Here's the press release announcing our new imprint, Broken Levee Books, which went out to the press ahead of today's New Orleans Book Fair.

Chin Music Press Launches Broken Levee Books Imprint
Seattle publisher reissues popular New Orleans book in beautifully redesigned hardback edition

SEATTLE — Chin Music Press announced today that it has started a new imprint called Broken Levee Books dedicated to preserving the unique literary heritage of New Orleans and discovering its most compelling voices.

The Seattle publisher also has released this month a redesigned and refreshed version of its hit 2006 anthology of essays and art, Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? Chin Music Press took the unusual step of reissuing the book as a hardback edition because it wanted to offer a more aesthetically stunning version of the book, which was made during the chaos after Hurricane Katrina and released before Mardi Gras in 2006.

“When we published the anthology after the levees broke, speed was critical. We were one of the first publishers to respond to the debacle in New Orleans because we felt the urgency of our mission,” says Chin Music Press publisher Bruce Rutledge. “We haven’t changed a word because the writers need to be read in context: They wrote their essays without knowing if their city would be saved. But the art and the design and the paper quality have all been refurbished and refreshed. We rebuilt the book while the Gulf Coast struggled to rebuild itself.”

The second edition of our anthology Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? should start appearing on bookshelves any day now. It looks stunning, I must say, and we're damn proud of it. The writers in this book put you back in those horrible days of September 2005, then pull you out and leave you somewhere between laughing and crying by the end. The redesign, by our very own Craig Mod and our printing buddies at Yushin Insatsu, brings an extra pop to the old woodblock prints and adds a a little sparkle to the book. The new cover takes the star theme right to the very edges of the page. When Craig snaps a few erotic photos of the book for us, we'll post them here, and you'll see what I mean. But for now, you'll just have to take my word for it.

Unless, that is, you happen to be headed to the Parkview Tavern in Mid-City this Saturday. The bar is having an art fair and brother Dave will be there showing the latest version of our book. (For a glimpse of Dave with Saints face-paint, check out slide #9 on the bar's myspace page). Saints fans and Parkview barflies get first dibs. For the rest of New Orleans, the book will also be on display on November 15 at the New Orleans Book Fair.

It's a big week for Chin Music Press. On a week when the absurd and dismal Iraq War turns five and spring officially arrives, we're siding with spring by offering a whole lot of good stuff for your soul. We've got two readings in San Francisco, a reading in Seattle and our fifth title, Art Space Tokyo, goes to the printer. We're going for it!

Tomorrow, Dave Rutledge, currently stuck in the Houston airport and sending me text messages likening it to hell, will be in a little slice of heaven along San Francisco's Market Street called Get Lost Travel Books. The travel gear/bookstore is a beacon in the neighborhood with a big glass window emitting warm light on the street, and up in the loft is a cozy little reading area where Dave will update us on all things New Orleans and read a bit of Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? This will be the last event for the first edition of Do You Know because the book is all but out of print. But Get Lost has copies, so come get 'em. The reading starts at 7.

The following night, 3/20, at the same cozy loft in Get Lost Travel Books at the same time (7 pm), Sumie Kawakami makes her North American debut as she does a reading and talk about Goodbye Madame Butterfly. I will have a flask of bourbon on hand should she get a little nervous (and who wouldn't, giving a reading in one's second language?), and I'll make sure to bring something for her to drink too.

Then on 3/22, Sumie takes on the Seattle crowd at Elliott Bay Book Co. in Pioneer Square. She'll be on from 7:30. Translator Yuko Enomoto will be in the crowd too.

Join us at one of these events if you can. They should be fun.

And just to top it off, we're sending our fifth title to the printers this week. Art Space Tokyo is shaping up to be a true literary object. If you want your book hot (or at least warm, depending on where you live) off the presses, we still have a ridiculously good offer of $22 for the book and worldwide shipping through March 31. After that, the book will retail for $30. Get it now!

We're not shy at CMP, so when Nik Mercer of Anthem magazine asked if he could interview us for the magazine's website, we said, "Hell yes," then proceeded to talk over each other until Nik had enough to emerge with this nifty little interview.. Anybody else want to chat?

One of the great indie bookstores in all of Texas (or all of the US for that matter), BookPeople in Austin, has been featuring our little babe Do You Know ... at the front of the store. We heard this from contributor Jette Kernion, who took the snap featured here. Jette writes:

Tons of copies of that fabulous book, Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans, perhaps because one of the BookPeople book clubs is supposedly reading it soon. That doesn't mean you can't go buy a copy if you haven't already. It's a beautiful little book with some excellent essays in it (including mine). These books were available on the stand at the entrance to the store.

Why is this significant? Way back in early 2006 when we were planning events for the book, we called BookPeople and they were extremely polite and nice but not interested in the least. We were an unknown quantity and no reviews had appeared, so who could blame them? But it is gratifying to see that now they are giving us prominent play. Persistence, people, persistence.

A sidenote: After being rejected by BookPeople, we held a really nice event at BookWoman, which we thought was a sister store until we were set straight. Thus we now have two good homes in Austin.

Seattleites, tune to 94.9 FM KUOW tomorrow at 9 to hear Chin Music's very own David Rutledge (co-editor of and contributor to Do You Know ..., pictured here with his agent) on Steve Scher's Weekday. Steve and krewe have assembled a panel of New Orleanians in Seattle to talk about their city, and author Chris Rose will be joining them. The rest of the world can hear the interview on a podcast anytime by going to the Weekday homepage.

Our second book, and so far, our best-seller, Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? just got a very positive review in the Midwest Book Review, an online review service that publishes its reviews on Amazon and in other forums. Here's a snippet:

(A) collection of heartfelt true stories told by survivors, evacuees, and natives of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the lethal city flooding. A handful of black-and-white illustrations grace this collection of brief reminiscences of New Orleans as it once was, the hardship of survival, attempts to return to the city, the hope of rebuilding despite the overwhelming challenges, and much more. A dollop of humor here and there intersperse the at times harsh true stories, in this highly recommended tribute.

I don't have the exact count on me right now, but our first run of DYK will probably be sold out in a few months. If you'd like to get a copy of the first edition, or send it to a friend, consider ordering it over our site. From now until Fat Tuesday, Chin Music Press is contributing $5 for every copy of DYK and Last of the Red Hot Poppas bought over our site to help displaced writers in southern Louisiana. We'll be donating the proceeds to KARES, a group that has been helping writers in various ways since soon after the levees broke in New Orleans.

My bro, Dave Rutledge, will be manning the Chin Music booth at the NOLA Bookfair on Nov. 10. It's free and a lot of fun, plus Sarah Inman is performing on the trapeze a la her essay in Do You Know, "A Lesson from Below." Eyebrows raised yet? Come check it out. Dave will have all four Chin Music books for sale and will probably be offering some nice discounts (especially if you buy him a beer). Hope you stop by.

Jason Berry, author of Last of the Red Hot Poppas and a contributor to Do You Know, was interviewed this week about life in New Orleans post-Katrina by Critical Mass, a blog from the National Book Critics Circle board of directors.

Part one deals with life after Katrina, and part two focuses on his writing, with insightful cul de sacs into the New Orleans music scene and the environment.

