The Seventeenth International Conference on Books, Publishing & Libraries

Abstract

Author Neil Gaiman, in the second annual Reading Agency lecture, said, “books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over.” Focusing on the conference theme of “Publishing Practices: Past, Present, and Future,” this paper is based on a case study of a book that was produced for the specific and deliberate purpose of capturing a story that was important to a specific group within the community before that story was lost. It addresses all three of the conference concerns of access, diversity, and democracy as they apply to a project that responded to a specialty publishing need. The discussion focuses on one purpose of a book, as described by Gaiman, to learn from those who are no longer with us, and will discuss both the process of producing a book for this purpose and the decisions that were made about design and publishing formats.