings the italics over correctly, so it's the best I've found so far.
Google Docs is ok for what it is, but it doesn't allow fine formatting. Am going to go to a LaTeX-based editor
The book has 36544 words, which is novella-length (20K - 50K (or 17.5K - 40K - so either way)). The industry-standard size for a novella is: 5" x 8". So, I guess that'll be the paperback size.
2022-05-19: Writer Anon wrote in and made some welcome suggestions.
2022-05-18: Still trying via LaTeX. I wonder about the 10" x 7.5" size (measured by its similarity to this example (inside: one, two), it seems a format for a picture book, and AtH doesn't have too many pictures. I'll do a hardcopy of /some/ format, and a cheaper, smaller softcover, before it's done. It's not really a coffee-table book. Probably need to visit Barnes + Noble or the like, for examples.
2022-05-16: Much success with TexLive. Now I need to tame the image sizes, add the foreword, probably other things. Please, all, WEIGH IN ( ) on how it looks, what should be done. We're approaching finality.
I'm half thinking that I should do the paperback first, to work out the kinks relatively cheaply, before people spend more money on the nice version. Tomorrow I'll put up the makings for what I have, so that knowledgeable people can tweak it maybe.
2022-05-15: Bashing around with TexLive, wondering whether I shouldn't just try to convert to Word. "pandoc" didn't work so well on that count.
2022-05-13: Looks like the fan's book is 7-ish x 10-ish - "children's" or "textbook" size. Also, poked around on lulu, had the thought that they might want just the ASCII text, but no, they want a .pdf. So, back to grappling with LaTeX and the kaobook style. It's not infinitely scary, I just need to add graphics and change the paper size (probably more that I don't know about yet). I think I'm going to go with the Creative Commons, 'sharealike', yet commercial license. I couldn't bring myself to declare it Public Domain, since I know it's not (though I don't know why).
2022-05-12: Looks like (via myfonts.com/WhatTheFont) the cover font is "Felix Titline MT by Monotype".
2022-05-12: Chapters 5 and 12, second passes. I'll probably spot-check some, but I'm 99% done.
2022-05-10: Chapter 3 second pass.
2022-05-09: Chapter 1 second pass.
2022-05-07: Chapter 4 second pass.
2022-05-06: Murdoch to Writer Anon: "Also the expression you gave nihilism was a great touch.". I'd taken out most of Nihilism's theatricality, because Murdoch's original way, she made sense to me as nihilism distilled (maybe unintentionally), sounding like a depressed person, little emotion or color. Now, WA made her speech a different typeface, as well as being more theatrical and having more personality, but because I don't know whether Murdoch meant one or the other interpretation of 'expression', I'm going to leave in both of WA's changes.
Chapters 11 and 12, I guess. I'm starting to not care, so I should probably take a break.
2022-05-05: Chapters 9, 10, and 2 second passes.
2022-05-04: Chapter 8 second pass.
2022-05-03: Chapters 6 and 7 second passes done. Am not doing them in order, I'm doing the easier ones first.
2022-04-28: Just for interest, the style Murdoch says he wants to evoke: Thus Spake Zarathustra. Note the 'all-too-', 'verily', and 'suddenly'. Using 'ever' as an intensifier, or maybe showing an /intent/ (because the action is unlimited). ('so, too' isn't from Zarathustra. And 'know this' has only one use the way Murdoch uses it.)
There are no "let out"s, "mutter out"s in Zarathustra, but you know, I've kind of gotten used to them, and they've started to feel legit to me (induced? :) ). Like, if they are not actual archaic speech, then they're of some archaic pattern ("cry out"?). Not Chaucer, not Beowulf, nor anything else I can think of (King James Bible? Shakespeare?), but, you couldn't change them without gouging a lot of material. Writer Anon has nibbled, and I probably have, too, but both of us have left them mostly intact.
2022-04-26: Chapter 11 is done except for nothing ever being done. I've got a method and a firmer philosophy.
'can not' vs 'cannot' - 'cannot' is more correct, and plenty formal, but 'can not' emphasizes the 'not', and feels more archaic. Writer Anon didn't ever touch it, so I guess I won't, either, though imo it unnecessarily 'staccatos up' the text. Maybe that's lazy, because as I say sometimes 'cannot' is fine. But then, you want to be consistent. 'swamp' vs 'swamps' - leave it like Murdoch had it, 'swamps' outside the swamp, 'swamp' inside. Also a lot of 'look to', which already has a meaning in modernish English: 'look expectantly toward', 'hope for something from', but Murdoch uses it in place of 'look toward', 'look at', basically. I've never seen it used the way he does, but, it's very common, and it's Murdoch's book.
The book is kind of impressive.
MM does his usual 'fourth wall' breaking (talking to /you/), like he did in the show. Looking at you out of the corner of his eye anyway. Now we just need someone to animate it. I guess we'll settle for 'better pictures on the radio' (ie your imagination), as someone said.
2022-04-24: Pardon the slowness, I want to get it right. A strange effect, reading the narrow-column diff format made reading easier, erasing some of my objection to the language.
Put back the things Murdoch mentioned upon reading WA's version.
Made all-way diffs, so I can see the size and kind of changes Writer Anon made, for myself. It helps to be able to contrast all 3.
(For what it's worth, this is where I'm spending my 'site' time, the book is not languishing in 'someday'.)
2022-04-22: Finished first-pass proof-reading. Post theme: Always the Sun (YouTube), by the Stranglers (for the Sun breaking through the clouds in the Swamps of Sadness).