When you don't have the muscle to get your authors on Oprah! and Fresh Air or reviews in the NYT, you can sometimes forget that all your work to get the word out about your books takes time to bubble up. This Sunday we got a little write-up in The Daily Advertiser in Lafayette, LA, which reminded me that no matter how many calls you've made about a book and how many galley sets you have sent out, when you are small, you still have the potential to be discovered well after your release.

OK, so the paragraph from Lafayette won't set us over the top, but it does show that our marketing efforts need to focus on the long-run with each book.

And by the way, it takes just one sentence — even a sentence fragment — to make a publisher smile. This is the sentence that made my Sunday:

Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans ($18.50) is another ingeniously packaged title from Chin Music Press

Nice.

Congratulations to Toni McGee Causey on the publication of her first novel, Bobbie Faye's Very (very, very, very) Bad Day from St. Martin's Press. From the looks of the videos promoting the book on Toni's site, this novel will be a hoot. (And this is yet another example of publishers and writers turning to video to promote their books.)

Toni was instrumental in helping us put together Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans last year. Blogger supreme Colleen Mondor introduced me to her, and I spent the first few days after the levee broke riveted to her blog as she wrote heart-wrenching accounts of happenings at the LSU triage center. Those writings ended up as "Where Grace Lives" in Do You Know. Toni also introduced me to fellow bloggers Ray Shea and Juliette Kernion. Plus she helped us promote the book in her hometown of Baton Rouge.

We at Chin Music wish Toni and Bobbie a lot of luck. Can't wait to read about this "bat shit crazy" heroine from Baton Rouge.

So the Saints lost and the city of New Orleans' football joyride is over.

Next up: Mardi Gras. Fat Tuesday is on Feb. 20 this year, and the Mardi Gras season is in full swing, with a couple of parades already finished and the colorful Krewe du Vieux scheduled to ramble through the French Quarter a week from Saturday.

Last year during Mardi Gras season, we launched our second title, Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?, at the Saturn Bar in what was personally one of the most memorable moments of my career.

This Wednesday night, four of the contributors to the anthology will be reading from their work at the Jefferson Parish library at 7pm. It's free and open to the public. Writers will be running the gamut of the New Orleans experience, from Dave Rutledge's "Corners of the Quarter" to Sarah Inman's "A Lesson from Below" to CW Cannon's "New Orleans Manifesto," which was handed out by costumed revelers at Mardi Gras 2003 and is even more relevant today, and finally, to Ray Shea's hilarious "I Was a Teenage Float Grunt."

This is something I won't be mentioning on our Voices of New Orleans blog, but since you folks are ostensibly reading this blog because you're interested in the travails of a small publisher, we are getting excitingly close to deciding whether to produce a second edition of Do You Know. We printed a little fewer than 6,000 copies of DYK and have just several hundred left in our warehouse in Seattle. If we don't get hit with massive returns in the next month or so and if sales stay on pace, look for a thicker version of DYK as early as later this year (which means, of course, the first editions will become more valuable — so if you don't have one yet, get your butt to the Jefferson Parish library or order one here!)

If you've completely sated yourself on our Chin Music holiday specials, allow me to guide you to some other great gift ideas on our sister site, Voices of New Orleans. Colleen Mondor has reviewed a dozen books for us since February — from Poppy Z. Brite's Soul Kitchen to the first four Neighborhood Story Project books — and any one of them would make a good gift idea. Check out all of Colleen's reviews here.

We're invoking the spirit of Cleveland-area furniture retailers this holiday season by offering you crazy discounts on our beautiful, entertaining books. Trust us, the bibliophiles in your life will love the following:

The Chin Music Collection: All three titles for $40*
* A savings of $31.50 — crazy!

or, for the less fiscally endowed among you who still want to wow a book lover or two, we recommend:

Kuhaku for Kurisumasu
Our baby, Kuhaku & Other Accounts from Japan, for just $15, almost 50% off the $28.50 retail price.

These books make great gifts. And if you buy lots of them via our website, it will all but ensure that we can keep on making more. So, thank you, ahead of time, for supporting us!

If you're in New York City next week, check out Roland Kelts' launch party for his book Japanamerica at The Cutting Room. It sounds like a great bash — music from Gaijin å GoGo, anime installations and free manga. The party runs from 7 to 10 pm next Wednesday.

At least one of the Chin Music team will be there to help Roland celebrate. The book is beginning to get noticed. Here's a strong review that recently ran in the Village Voice.

Tomorrow is a very big day for books in southern Louisiana. First, there's the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge. I'll be hosting a panel on Do You Know at 10 am with Sarah Inman and Jason Berry. Brother Dave will be there too. We'll also be signing the book after the event.

Jason will also be on two separate panels to talk about 1) the environment and 2) his new novel, Last of the Red Hot Poppas. And Sarah will be reading from her novel, Finishing Skills. The event is free, so come on down.

In New Orleans, the 5th annual New Orleans Book Fair will take place. Our peeps at Nolafugees will be hawking Chin Music books along with their own latest creation, Chris Rose is Dead 2 Me. We're hoping to be able to get there after our Baton Rouge appearance, so see you all at one or the other of these book fests.

The Ballard burglar is by no means a smart man. Imagine ripping off the headquarters of Chin Music Press and: 1) looking for cash (who they kidding?) 2) looking for expensive hardware (ibid) and 3) not stealing a book (idiot!).

So, yeah, we got broken into over the weekend. And so did some of the neighboring businesses. Some of them had far more substantial losses than we did. The semi-literate burglar ransacked several offices, looking for cash and small items he could carry, dropping many of the things he was trying to steal along the way (my neighbors arrived at work today to find a new video camera on their floor!) and finally opening a door to an office that still had people in it! OK, this guy is not a master criminal. He probably doesn't even have a bachelor's. But he did make a proper mess of CMP HQ. For a moment Sunday, sifting through all the papers on the floor, I thought I was in my brother's apartment (ba-dum bum).

But we're back to normal now, although with a cancelled credit card.

We also received a rather tepid review of Poppas in the Baton Rouge Advocate Sunday. But then — and it may sound cliche, but these sorts of emails make my day — we received a message from a reader of DYK that said in part:

"I just purchased Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans? from Elliot Bay and read it in the same day. As an evacuee from New Orleans to Seattle, it was moving to see people outside of New Orleans realize what an impact the city has. You were able get writers who captured the essence of the city that is so unique and beautiful. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

All in all, it was a good day.

Some recent updates to the structure of our Voices of New Orleans sub-site:

- We've shifted News to the main column and will be including much more commentary. Colleen Mondor is also onboard as an official contributor. Expect more from her soon!

- Our entries on Voices have always been fairly in-depth, and as such, we've moved them to Feature status. We want to maintain a small but high-quality level of output for these posts. The full feature archive is listed in the middle column now for easy access. These features will also appear chronologically between news posts and are set off with larger type and a light background.

- Our RSS Feed now combines both "news" and "features." So expect more frequent updates in your newsreaders.

- The photo in the masthead is from Octavia Books in New Orleans.

And many thanks to everyone who has been linking to and supporting the site.

If you missed Sarah Inman on C-Span Sunday, you can watch her here. She raised the issue of "secession" — a hot topic among some New Orleanians but little reported on and usually just dismissed (as the panel does here) — equated New Orleans with the Third World and pondered aloud whether the fact that she gets more unwanted sexual advances in New Orleans than elsewhere says more about her or the city. Plus, she propped up our beautiful little book throughout the whole panel. Makes a publisher proud.

