Surely you remember our note about Caleb Crain’s new book, The Wreck of the Henry Clay? (He noticed us!) If you don’t remember the story, then briefly: it’s a collection of untimely essays from his blog, Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, edited into a book and self-published with Lulu. (Don’t miss the silly, animated Lego-like ad he created for the book.)

But the point is this: while I wasn’t looking, the New Yorker went and interviewed him about the process of creating the book, especially the niceties of formatting and editing. As a bonus, towards the end there’s a short list of other great book-worthy blogs to check out.

I compiled the whole book in Microsoft Word, in which, for reasons I don’t pretend to understand, images dance away from your cursor as you try to place them, like live butterflies trying to evade pinning. To design the cover, I relied on an edition of Photoshop that I surreptitiously copied back when I was an editor at Lingua Franca, a magazine that shut down in 2001.

Ah, haven’t we all been there. My own surreptitiously-copied edition of Photoshop is even older, and quite possibly useless by now. Link.

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