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Brockbank book

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Grey Doffin Grand Master

Grey Doffin

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A little bit of trouble. Hard to fill in one of the forms because the cursor and screen disagreed about where they should be; otherwise it went well.

However, once Darcy has it ready for everyone, you all need to buy a copy; this is a first class effort. Excellent articles about the history of Bizen-to and crisp photos & oshigata of some high end pieces. Also, a thorough write up of each piece. I'm a third of the way through it and I've learned tons already. Kudos to Darcy and Bob Benson for a job very well done.

So, if you're serious about sword study, here is an impressive book at good price. Buy it.

Grey

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Curran Grand Master

Curran

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Strider,

 

I did not have any difficulties. The books arrived very fast.

 

It is my understanding this is still an "early release" version in which Darcy wanted to hear about any problems specifically with the book. I don't think he can do anything about LULU themselves. I do not think you are "too late", but rather too early.

 

I edited an earlier version for Darcy, and I must say that even I was pleasantly surprised in the improvements made between the proto-release and this early release version, -as he added more.

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Stephen Grand Master

Stephen

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the link for lulu http://www.lulu.com/

 

I have two copies for the show if I do not sell both and your still looking peter ill save one for you.

 

I'm sure it will come back on line, at the moment none available.

 

Excellent book which I hope to spend some time with at the show, the price will only go up in the future.

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bdgrange Collaborator

bdgrange

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Fastest delivery ever encountered.

It looks very nice and the photography is excellent.

Reminds one of the Masamune exhibit catalog.

Spoke to one of the contributers of two of the fine swords shown.

Very good reading with insights by Tanobe that are honest and

clearly defined. Not done reading this and enjoy it immensely.

Good reading in bed with good lighting, doesn't weigh a ton.

best to all

Bill Delagrange

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Darcy Mentor

Darcy

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A bit late to the thread... if you have any wonky problems let me know ASAP. Lulu.com is pretty good about handling issues. One tester got his copy with pages 1-100 duplicated. They gave him a refund right away (which means I gave him a refund too I guess hehe).

 

But I want to know if people are experiencing issues.

 

I've had some problems with the Lulu.com creator tools in the last few weeks and the book vanishing for a short period was because I had blocked sales for a short period while I worked out a problem I was having.

 

The version currently up is the final version of the book. It is possible that I might fix a typo or two if/when they are found but this edition is final. The major issues would be things like a photo printing too dark or alignment of titles not being consistent, gutters too wide, margins, overlayed text printing stacked in the wrong order, table of contents with wrong numbers, and so on. I am 99.9% sure all of that is the way it should be.

 

It's very hard to fill all the roles on a book like this, because if my focus is on one element like layout, I could be staring an incomplete sentence in the face and it won't register. If I'm trying to get color and image consistency as high as possible, I will miss something else. So it makes me skip around changing hats, doing test runs, proofing, proofing, proofing, each trip through with the comb pulls out tangles. Then fresh eyes usually catch stuff which later looks very obvious but I may have been staring at for a year and I've "gotten used to."

 

So the people who gave me feedback, thank you very much for improving the quality. For a home-made project I think and hope it comes over as fairly professional.

 

One thing that I found to be very interesting was that it was very hard to make it look "book-like." Book designers are artists like any other, and their choice of layout, font, presentation, all of this if done right just makes the reader feel good when they pick up the book and it may not entirely register with them. My first few tries had me discover that it was pretty hard to get away from the term-paper kind of look and feel into what felt like yeah, this is a book I'm reading.

 

Careful choice of font (Warnock for the most part, really great font family from Adobe) after a week of experiments and several tests with different faces gave a warm yet substantial feeling to it. I searched high and low for nice Japanese calligraphy fonts to add some touches here and there. I hired four different calligraphic artists to do the calligraphy for the title page before I got someone who was very talented and could give the feeling that I wanted.

 

When you get your margins right, gutters, font, line sizes, space between paragraphs, whether you want ragged lines or not and where, which weight of italic to use and when, your calligraphy, section pages, title pages, covers, all that lined up and done right... then it jumps the gap and suddenly has that book feeling you hoped for.

 

PS. Grey is an awesome proofreader.

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Darcy Mentor

Darcy

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Also please note there are two choices of binding, spiral bound and perfect bound. I like the spiral bound myself because I like to fold it in half and put it on something flat if I'm studying or if I want to scan something. It becomes a more useful tool like that. It's an uglier binding of course and harder to find in the bookshelf so you're free to order what works best for you! Both versions can be found here:

 

http://stores.lulu.com/nihonto

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Leroy Contributor

Leroy

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Also please note there are two choices of binding, spiral bound and perfect bound. I like the spiral bound myself because I like to fold it in half and put it on something flat if I'm studying or if I want to scan something. It becomes a more useful tool like that. It's an uglier binding of course and harder to find in the bookshelf so you're free to order what works best for you! Both versions can be found here:

 

http://stores.lulu.com/nihonto

 

I could not decide which I wanted, so I got both :D hehe!

 

-Leroy

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