Update: Sarah's bit starts around the 21:45 mark.

In honor of this most unfortunate anniversary, even sister site cannedcoffee.com has turned to New Orleans. Rex Noone, author of the lagniappe in Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?, discusses his very troubled city while sipping an iced coffee from Starbucks.

Over on Voices of New Orleans, David Rutledge writes about the loss of an American city.

And finally, Jason Berry, author of Last of the Red Hot Poppas, has this to say in today's Boston Globe.

To all those people on the Gulf Coast who had their houses or loved ones washed away from the broken levees or who have been trying to repair your lives despite the broken promises of our government and the sickening nonchalance of our leaders, to all those people who feel forgotten and alone, we send our prayers from our one-room office in a Seattle warehouse district. We Americans have to do better. We just have to.

Sarah Inman and David Rutledge will be at the Sheraton on Canal Street this Sunday from 2 to 6:30 as part of a big event hosted by the New Orleans press club to honor the writers who produced works after Katrina. The event, called "The Katrina Collection: An Afternoon of Authors," will start with a book signing and end with back-to-back one-hour forums where the public can pose questions to the authors. Sarah will be representing Chin Music Press and Do You Know ... at the forums, and both Dave and Sarah will be at the signings.

C-Span is planning to air the forums live, so check in at 2:15 PST (4:15 in New Orleans) to hear Sarah Inman talk about Katrina, life in New Orleans and her favorite antidepressant (hint: starts with an X).

For publishers, NPR combines with The New York Times and Oprah to create the holy trinity of book publicity. Well, thanks to Jason Berry, author of our forthcoming Last of the Red Hot Poppas, Chin Music Press and Do You Know crept into Monday's All Things Considered. We're watching the traffic generated by the links to our site and will report back if anyone is interested.

Just wanted to point you to some excellent reviews of New Orleans books on our Voices blog by Colleen Mondor. She's reviewed seven books so far, including the whole Neighborhood Story Project series from Soft Skull Press, and we'll be running more over the coming months. If you're on the fence about a certain book, Colleen will swiftly and persuasively push you off the fence and toward the nearest bookstore.

Join Bruce and David Rutledge at Book Buffs in Denver this Thursday at 7pm for a reading and talk about the making of Do You Know ... Book Buffs isa great store in south Denver, filled with beautiful first editions and original prints from local artists. Rumor has it the Rutledge brothers may be packing Colorado Rockies Mardi Gras beads as well.

After our reading in Austin Saturday, I began talking to BookWoman owner Susan Post while we and others from the event relaxed over a beer at The Tavern, a bar next door that, according to Susan, had its soul ripped out when the new owners tried to clean up its dive-bar image. It was the least interesting bar I saw in a weekend of book reading and bar hopping (favorite Austin bar by far: Deep Eddy's — please tip bartender Yuri heavily). But Susan's conversation and an epic baseball game on the tube made up for the Tavern's neutered atmosphere.

Susan has run BookWoman for 34 years. Her little store on the corner of 12th and Lamar has survived and evolved while many other feminist stores have faded away. I wasn't sure how we'd be received at the store, but I knew we were in a good place when the audience and staff erupted with laughter as Ray Shea read a passage about Doc Severinsen eyeing the pretty girls in the crowd and saying, "Oh look at that! Give me some of those long beads, quick!"

In fact, the reading was great. It was short — the whole thing was about 30 minutes — and it left the crowd of nearly 20 wanting more. That's the way a reading should be, since your ultimate goal is to get people interested in your book. Dave, Juliette and Ray did a nice job of showing the breadth of our book, too, with the sad procession of brake lights that closes "Corners of the Quarter," the humorous tales of summer movie theaters from Juliette, and Ray's "I Was a Teenage Float Grunt," which has become our reliable closer, like Lynyrd Skynyrd saving "Free Bird" for the encore.

Colleen Mondor, one of the contributors to Do You Know and the book reviewer for our Voices blog, has an excellent short story in the latest edition of failbetter.com. But don't read it if you're about to step on a plane.

Pictured here from the left are Ray Shea, Jason Berry, Toni Causey and Sarah Inman.

Last weekend in Louisiana was successful and fun — with the exception of having brother Dave's rear bumper fall off his car on the highway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans (but then again, Louisiana's drinking-and-driving laws allowed for me and Sarah to share a large can of Heineken while Dave carefully drove the bumperless Saturn along the crowded highway). The Tennessee Williams Festival panel on our book drew some 50 or 60 people — well more than we expected — and a certain erudite book reviewer mentioned to Toni Causey afterwards that she should join the mayoral race.

Baton Rouge also brought a warm crowd of about 25 or 30 — many McGees and Causeys, a few Kernions and Sheas — to our afternoon reading at Barnes & Noble. The readers showed the breadth of the book, from Katrina essays to Mardi Gras hilarity. And the big stack of books on sale shrunk as just about everybody there picked up a copy.

Baton Rouge was the equivalent of dipping our toe into the ocean to see how cold the water is. It was our first foray outside of New Orleans, and as we print another round of books, our success or failure will be dictated by how far we can take the book before we run into that most cruel of phrases: Katrina fatigue.

I'm not sure how we'll be perceived in other cities. I hope and half-expect to be well-received, but the cynic in me wonders a bit about just how much Americans do care. Of course, the cynic will be stuffed in a small box, bound and gagged and shipped to some undisclosed Central Asian country as we promote this book. No time for doubts now. Our path leads from New Orleans to cities beyond, and our long-term success will be dictated by how we are received there.

New Orleanians: There's a panel on Do You Know tomorrow at 1pm as part of the Tennessee Williams Festival. Jason Berry, Toni McGee Causey, Sarah Inman and David Rutledge will be on hand to talk about the book and sign them. And I'll be skulking around in the audience, too. Here's the lowdown:

April 1, 1pm, The Cabildo, Jackson Square in the French Quarter
Two days after Katrina hit New Orleans, David Rutledge headed to Seattle to stay with his family. His brother and sister-in-law, who run Chin Music Press, were deeply troubled by what they were watching on TV and proposed that David help them create a book on New Orleans — something that would both capture the rage and impotence of the moment and look beyond it to grasp some small truths about the city. Panelists, all contributors to the anthology, talk about the book and how Katrina has affected striving writers.

Hope to see you there.

Had to share this with you: According to the latest BookScan statistics, Do You Know was the sixth best-selling book in New Orleans for the week through March 19. We debuted on the list at No. 17 the week before, and jumped to No. 6 with sales of 156 copies for the week. For the whole top 10, check out Voices of New Orleans. Meanwhile, I'll be lighting up a Cohiba.

So what happens when a mammoth bookstore chain takes an interest in a tiny publisher's product? Stay tuned to this blog, and you'll find out.

In the past couple of weeks, Borders has ordered more than 1,000 copies of Do You Know. Our total print run was going to be 3,000, but now we're expanding it to feed demand. Other bookstores and distributors, especially in the South, have been placing big orders too. This is the stuff young publishers like us dream about, but for every dream, we also wake in the middle of the night, sweating and breathlessly repeating the dreaded "R" word: returns.

For those of you not clear on how the publishing world works, stores can order large numbers of books with no commitment. If they sell, we make money. If they don't, they send them back.

Large chains are notorious for over-ordering books they like because ... well ... they can. There is nothing in the system set up to punish bookstores for ordering too much. But then again, we're hoping that 1,000 books isn't too much — that they'll sell those and order more. Publishing veterans are rolling their eyes as they read this, but we still dream.

Today's little update is some new photography of the Do You Know book. Check out the goods here.

And we've got plenty of copies left, so hurry and grab those early Easter presents!

Here's a quickie on a recent update to our Voices blog. I just added a full archive for the news sidebar section, which Bruce has been populating with fervor.

More updates on the way.

The Chin Music road show will experience a first two weeks from today: two events on two different sides of the US for two different books. OK, so it's not like winning a Pulitzer, but it's still a significant step for a company as small as ours.

On March 16 at 6 pm, we'll be in Octavia Books (pictured here) in the Garden District of New Orleans for a reading of Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans? There will be five contributors reading: Jason Berry, Toni McGee Causey, Sarah Inman, David Rutledge and Dar Wolnik. Depending on how the evening goes, brother Dave may act more as an emcee. Octavia is a handsome, bright store in a corner building shared with a yoga studio, a martial arts studio and a coffee shop — made me feel like I was back in Seattle. Owner Tom Lowenburg told us books about New Orleans have been selling like mad recently as locals have a newfound devotion to their much-impugned city. We're hopeful for a good turnout.

On the same day at 7pm, all the way across the country on Market Street in San Francisco, me, Yuko and Bob Juppe will be appearing at Get Lost Travel Books to read from and talk about Kuhaku & Other Accounts from Japan. I've never been to this store — it's at 1825 Market, which the locals call mid-Market, I believe — but it sounds like a cool space dedicated to both books and travel gear in an up-and-coming part of San Francisco. The store's owner, Lee Azus, is a big Kuhaku fan (and obviously a man of good taste) who invited us down. We're also hoping to hold a reading for Do You Know there someday soon.

So watch out Nan Talese. On March 16, Chin Music's going nationwide.

The latest review of Do You Know... appears in the just-released spring edition of Internationalist magazine. It's short but good. Here's a snippet:

[The book] is a literary tempest that assaults the reader with detailed, unpredictable, and unique happenings that a superficial spring-breaker might otherwise miss.

We'll link to the review once it's online because you won't find this magazine at your local newstand. It is a student-run publication that has recently teamed up with the Roosevelt Institution, a student think tank begun at Stanford. The magazine is run by a nonprofit group, distributed to more than 150 colleges and universities and is published quarterly (the website updates weekly). It has offices right near the Puget Sound in downtown Seattle, which is why I knew about it. The editorial is a wide-ranging mix of international stories from students all over the globe. It's an ambitious, interesting magazine, dedicated to bringing new, progressive ideas to the fore. The design is inspired too. All in all, it's a much better read than most of the stuff on the newstand today.

The advertising is international too. The inside back cover features a geisha in an ad for Nova. Yes, that Nova, the one that warped our friend over at this site so badly that he has obviously never recovered. But I digress. Check out the Internationalist's website (and doesn't that opening graphic remind you of buzztracker?).

Here's a summary of all our New Orleans media from the recent trip:

Videos:
Lower Ninth Video 1
Lower Ninth Video 2

Photos:
New Orleans photoset
The Saturn Reading photoset

There isn't much I can do aside from echo Bruce's sentiments on the New Orleans trip. It was astounding, and the people we collaborated with down there were absolutely amazing. Press Street and Rebuilding Together were pivotal in just how successful our reading event was.

I had a blast meeting everyone involved with the book finally. It's quite interesting to read someone's work on such an intimate level over and over again and then finally meet them in person.

The whole trip was the perfect mix of dive-bars and swanky eateries. I had been to New Orleans once before when I was 19 and had always carried with me a sense of the brilliant food and music of the city, but this trip pounded the reality of that sense into me over and over again. Gumbo? I will crave gumbo back in Tokyo.

I know Bruce will be popping back down for more readings next month, and I only wish I could be there as well. New Orleans is not dead by a long shot — and in fact, if the current New Orleans is considered dead, then count half of the cities in America long since deceased.

As you can tell we really wiped ourselves out from the activities — just finally getting photos up from the event and hell, we even missed a Coffee Monday this week, the first in ages. Time to get back in the media makin' saddle.

What a great party! We had well over 100 people at The Saturn Bar in New Orleans' Ninth Ward last Thursday for the launch of our second book, Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans? We had kosher red beans and rice, seafood gumbo, Carl Causey's shrimp and corn soup, fresh fruit, smoked duck and even a King cake spread out across the pool table; an eclectic crowd sat around the bar and along the railing of the second floor to take in the readings — nicely dressed senior citizens rubbed shoulders with tattooed and dreadlocked students, professors, professional people and at least a few construction workers who were taking a break from rebuilding the city. The goodwill and energy in the room was palpable.

The readers rocked. We had a rookie lineup that made me more than a little proud of our scouting skills. My brother Dave (pictured outside the bar), Toni Causey and Ray Shea all read for the first time. All three of them kicked butt. Dave started out the readings with some excerpts from the preface to give the room a feel for what was inside the book. Toni silenced the room as she read from "Where Grace Lives." It's a heavy piece and a few people looked visibly moved by it. Then after Dar Wolnik gave an inspiring talk about the city's Farmers Markets and how they are coming back, Sarah Inman, Ray Shea and C.W. Cannon filled the room with laughs and applause during their readings. It was a great performance, mirroring the book's slow, sad Dirge and bouncy, humorous Return sections.

Check out the photos here.

We ended up selling 97 books. People were buying four or five at a time, then cornering the writers to sign each copy. It was, in short, a hoot.

The bar owner, Eric, even bought a copy. We promised to come back again soon and run up a bar bill that will more than pay him back. He says he hopes to officially open in a month or so.

The Gambit Weekly, New Orleans' alternative paper, ranks our reading this Thursday at The Saturn as the city's "best bet." Craig and I are off today for New Orleans. More soon from the Crescent City.

The Times Picayune's Susan Larson has written a beautiful review of Do You Know ... today.

Here's a snippet:

Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? not only captures the valued and unique facets of our culture; it provides a kind of emotional prism, ways of looking at this time of love and rage, fear and anger, despair and fierce — and I mean fierce — hope.

This is a great review, but if you haven't seen the paper and are only able to read it online, you might not realize how great. In the paper, the review covers about three-quarters of a page. The print "View in Rear of St. Louis Cathedral" from page 53 of the book is reproduced here, as is the cover. Running across the very top of the page is a quote from the book: "'New Orleanians know that a culture is not just something that you look at or something you eat. In this city, culture is something you live.' — David Rutledge." And below that is a different headline from the online version in large type: Defining Moments. Finally, our reading at The Saturn is plugged in a thin column of events running down one side of the page.

Of course, I'm getting this all secondhand, but that gives you an idea of how the book is playing in New Orleans.

This is a first for us: We've never been reviewed in a major North American daily, and it has been one of my modest goals with this launch to make sure that at least one paper would pay attention to us. Thanks to Susan Larson's thoughtful review, my goals for the book are getting a little less modest.

