Middle Ground – Revised edit – again

Middle Ground, revised edit, March 2018 copyright Douglas Stockdale

At this point the realist side (aka the practical engineer) of my personality is kicking in. While I would really, really like to have a large commercial (trade) photobook of the leporello design published, I am not sure that I can obtain the financing for this book in advance of its printing. I have been thinking about a Kickstarter program to make the trade book happen and while that idea is still lurking, I am now working on a scaled down version of this project, both in book size and book quantity, that I can self-publish.

Which is leading to the development of my Middle Ground book dummy #4 that I hinted at earlier. The edit for this new dummy is a work in progress, see photo above. I have the maximized size of the book from the printer for a digital litho printed leporello book, essentially six pages per blank, with a small end tab for the binding process. The trim size is now 7-7/8″ wide x 6-1/2″ high. This will provide a very nice image size and when the leporello is fully opened, the pages will extend about 15 feet, still an impressive length.

To reduce the printing cost I have redesigned the book with one photograph per page (printed on front side only of the leporello), for a total page count of 66 pages from the previous 132 pages for the trade book. The main reason for the new edit is that instead of viewing one image at a time there will be two images per spread and I need to consider the interplay of the paired images. The overall sequence is thus slightly modified but I have the same visual intent of the progression.

For the revised photobook my intent now is to self-publish a limited edition artist book, with the edition size of 99 books, plus artist proofs and a few extra for advertising and display copies. To keep the costs in line, I will be performing the hand binding for the leporello, which means there are 11 glue joints that I need to perform to complete each book. To ensure that the leporello lays correctly, this will be a slow and tedious process, which means that the book cost will not really reflect that amount of my labor going into each book, but each book will be personal and probably a bit unique as a result. This book binding process will take a good bit of time, so I need to decide to do all of the binding before I start shipping or ship the books as I make them, probably a couple of books per day?

Let me know if you want to be placed on the now growing interest list (doug@douglasstockdale.com) for my Middle Ground book. If you can help me network for potential exhibitions (pop-up, weekend, month long), I would really, really appreciate that very much!! (expect this to part of my update to be repeated very often!)

Cheers!