TODO:

Make e-pub versions.
https://blog.reedsy.com/guide/parts-of-a-book/
For the hard printing, find some nice quotes about the book on /pol/ to put on the back cover.
Make a glossary with links, here! There are a lot of esoteric(? or otherwise) references, that I sure wasn't familiar with.
The Sacred Sword is described as a gladius Hispaniensis (Google search). It is my impression that Murdoch chose his chapter header images off-the-cuff (but he wanted fan images); it would be nice if we could put some fan-generated art in the book. If some artist could make a reasonable-looking picture of a gladius Hispaniensis Sacred Sword, well I'd like to use something like that.

Know this: I can't give out free copies for contributors, but if you contribute, I will acknowledge your contribution to a family-friendly handle of your choosing (or your actual name if you swing that way) in an acknowledgements section.

Reminder, I'm going to try to sell this for cost. But, that probably won't produce much savings, iirc authors only make $1-$2 per book anyway. Wrt color etc, I'm aiming at ~$30, so whatever features that allows. I'm going to go for durable and nice when given the choice. I currently think I might publish twice at different places, one nicer, one cheaper; two places, for resilience. Even though it's got 'Semitic goblins' in it and will very likely get deplatformed, well there are enough platforms that I hope we'll be able to keep it available. You know, I wonder whether it would be worth abbreviating to 'SGs'? Some Jews did something like that with the Talmud. When the Talmud was discovered, they bowdlerized the language, and published a second book of 'corrections' that restored the original language. So they could say: "No, the Talmud doesn't say that!" (Source: Israel Shahak's, "Jewish History, Jewish Religion"). Anyway, it occurs to me that against its getting coordinatedly targeted (too paranoid?), you might want to buy fast, once it's out. I'm sure all these little places have terms about 'hate'.

Frontispiece image, the master of Murdoch's merch poster 'Chase the Sun' (Thanks again, Murdoch.)

Murdoch's chapter header images - if you have a good-quality image to replace one of the chapter headers (or to just add to a chapter), send it in! I think Murdoch wanted to see fan contributions (he said, 'you can use anything for the pictures', and, that he wanted to hear it read to him. Ok, so I'm generalizing a bit, but I bet I'm not much wrong.

Writer Anon's 2nd pass vs em14's pass:

Writer Anon's 2nd pass vs Murdoch's original:

em14's 2nd pass (built on WA's 2nd) vs WA's 2nd:

em14's 2nd pass (built on WA's 2nd) vs Murdoch's original:

Murdoch's Original Chapters
Chapters from Writer Anon's 2nd pass
Em14's chapters (built on WA's 2nd pass). Candidate for printing.