Susan Larson gives us the lowdown on all the Katrina-related books coming out this spring in today's Times-Picayune. Scroll down to see a blurb on DYK, which she calls "an inspired riff on the Armstrong tune." Nice.

The books arrived yesterday. They look great. As you can see, we immediately put our three- and five-year-old publicists to work.

More photos at Voices of New Orleans.

The Saturn Bar in New Orleans' Upper Ninth Ward is regularly talked about as one of America's great dive bars. A quick Google search will tell you that. Recently, it has been through some hard times. The long-time owner, O'Neil Broyard, died in December. He had sat in front of his bar with a shotgun in his lap after Katrina, according to the Times-Picayune, and only evacuated to Illinois with his two dogs when state troopers forced him out.

Today, his nephew is trying to revive the bar. Eric, his wife and their kids have been cleaning like crazy to get ready for this Saturday. The family will have a celebration there from 11 am in honor of O'Neil.

The Saturn's next big event is hosting us and the launch of Do You Know on Feb. 16 from 6 to 9 pm. We are very excited to be able to launch our book in this fabled New Orleans watering hole. And once Eric sees how much beer the Rutledge brothers can down, he'll be very excited too.

The Press Street Organization is largely responsible for making this happen. As far as I can tell, this is a group of people in New Orleans who are passionate about rebuilding their city and its culture. I talked with one of the members, Anne Gisleson, today and she said they haven't had time to worry about building a website and that sort of thing. They are just too busy fixing their city. We're very lucky to be connected to them, and of course, to Rebuilding Together.

So folks, come to The Saturn (3067 St.Claude Avenue) on Feb. 16. We hope to see you there.

Cross-posted on Voices of New Orleans

There's just one week left in our Do You Know campaign. For those of you who are just tuning in, we've pledged to donate all the profits from early orders of Do You Know to a relief organization in New Orleans. We named that relief organization on our Voices blog today: Rebuilding Together New Orleans. For more on this organization's work to rebuild the homes of low-income people in the Big Easy, check out this post.

And for you publishing otaku and IRS agents among our readers, here's a rough outline of how the money works:

Orders of DYK as of 1/24 = 89
Total revenue raised = $1,646.50
Shipping and handling costs = 356
Cost to make & market 89 copies of DYK = 579
Money raised for Rebuilding Together = $711

There you have it. Each book sold makes about $8 for Rebuilding Together. If we sell another 23 copies or so, we can raise $1,000 for them.

PS We also appreciate the infusion of cash. It keeps us going. Thanks. And you're gonna love this book.

The Hurricane Poster Project is a beautifully designed site housing delicate and emotive posters on New Orleans. The Hurricane Poster Project looks to raise funds to help rebuild a city that us CMPers have grown deeply connected with these past few months. I urge you to poke about the submissions. If you order them by price you can get a pretty good idea of the amount of talent and effort put into this project.

Notes about our New Orleans blog:

* The RSS Feed for the main blog is here. Subscribe to this to get updates on the main posts.

* The RSS Feed for the "On the wire" section is here. Think of this like a Google Alerts for the keywords "New Orleans" and "rebuilding" ... except, unlike with Google Alerts this feed is being filtered through editorially experienced humans.

* Also, as always, if you want to keep abreast on all the New Orleans news happening worldwide, you can't beat periodic visits to Buzztracker.

For everyone wondering what the hell an RSS feed is, it's a way to "subscribe" to some stream of content — in this case, blog entries. If you have an RSS-aware web browser (Safari, Firefox, etc.) or dedicated reader software (NetNewsWire for example) or subscribe to some online blog aggregator (Bloglines for example), you can collect the RSS feeds of all the blogs you regularly browse in one space. Then, instead of having to go to the sites directly to check for updates, you check your RSS reader and it shows you all the new content. This saves a lot of time if you follow a lot of sites. It may sound a bit complicated, but it's a very small input_energy:time_saved ratio in the long run. I will now remove my dork helmet.

We have a clear philosophy when it comes to print and online publishing: They enhance each other. This doesn't come from any high-minded artistic concept; it's much more about money — online publishing is a lot cheaper than print and allows us to extend our discussions without breaking the bank (see Kuhaku and cannedcoffee.com, for example).

But this choice is also about the medium — books seep into the culture over time, taking years to bubble up in some cases; blogs hit instantaneously and often dissipate quickly. And that's why we've just launched our Voices of New Orleans blog to complement our upcoming book, Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans.

The book is weeks away from America's store shelves. We hope that Voices adds some spice to the battle for New Orleans. And we also hope that the book creeps into the public sphere, reminding everyone of what is at stake in the Big Easy. Cause it's a lot more than conventions and crawfish, y'all.

Just a reminder for all of you outside of the US and Canada: This is the final day to receive free shipping on an early order of Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?, our new book coming to stores in February.

We've decided to extend the pre-order campaign to the end of January. Shipping to the US and Canada will remain free for that period, but with US postal rates going up this Sunday, we couldn't justify extending the free global shipping offer. So, if you're overseas and on the fence about whether to buy DYK, you've got a few hours left to decide and still qualify for free shipping.

Of course, profits from early orders through January will still go to a soon-to-be-named relief organization in New Orleans.

On a linguistic note, one of our writers has expressed his annoyance with the term "pre-order." In his words, "You either order it or you don't. You may be ordering early, but you are not 'pre-ordering,' whatever that means." Should "pre-order" be taken out back and shot? Let us know.

Movie buff andDo You Know contributor Juliette Kernion is the driving force behind Holidailies, an online writing project where bloggers vow to update their blogs daily from Dec. 7 to Jan. 6. Holidailes serves as a portal for all the updates.

It's an excellent idea, allowing you to quickly check out blogs you may otherwise never stumbled across and bookmark a few for further reading.

Check out the banner at the top. We're today's holidailies sponsor.

At least two of the contributors to Do You Know were finishing up novels in Katrina's wake. The first was Toni McGee Causey, who was helping evacuees from New Orleans and elsewhere at the LSU triage, finishing the edits on her first of three novels with St. Martin's Press, running an excellent and frequently updated blog and writing an original essay for us. Oh yeah, she and her husband also run a construction company. One reason she can do all this is she never sleeps. I can send her an email at one or two in the morning — on the West Coast, mind you — and she'll respond within minutes. Amazing.

The other novelist putting the finishing touches on her work when she contacted us was Sarah K. Inman. Her piece for Do You Know presents a rough side of New Orleans that tourists don't see. And it's all from the vantage point of a trapeze artist, or aerialist, alternately getting lost in her art and being rudely awakened by the city below. Her novel, Finishing Skills, also has a strong physical element: it explores the world of female boxing in New Orleans. It has just been released by Livingston Press, and a favorable review ran in the Times-Picayune in late November.

THE HALF-TITLE

Do You Know may finally be off to the printers, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop talking about its production. Especially considering I didn't really talk about it while designing it.

This is CMP's second physical book. A lot of the decisions we make on how our books should look are based on 1) observations about how we, and others, use books, and 2) beautiful bits and pieces from other books, both old and new. As such, sometimes we include things without really knowing why. Like, for instance, the half-title.

The half-title is the name given to what is usually the first page of a book — the page with the abbreviation of the full title and maybe a small, whimsical typographic indulgence. Following immediately after is the title page, with full title and even more typographical indulgence (or restraint). These two pages form a sort of secret code among book designers. As Hochuli puts it, "Here, on the title page, the designer is revealed."

Not much thought ever went into why we needed a half-title — it was just a piece of the book, like the cover. It had to be there. There was no maybe. A book just isn't a book without starting with this obtuse, somewhat useless and redundant piece of extravagance.

It wasn't until I was thumbing through Designing Books: Practice and Theory by Jost Hochuli that the mere existence of the half-title was brought to my attention. Let me allow Hochuli to explain:

"The half-title derives from the time when books were sent out by the publisher (printer) without a binding. The first page had the function of giving an abbreviated reference to what was inside, and of protecting the title page itself against dirt or damage."

Hochuli also sums it up this way: "If the main title page is the gateway to the book, then the half-title is perhaps the garden gate."

When I read this over the phone to Bruce, you could feel the collective "Ahhhh" in the air.

So now that the mystery of the half-title has been solved, go and grab a handful of books off your shelf and see if there's any particularly elegantly designed half-titles poking around that you hadn't yet noticed.

This September, the Christian Science Monitor published a skeptical piece on lit blogs and their relevance to the publishing industry. Lit bloggers seem to only talk to themselves, the reporter wrote, and it's doubtful whether all their writings amount to book sales for publishers.

Well, Colleen Mondor has written a response to that piece today on a very interesting, new site, Metaxucafe. She relates how she went from getting rude rejections from literary magazines to reviewing for Bookslut, then being published in our soon-to-be-released book, Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans and having her novel read by agents and publishing houses. Colleen is one of the trailblazers on this new career path, but soon, the path will be well worn, I bet.

From a publisher's perspective, do lit blogs help? When we launched Kuhaku with our distributor in April, we were a complete unknown on the literary blog scene. We made some waves on design sites and in the Japan blogosphere, but we were clueless about lit blogs. Sometime during this summer, Colleen found Kuhaku in a local bookstore, contacted us and wrote a glowing review of our press. While we can't give you an exact number, we can say with confidence that the review gave us a lift. The eight or so online sales we received were directly from the review, but we also saw sales through Amazon jump from a paltry two copies in August to 14 in September (the review was posted on Bookslut just after Labor Day). The president at our distribution company sent us a congratulatory note, and the review is now part of our sales kit for Do You Know.

Lit blogs are now a central part of our marketing plans for Do You Know and future books. And when we're feeling pretty satisfied with ourselves (which, mind you, is not often), we like to think of Chin Music Press as a trailblazer in using the web to build an independent publishing house. So, at least for this publisher, lit blogs have created a new avenue for media exposure, helped us sell books and, by the way, introduced us to five of the 14 contributors in our new volume, Do You Know. I'd say that's pretty relevant.

Do You Know contributor Jason Berry wrote a powerful op ed piece on New Orleans that ran in the Boston Globe today. Berry is exceptionally good at giving the increasingly frustrated and fed-up New Orleanians an eloquent voice. What exactly is our country doing about this disaster? Does anyone know?

For those of you who don't want to go through the signup process (it's free and not too involved), here's an excerpt:

Entire neighborhoods go dark at night — no power, no people. Those clamoring to return — to demolish or rebuild — cannot. No place to live.
Apathy toward the dying neighborhoods stains the Social Darwinists who run Congress. They wear the masks of prolife Christians. As Nero fiddled while Rome burned, these Jesus-lovers yawn at a city on the rack, their pensions safe in the mammoth debt furnished by the worst US president ever.

and a little more:

The ''target neighborhoods," as Mayor C. Ray Nagin calls those that have rebounded, lie on dry ridges of the sub-sea-level terrain, notably the French Quarter, the Garden District, Algiers, and Uptown, where life is seminormal with stores and restaurants. Drive a few minutes and you'll see mounds of debris, trashed buildings, brown water lines on houses, shattered lives.

It's worth signing up to read the complete piece. Powerful and depressing. Are we going to fix New Orleans? This is one of our country's darker moments, I'm afraid.

For those of you who didn't read Bruce's blog entry yesterday (and I don't blame you one bit; sometimes you can just see him sitting there chuckling to himself, thinking he's so damn clever. Hahaha, Mr. T ... Gawd! ... It makes us all a little sick, but hey, he controls the purse strings and Cletus needs his quarterly oiling as much as the next guy), I have a simple announcement:

Our Do You Know section of the website is live.

Also, we'll be expanding this part of our site in coming weeks to bring you more New Orleans news. We'll be announcing new steps here on the blog, so stay tuned.

It's a madhouse over here. We've sent Do You Know to the printer, with the exception of the cover and the map, and those are being sent later today. But there's no downtime, no time to catch our collective breath. Craig is working into the wee hours of the morn getting all sorts of things ready for promoting the book: a pre-order page, a banner ad to run on the holidailies site later this month, galleys for reviewers, postcards for people who buy the book as a gift, press releases, etc., etc. He's also contacting design websites and publications to push them to write about the book. Meanwhile, I'm trying to line up people to review the book, collect comments for the back cover (perhaps the lamest job in all of publishing — "I know you don't have time to read it, but could you say something nice about it anyway?"), print out and mail galleys, scrounge up money to pay the bills and set up readings for February and beyond. The actual editing and designing of the book seem positively serene in comparison (oh, those languorous days when we argued over semicolons...)

If editing a book is at times like savoring a fine bottle of wine, then promoting it is like being jittery on too much Red Bull and coffee. To do it all, one needs to be a bit bipolar — Nan Talese by day; Don King by night.

Right now, I'm Don King and I'm here to tell you that you need this book. If you order today, we will ship this book anywhere in the world at no extra cost. I pity the fool who thinks that's not a good deal! Actually, that's Mr. T, isn't it? Back to Don: Plus, we will donate the profits from these pre-orders to a relief organization working to rebuild New Orleans. So buy the book and 1) help New Orleans; 2) support small publishing; and 3) be one of the few who can say they had their copy of Do You Know before that memorable Oprah appearance made Craig, Dave, Steven, Bill, John, Jason, Steve, Toni, Colleen, Sarah, Miki, Juliette, Dar, C.W., Ray and Rex household names.

In the last week, we've finished 99.999% of the editing and 98% of the design of the book. We spent Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday last week shooting several rounds of emails back and forth, coordinating editorial changes. Going through this phase with Kuhaku, we only used email to coordinate. This time, in an attempt to bring some organization among four editors and a designer, I set us up with a Basecamp account. We've been using their messaging system to handle the input and discussion surrounding the edits. It's not a perfect solution but it allows us to keep pdf comps, edits, discussions and to-do lists all in one place.

Amidst inputting these edits, working on the New Orleans map and performing final cleanups on the design, I also moved. Eight hours of packing on Sunday. Contract signing on Monday. Movers come Tuesday. Turn on gas, electric, etc., on Tuesday afternoon and install Internet on Wednesday. By Thursday I was working again. This was probably my quickest move ever.

The roadmap was to finish the book before the move — and we almost did — but with one change leading to another and our masochistic knack for taking on laborious acts of research in the name of art, I *just* missed our Monday deadline. Not a big deal because we were still waiting for the final quote from the printers!

