Printing Story

I thought writing the book would be the hardest part of becoming a famous bulldog author. Oh, how wrong I was! Mighty paw, the printing world is like astrophysics and astral travel mixed together.

Last weekend we spent the whole time fine-tuning the text and especially the book cover. We were fixing tiny details and aligning everything down to the last millimeter so it would all be perfect. On Monday morning, we headed to the print shop to pick up the finished result, because the Girl refused to let anyone else handle my precious prints.

So off we went, through snow, frost, and a full-on blizzard, like maniacs. And what did we find at the print shop? The cover was missing my bulldog head symbol. Can you believe that?! We couldn’t either, and neither could anyone else. Nobody could figure out how it even happened! They said that in five years, they had never seen anything like it. The program simply decided to delete one image from our book cover.

If that had happened to the entire print run, Hydra would already be in a psychiatric hospital. Luckily, this little disaster only cost us one day and forced us to make a backup plan. Which in practice meant driving home and sending everything again, with a new schedule: first they’d print and bind the inside of the book, and only then the covers.

Not exactly a standard procedure, but Hydra, panicking that the books might not be ready in time, even offered to go there and bind them herself if that’s what it took. The Boy just sighed that nothing in our lives can ever go smoothly, got in the car, and we zoomed home.

Once we got there, we realized every bulldog saint in the universe must have been watching over us, because the text file had completely imploded. All the text was scattered in every direction. If that version had gone to print, Hydra would be in jail, because the Boy, our chief aligner, would have died a slow and painful death.

So we spent the entire night until six in the morning aligning every single line and checking all the word breaks that were broken too. When we finally sent everything around seven, we were as dead as a group of carol singers after Easter Monday.

Even I was exhausted, because those two kept the lights on all night, slamming rulers, measuring every millimeter of the fonts, and yelling: “Enter here, another enter there, wrong again, enter, fix this, enter!” I heard the word “enter” so many times I honestly expected the spaceship Enterprise to land in our living room. The keyboard clicking echoed in my ears for two more days after that.

Tomorrow we should get another set of test prints, and let me tell you, even the loaf of bread in our breadbox is clenching from tension.

And for those of you who aren’t from Czechia or don’t speak Czech and therefore can’t get the book just yet, don’t worry! The Boy is already working on the translation, and after that we’ll figure out the best way to bring it to your homes all around the world, either as a physical copy or at least in digital form!