Here’s how the book was looking in the wee, dark hours of the morning today. All the pages have run through the press and are stacked on pallets, waiting to be assembled.

I’ve spent much of my career producing images for magazines and newspapers, so there’s something familiar…comforting even…about walking out onto the pressroom floor, smelling the ink and hearing the hum of the rollers turning.

We are just weeks away from holding the first copy of Lessons on the Road to Peace in our hands and now that I see it all come together, I am more excited than ever. We made the choice to self-publish this book so that we could control every step of the process and produce a book that has all of the soul and wisdom and beauty of this journey. If you’ve never seen the process, let me give you a little sneak peek.

First, of course, you have to write the book. Just showing up and getting words on paper is a herculean effort. This book is 304 pages long, and that’s a lot of words. So, you write the book, and then you have to edit it. And then you have to edit it. And then you have to edit it. Maybe it’s just me, but I need a steady march of painful revisions to finally get the message refined and delivered in its final form.

I sifted through two years of photos. Terabytes of files on multiple hard drives and narrowed it down to a modest gallery of 2,000 photos to deliver to Barbara Koster, a long-time client turned friend, who is the design genius behind my first two books, and this one, too. 

I had created a map of the book, planning out the flow of the themes, the chronology, the geography and which stories would fall where on the pages. Barbara started choosing photos and laying out book. Where the photos would run big, I’d have to trim text to accommodate. Where the text was dominant, we had to give up a few images. Sometimes the layout would have a little hole and I’d go searching for the right image to fill out the design and tell the story. It was a little dance we did for months until the design finally looked just right and we delivered a finished file to the printer.

Proofs and more proofs. It’s amazing how six sets of editing eyes can read through a passage ten times until finally, a lurking typo reveals itself, and it is so glaringly obvious that you wonder how you had missed it so many times before. I would be lying if I said I thought it was flawless, but dang, that copy was clean, so it was time to go to press.

The book prints 16-pages at a time, laid out on the paper sheet so it can be folded and trimmed into what looks like a little booklet, or “signature.” Because Lessons on the Road to Peace is 304-pages long, that’s 19 signatures. (ok, I’m getting into the weeds…onward.)

Every time a new signature is on the press, it takes a little time to make it lovely. We run a few sheets, look at the colors of the printed page, add a little yellow here, remove a little black there, and try again. Once everybody is happy, I sign off on the approval slip and the press operator runs a few thousand copies. The team changes the press plates to the next signature and we do it all again.

These presses cost a few million dollars, so they don’t let them stay idle very long. Once you are on press, you keep rolling around the clock. Every signature takes about 60-90 minutes to complete, so during our press check, I ran through three shifts of operators, but I signed off on every signature. There’s a client lounge with a couch for naps between signatures. And a good supply of coffee.

So now it’s printed. The project looks amazing, but it’s just a bunch of loose sheets. Over the next couple weeks, those pages will be folded and trimmed. They will be sewn together and finally bound between the covers.

I’ve never been pregnant, but every person I’ve ever met in their late stages of pregnancy has said some version of this: “Oh, my god, it’s time for this baby to be born.”

I get that.

We are in the home stretch. Books go on sale on our website December 15 (oh, my god, that’s next Friday!) We will start shipping books the first week of January.

Check out the video below for a snapshot of the process. I’m going to bed. 😉

Peace and gratitude.

John