Here you’ll find in detail how the book came to be.

The drawings

We started by sorting out the stories and distribute them between us. We decided to make new drawings and this was the simplest way to do it. Also we did some layout sketches to have an idea of the area we would have for the illustrations and for the text. This way, when we started drawing, we had a rough estimate of how much space we could use.

For drawing materials we used:

• black Pilot 0.4mm pen;
• black double point Muji pen;
• 120 gr A4 white paper (regular printer paper)

Along with the drawings, we also hand-drawn a few horizontal lines which would be used to frame the text. It seemed a bit overkill at the moment, but the hand-drawn horizontal lines ended up looking a lot better than simple vector lines.

After the drawings were finished, we scanned them in grayscale, 600dpi and saved them in TIFF format. Then we imported those bitmap files into Inkscape, using its wonderful “Trace Bitmap” tool to trace the drawings into vector format. After correcting some of the drawings with the also-wonderful “Tweak” tool, we placed each illustration into its own SVG file.

The text

We had to transcribe all the stories from the original publication. Along the transcribing process we re-wrote some parts, added and changed stuff. Finally, we revised the text before starting to format it.

We decided to use the same technique for the text as the one we used the first time we published this work: choose a font for the text, print it in light grey and draw over it. Recently we found an article at Design*Sponge describing this technique, which is great for giving a definite human touch to what would otherwise be dull, printed characters.

The layout for the text was easy to build up, we knew how much space each story could use so we created small justified text blocks that would fit the size. We decided on using Georgia, size 18pt. This was not the final font size for the book. As we were going to draw over the letters the bigger they were the best.

For the colophon we used a different font, Fertigo sans, other great freeware font.

After the printing came the hardest part of the work: writing by hand over all the book texts… which we then photographed and imported into Inkscape for some cleaning, doing the same as with the drawings (trace bitmaps and tweak), and finally set them up for the layout.

The layout

For the final layout work we used Scribus. We created a file with the final page dimensions – 148 x 145 mm – and the total number of book pages, 24. After making the master pages with guides to help place the page elements, we set out for the boring work of manually importing each SVG file (drawings and text) and placing them on their right place.

The cover

The cover was done in Inkscape. We wanted an almost calligraphic swirliness for the header, and Spiro curves were our godsend, resulting in a cover made in record time!

Print!

Finally, putting everything ready for print was very easy, thanks to the great output from Inkscape and Scribus; we exported everything as grayscale PDF’s, and then told the printer which spot colours we wanted. The end result made us happy: