One of the advantages of the hard-copy of my latest book, Dartford to Gravesend is that you get to see the cover properly. Not my greatest design, but it is a panorama that wraps around front, spine and back of the book and begins to make more sense.
You get almost all of the image in the PDF version, but Blurb chooses to put the front cover at the start of the file, and the back cover only comes after another 80 pages, and the small vertical text and sliver of the image on the spine is missing completely.
It would do the ‘perfect’ binding of the book no good at all to flatten it out to view the entire panorama, but you can get a good impression of it. Perhaps I would have been better to have included the image across a double page spread inside the book, but getting images to work perfectly across the gutter is something of a black art, as I discovered when I produced The Secret Gardens of St Johns Wood and Thamesgate Panoramas, both of which required a couple of proofs and subsequent adjustments to get them more or less correct.
I produced the panorama back in April 1986 as four separate images taken on an Olympus OM1 camera using the 35mm Olympus f2.8 shift lens, leaning out over a wall near the top of Lawn Rd. When I returned to that same spot on New Year’s Day 2013 I made a panorama from almost the same position.
What had been the largest cement works in Europe had disappeared, leaving just a muddy hole. Then as in 1986, taking pictures was a little difficult because of the vegetation along the edge of the quarry making it hard to get a clear view.
Today I received a few print copies of the new book, and it was exciting to open them and see how good a job the printer had made of them. I was very pleasantly surprised with the quality, very close to that of the original scans and the PDF.
While my current stocks last, print copies are available direct from me (see details of how to order here) to addresses in the UK at £27.00, while the PDF remains available (as well as the printed book) on Blurb, where the PDF is £4.99 and the print version £29.99 plus exorbitant postage. You can read more about the book and see some of the pictures in an earlier post on this site. The price will have to go up slightly when present stocks run out.
The first batch of my ‘economy magazine’ on the Poor Doors protests has sold out, but I now have a new batch but the price including UK postage from me is now £7.00. You can read more about the magazine and the protests on this blog.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
To order prints or reproduce images
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