The main bits left to deal with design-wise are:

- Insert cover into a template for the printers. You need to make sure the cover art lines up with where the font, spine and back of the book cover will be printed. The whole "cover" is printed from a single file. Since we're doing foil stamping on all pieces I have to make sure everything is in tip-top shape before submitting the final file.

We spent the Thanksgiving weekend proofing the final draft of Do You Know... and, as usual, much of the time was used debating arcane points of punctuation and style. Is there a difference in the nuances of "mama" and "mamma"? The dictionary doesn't give us any, but we know that words live beyond the pages of Webster's. Do you hyphenate "African American"? How about "category-four hurricane"? The questions went on and on. And with only one exception, the four of us proofing the final draft found common ground. That one exception was the use of the semicolon.

I love the semicolon; Yuko does too. David Cady dislikes it — so does my brother Dave. The battle lines were clearly drawn, and they are clearly drawn in the literary world as well: We have Gore Vidal, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Evelyn Waugh on our side. They have Donald Barthelme, Ernest Hemingway and E.B. White on theirs.

I was all set to write a lengthy ode to the semicolon when I found that it had already been done recently by Timothy Butterworth of the Financial Times. In his splendid piece, "Pause Celebre," he argues that the semicolon is embraced in Britain and considered part of "punctuation's axis of evil" in the US. He also argues that the semicolon has a political bent these days. And while he has been accused of stretching his case, who can argue that the Bush administration prefers nuance to simple declarative sentences? No one, of course. Isn't it time, then, to bring the semicolon — the much abused punctuation mark — back with a vengeance, giving it new life in the way @ was resurrected with the advent of email? (And, no, winking emoticons are not enough for the semicolon; it deserves so much more.)

The semicolon is a half note to the comma's quarter note and the period's full stop; it draws together what the period — and the dash — separate. It is all about individual style; the writer forces a half breath and refuses the full stop. The writer draws attention to himself; and he bathes in it. My favorite use of the semicolon cited in Butterworth's piece is from literary critic F.L. Lewis: "... a writer should be able to vary his length; like a bowler."

Go ahead; call it a sentence fragment. But the semicolon is coming back; you heard it here first.

We've finalized the cover but have yet to finalize the materials. Bang was supposed to get a nice box of samples out to me here in Tokyo a week ago but it didn't arrive until Saturday afternoon. Not that we haven't been busy with a million other things in the meantime (like eating French food) but, we'd really like to get our final estimate for the book, which is very much contingent on what materials we use.

So here we are, a week before the final pdfs are due at the printers, and we still don't know *exactly* how much the book is going to cost to produce. We have a pretty good idea but no exact figure.

Originally we were going to use a type of paper called Rainbow, which despite its name, actually comes in solid colors. So a Rainbow with a nice linen embossing. Or at least, that's what we thought until the samples arrived on Saturday. Rainbow looks and feels cheap. Maybe it's nice for the cover of a book you're hiding under a dust-jacket but us Chin Music folk — lovers of naked, dust-jacket-less books — were a bit turned off by its nasty, dry feel.

Thankfully our point-man at Bang sent over some other samples for a material called Kivar which is worlds above Rainbow in terms of presence and quality. Think of it as the stuff you'd bind a bible in. Also think of it as the stuff that could potentially drain your bank account.

For me it's Monday, but for the folk in Minnesota, it's Curb Your Enthusiasm and Rome time, which means we're still about a day away from getting a final quote. Will Bruce have to sell his blood and/or liver to pay for the cover? Oh, who said publishing isn't exciting?

My sleeping schedule is thoroughly lopsided. Up by 10:30 or so. Asleep by 3 with a pile of books around my head. The sun sets at about 4:30 now so the light pouring down through my window already has that early evening feeling by the time I'm showered and getting ready to work.

Packing last night until 1:00 am — I have plans to move the day after Do You Know is due at the printers. It feels so good to be throwing things out and boxing stuff up. A nice contrast to spending all day building and adding to something. Then off through the cold night air, down Japanese backstreets, along the Kanda river, behind the Four Seasons hotel, past the homeless sleeping on the river's edge and over to my girlfriend's house to hop in a giant tub and read a forgotten book I had turned up in the packing process: Designing Books by Hochuli and Kinross. Asleep by who knows what hour on the floor, wrapped in layers of futon with notes strewn about.

Up this morning at around 11. Down into the giant, white-floored living room. Heat some tea and sit down with Hochuli again for a bit. Tomomi pops out and, since it's already 11:30, we decide to skip breakfast and head right down the road to Kagurazaka for a French brunch.

On bikes. Freezing in the shadows, warmer in the sun. A white haired French giant screaming "Se Bon! Se Bon!" at his employees greets us and we sit next to an old couple. They smell like my father's late mother and for a moment I'm thrown back into my childhood.

Don't speak French so I read the Japanese half of the menu. I go for a sashimi-esque salmon and hotate salad and a steaming pot of meat and beans. Substitute wine for espresso. It's all good — it always is. Even if the stew was a touch salty.

I was just 90 minutes into what was promising to be a daylong editing and proofing session this morning when I heard from the living room the pitter pat of little feet across the floor and then wham, thud ... and my son begins to wail.

Kenzo had cut his forehead deeply on a wooden chair — a Kenyon College chair — and blood was gushing everywhere. I picked him up into my arms and ran through the kitchen and into the bathroom, leaving a trail of blood and yelling "Omigod, omigod, omigod." (Medical school was never even a thought for me; I hate the sight of blood). We went into the bathroom, and I could see that the cut was deep. Blood kept spilling out, and he was crying like a baby (a good sign, all things considered). I put him down on the bench by the front door with a washcloth on his head and called Yuko, who was at her yoga class. The ring seemed to echo, then I realized her cellphone was in the basement.

Next I ran outside with Kenzo to find our neighbor. She was at work. I ran back and called 911. Blood was still dripping despite me applying light pressure to the wound. I asked where the nearest emergency room was (I knew where it was, but for some reason I really needed to talk to another adult right then). The operator probably picked up on the fact that Dad was freaking out a little bit and said as calmly as she could, "Why don't we send someone over to help you out?"

Allow me to break free from Photoshop, Indesign and Illustrator for a few moments to catch my breath and attempt to continue this dialog on design.

The last week has been very much a week of logistics. Paper types, embossings, costs for special orders, minimum size orders, colors, how colors affect cost, foil stamping resolutions, cover design and book wraps. It's been a series of emails with our printer, Bang, in Minnesota. This is our first time working with them, and we're trying to make sure they understand the type of book we're looking to produce. One that, hopefully, will hold its own against, if not exceed Kuhaku in terms of craftsmanship.

I modified my sleep schedule to stay up a little later than normal so that Justin at Bang and I could talk about all of the logistics one has to deal with when producing a book. Mainly our conversations have focused on cover design. The color of the paper and the type of embossing applied to it (i.e., a "linen" or "textured" feel) greatly influences the price.

For instance, one type of black paper with a normal embossing would cost us an additional $400 to use in the book. Whereas another black, with a special embossing, could cost us $2000. Why is this? It's because there may be a higher minimum order on a special embossing depending on the demand. It's also because our printer doesn't stock every type of paper and embossing combination out there. If we want something that's not in their warehouse, they have to dig it up. And that costs them time and money, which is then transfered to us.

