weird book ideas

I just had a crazy idea for packaging the Rita omnibus come to me in a dream.

Okay. Imagine you have a hardcover book, wider than it’s tall. Instead of showing page edges on he right side, the binding runs around this side too, with a split in the center. You open this up, and are presented with a wide, flat surface. The ends of the cover are in the center; you open them up, and get two books side by side.

You then go through these two books in sync, and see four pages of the story at once.

Maybe the quick doodles I drew after getting out of bed will explain it better…This is probably eminently impractical but oh man it could also be awesome.

It’s probably super expensive, tolerances on everything may be crazy tight, I may have to do some painful rearrangement of things to create surprises on page turns, the center hinge may be a giant weak point, and actually reading it may be stupidly impractical. But on the plus side, it will be able to present some upcoming scenes amazingly, and this really makes it An Artifact at a new level beyond “oh yeah here’s the hardcover omnibus”.

After coming up with this idea, dream me wanted to record it. I ended up at a shared studio space that used to be huge and empty, and now was full of lots of partitions creating rooms, including one for all of my stuff that I had never been involved in decorating. I couldn’t find a functioning pen, or a pencil sharpener that wouldn’t break pencils, and ended up scampering lost through the whole place carrying a roll of paper with some embarrassingly old art. While focused on finding my area again, I ran into a woman who was juggling; the woman asked if I knew what she was. My initial instinct was that she was definitely A Witch, but I didn’t want to get into a conversation here and talk about witchin’ because I was focused on putting this roll of paper where it belonged, then recording this idea. So I just said “You’re a juggler” and moved on; her response to this was definitely disappointed.

Anyway. Thanks for this idea, dream me. I dunno if I’m going to even begin to investigate whether this CAN be printed, much less how much it can cost, but it’s pretty interesting.

(And. Hmm. Looking at all the pages, chapters 2 and 3 begin on what would be leftmost pages, and so does book 2… if I can stretch the backgrounds on the first two pages of book 2 into two more pages total, then I get things lining up nicely there as well. A 2-page pause at the end of IX could be used for another gloss hint of What’s Outside like the one near the end of VIII, which then syncs up the rest of book 2 with 4-page boundaries, and one page of blackness at the end of book 2 will nicely sync up the beginning of book 3 with a page turn. That’s five pages added throughout 128 so far to synch it up, with fairly simple art additions. So the “painful rearrangement” thing is not really a problem. Especially given that I’ll probably be touching every page to move stuff back from what was a side and is now an inner margin even if I do 2 pages per spread. I… think this could happen.)

Hmm. What if instead it was two separate books? Decrypting Rita, Left Side and Decrypting Rita, Right Side. Put them side by side on a table and read? That’s pretty awkward too. I need to find two suitably-sized books (Battlepug 1/2 HCs?) and see how that feels to read.

Also I could just do one super-wide book but then it’s gonna be like two feet wide by ten inches high when closed and on the shelf and people will kinda hate me for that. I mean I have a Krazy Kat collection that’s 15×11″ and that ends up being hard to read, and lives on the Oversize Shelving. Which is actually “some big books standing on the floor leaning against the side of the book shelves”. God I’m going into fucking Chris Ware territory here with the packaging. But fuck it. Collapsar is an eccentric vanity press whose mission statement involves “making cool artifacts” and I can do this.

I guess this adds the additional question of: are there softcover and hardcover versions of the omnibus? Or just awesome hardcover? In the long run I do want to only have to worry about restocking two books, instead of four (3 sc volumes + 1 hc). And I suspect things are gonna be a lot cheaper if I can use the same interior pages for both – but a 2’x10″ softcover just seems insane, I’ve never seen a book in that kind of form factor.

Anyway. I think I’m about to start thinking in circles here. Time to go out to the farmer’s market and see if the tomatoes are back yet.