Setting a book in type: a river runs through it

Making a book of Seamus Heaney's 2002 Frost reading and lecture has put me in the printer's catbird seat again. It has been years since I set a book in metal type or used the latest page making tools. So I bought a font of type and then tried to find a tool that allowed text to flow through the pages (as Quark and others had perfected), that also allowed one to fix the rivers streams and rivulets that developed in the type, and finally that allowed the minor jiggering that a book always needs-- usually at the last minute. That tool turned out to be right on my computer, Publisher 2003. The other tools that complement my bookmark tool box are pdfFactory, Adobe Reader, Hewlett Packard's manual print utilities. All of these tools handle digital type well.

With luck and loose ends tied up, that book should be available in the first quarter of 2008 in time for the New England Poetry Conference at UMass Lowell on Feb 27. Bookmaking is now such a pleasurable process with fine tools available on almost every laptop.