So as both a designer and as a principal in the company — i.e., someone who both has fiscal and artistic connections with the final project — I've spent the last week pushing and pulling cover designs in a dance of sorts, aiming to balance cost and beauty. And over the weekend it finally, like so many critical moments in all creative projects, came together.

Through trial and error I found our cover and, subsequently, the visual lexicon to be used throughout the book. I had been sending off cover comps that I hated to Bruce, Yuko and his brother David, knowing very well that just the idea of them looking at such horrific excuses for covers would be enough to motivate me to dig deeper into the book for more elegant solutions. And I found one, which I'll discuss in the next installment.

Sorry for the lack of meat in this potato stew. My mind seems to be one track only, especially when trying to produce a book. Anyway, let me try to catch everyone up to where we are right now.

Last week, on Halloween, I spent the day digging through the stacks of Waseda library for books, any books, on New Orleans. I ran into one in particular, an 1885 first edition of a book called Historical Sketch Book and Guide to New Orleans Illustrated. A title which is almost as long as ours, but not quite.

This was definitely a very lucky and unlikely find. Why, you may ask, is an 1885 first edition of a New Orleans travel guide in the stacks of a Japanese library? Because one of the contributors of the book just happens to be Lafcadio Hearn, everyone's favorite old tyme writer and obsessor over Japan. One of the first true Japanophiles before manga and anime ushered in the new guys.

This is a beautiful old book. Frail. The binding is cracked, and pages are on the verge of falling out. The text is miniscule by today's standards — in the 300-plus pages of this tome is enough content to fill 800 of a modern book. Rational leading, type size and line length ratios be damned.

In between these shedding, yellowed pages are a dozen or so incredibly detailed engravings of street scenes from New Orleans. A swamp. A cafe for the damned. An old church with women in puffy 19th-century European-style dresses out back. The moment I cracked the book open and saw the first spread — a scene of two men dueling with foils, each with one arm behind his back, I knew we had to include these in Do You Know. For historical posterity, if nothing else. Well, and I love engravings.

OPERATION "Obtain Book From 1885 Via Japanese Female Student" ACCOMPLISHED this afternoon thanks to Y. (Real name withheld for obvious reasons.) More to follow.

I like to read the text of a book before designing. A lot of inspiration for visuals can be extrapolated from the literary themes within the text. For Do You Know, a lot of the stories mention the sky. Often the starry night sky that was hidden by the city lights before the hurricane. This seemed like a natural visual to pull out and use in some way. I decided to use it on the cover.

The sky symbolizes a number of things. It links old and new New Orleans. The sky was there before, during and after the hurricane. In a sense, it's the one piece of New Orleans which hasn't changed.

It's also an example of beauty in the face of calamity. Tens of thousands of people were dying of thirst and hunger. Yet above them for the first time was a chance to gaze up at a beautiful, naked night sky.

For me, the night sky carries the feeling of holding ones breath in a moment of crisis or surprise. It's so vast and deep that looking at it forever feels like being on the edge of a precipice. This seems fitting because now New Orleans itself is on a precipice. And in many ways the world is holding its breath in anticipation of how it will change.

This is the simple thought process for how the night sky came to be a major design component in our new hardback.

There are many indispensable books on book design and typography. Were I forced to choose, the one I would be most reluctant to give up is Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style. Bringhurst, aside from being an incredibly gifted poet (with several volumes of poetry under his belt), is also a supremely lucid writer. Of all the bits and pieces and essays I've read on typography, none illuminates the subject with such near perfect clarity as Bringhurst. Even if you have no interest in design, his work is eloquent and full of enough history as to be an interesting read.

I cracked open Bringhurst for the first time in a long while last night in order to get my typographical bearings. I also pulled from my library Notes on Book Design by Derek Birdsall. Derek has been designing books for over 50 years now, and this weighty (my shoulders are aching from carrying it around with me all night and this afternoon) volume contains many insights into his work and book design in general. For example, right away, he makes an interesting note on the uniformity of the size of books in a series:

"For a series, the common height of the books on a bookshelf is an obvious concern; however a wider page is still possible whilst retaining that height."

Which is precisely what he did -- widen the series -- when the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. asked him to design the 16th volume of their systematic catalog.

"... the size of which was 285 x 220 mm. This page was too narrow for three columns, which I deemed essential for the numerous comparative illustrations and the copious notes. With sixteen more volumes to follow it seemed not too late to suggest a wider page. The spines will continue to match on the bookshelf..."

As with any large project you need to be held down to the ground by some sort of reference point. Spending several hours going over books like these and taking lots of notes certainly allow me to gain creative footing before diving into the design of something like Do You Know.

I'll be the first to admit that my approach to the creative process is as scattered as anyone's. Perhaps most detrimental to me getting anything done is that my "on" and "off" modes are so polarized and intense that when I'm "on" and working, I usually work until physical exhaustion takes me down over the course of a week or a month. And when I'm "off," attempting to get back on track is like trying to push a buffalo onto a ski-lift.

I'd like to think there is some way to achieve a balance, but I'm beginning to give up hope on that idea. Still, to just go with what comes, riding the waves until they break or push me back up, can be frustrating and unproductive.

With cannedcoffee built and David handling all the editorial, and with little need for immediate updates or backups at buzztracker, I finally have some time in front of me to dedicate to designing our second physical book.

I don't purport to be any sort of expert on designing books in any conceivable sense of the word. Nevertheless I'm going to try, somewhat masochistically, to document the design process of Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans. I know that even just mentioning the goal of this series upfront is a recipe for failure, a jinx. Much like saying that it's a jinx is a jinx. Let's just hope I've double jinx-nullified the jinx and that watching me stumble through making a book will be entertaining and fruitful.

Our second book will come out in time for Mardi Gras.

Two days after Katrina hit New Orleans, I picked up my brother, a resident of the French Quarter, at Seatac Airport. He was carrying a bag of clothes, as if he had packed for a long weekend ("My only belongings," he said). The next night, over a couple of beers, I proposed a project to him: A book that would capture the spirit of New Orleans before the incompetents in D.C. bulldozed it. Remember, this was three days after Katrina, and bulldozing the city was very much on everyone's minds (Denis Hastert, anyone?)

Needless to say, he was shell-shocked, watching his home city turn into a hellhole on national TV and worrying about the fate of his friends. But he liked the idea. So did Craig. And Yuko. And David. Suddenly, the creative fires were stoked and Chin Music Press was on a mission again.

Over the next three weeks, we've been impressed and humbled as people from all over the country contacted us with offers to help. Poets living in tents, writers taking refuge with friends in Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Houston, people who love the city from afar and even one dedicated CMP backer who is mulling offering us a low-interest loan to help cover writer fees and printing costs. People are passionate about this city, and we realized soon that this was becoming an important project.

As New Orleans is rebuilt, who will stand up for its quirks and eccentricities? Will public music in the square be seen as a public nuisance? Will the winos be tolerated? The spontaneous dancing and drinking? We've seen in recent years what happens when privileged country-club types are not kept in check. If they are left to rebuild New Orleans, we'll be left with this.

So, our book, title pending, is in the works. If anyone out there would like to contribute (stories or dollars), there's still time. And when the book goes on sale, check back with us, because we'll be raising money for certain Katrina-related charities over our site.