SNEAK PEEK #14: Westwood Library!

Kirsten Wurmann, Branch Head of Westwood Library, introduces UMP's Imagining Winnipeg talk/slideshow November 6. 

We had a roomful of people ignoring the U.S. election hubbub and the gloomy weather...including a intent eight-year-old who loved the banquet-in-the-sewer photo.

At the event, we had someone from East Kildonan request that we bring the slideshow to her neighbourhood library.

We've been chatting with WPL organizers...and it looks like we'll be taking our proverbial show on the road in the new  year, with two or three events at libraries around the city.

We'll let you know as soon as the dates are confirmed, but in the meantime, I thought I'd let you know about two upcoming events that author Esyllt Jones is doing.

First, she'll be speaking at the Fort Garry Historical Society's AGM on November 17 at 2:00 pm at the Pembina Trail Library.

Then, she'll be doing  a signing at McNally's in the run-up to Xmas.  On Sunday, December 2 at 1:00 pm, she'll be sitting by the cash desk with a stack of books and a bowl of come-hither candy.

Thanks!

Ariel Gordon
UMP Promotions/Editorial Assistant

SNEAK PEEK #13: Esyllt at the Library

Erica Ball, Reader Services Librarian at the Millennium Library, introduces Esyllt W. Jones.

Esyllt W. Jones, author of Imagining Winnipeg, lectures on Foote's photography.

Esyllt W. Jones, author of Imagining Winnipeg, lectures on Foote's photography.

Esyllt W. Jones, author of Imagining Winnipeg, lectures on Foote's photography.

SNEAK PEEK #12: Launch pictures!

The crowd at the McNally Robinson launch of Imagining Winnipeg, September 26.

UMP Director David Carr introduces Esyllt W. Jones.

Author Esyllt W. Jones.

The crowd at the McNally Robinson launch of Imagining Winnipeg, September 26.

SNEAK PEEK #11: The Books!

So when a book arrives from Friesens, the great majority of the boxes - usually 10-12 boxes - are immediately shuttled to our basement storage space.

(Don't even get me started on Friesens' SUPERdolly...)

But we always bring 2-3 boxes to the office immediately.

These are mostly destined for promotional purposes. Review copies to various media as well as academic journals and desk/exam copies to profs who might wind up using them in their classes.

But we always crack open a box and have a quick congratulatory look-see.

It's the first chance we have, as a staff, to see the culmination of all the steps in the editorial and printing process. 

We usually wind up standing in a circle in the main office, muttering about details like the spine, the back cover, how the paper looks.

The look-see for what I persist in calling 'the Foote book' took longer than usual. We had to call Esyllt W. Jones, the book's author so that she could have a look, and several other UMP authors and SJC faculty happened to drop by just after the book arrived.

In a word: fun!


Ariel Gordon
UMP Promotions/Editorial Assistant

* * *

From top right: Managing Editor Glenn Bergen, Sales and Marketing Supervisor Cheryl Miki, author Esyllt W. Jones; author Jim Blanchard (giving me the stink eye), and the hand of former Parks Canada historian (and now SJC fellow) Robert Coutts.

SNEAK PEEK #10: At the Bindery!

photo by Michael Deal

* * *

Winnipeg Free Press photographer Michael Deal was at Friesens again late week, this time for the WFP's Jets yearbook, also coming out this fall.

While standing in the bindery, watching the WFP book take shape, he noticed something familiar on a pallet nearby...Imagining Winnipeg.

He was kind enough to take/send this photo...

We're gearing up the for launch here at UMP, making and sending out invitations and arranging for special guests. Won't you join us?

SNEAK PEEK #9: Press check!

My camera is full of pictures from our twelve hour day in Altona at the Friesens plant, observing UMP director David Carr and Doowah Design's Steven Rosenberg do the press check for Imagining Winnipeg.

l-r: David Carr, Randy the pressman, and Steven Rosenberg.

My clothes still have that 'new book smell.'

But more than that, my head is still full of the enormity of the place. Reams and stacks of paper...

What look like water pipes, coming down from the ceiling, specifically for ink to feed the machines...

The ancient embosser in the middle of all the machinery, including a robot arm that lifts boxes...

The art book that retails for $5,000 that Friesens printed in their trophy room...

And yet, homemade cherry pie in the cafeteria where we waited the 45 minutes or so between signatures. And the Safeway bag on a cafeteria table full of extra cucumbers. And the quilted version of the cover of Robert Munsch's Love You Forever on the wall.

I won't be able to share any of the images until Monday, when I'm back in the office, so I thought I'd throw up this pic, taken on my cell phone.

Thanks to Glenda for showing us around, for making sure we had covers and one of each of the signatures we approved to take home and for directing us to Jasmine's Tea Room, just down the street from Friesens.

Also, yay for my first press check!

Ariel Gordon
UMP Promotions/Editorial Assistant

SNEAK PEEK #8: Proofing!

This week, Doowah Design's Steve Rosenberg sent the interiors of Imagining Winnipeg to Friesens.

UMP Director David Carr and I worked intensely on the proofs over the last ten days, checking for errors and omissions in addition to ensuring that that our design and layout choices were consistent.

We looked anxiously at each other and asked questions like:

"Do we have periods after all the source info in the captions?"

"Do we have hyphens between all instances of 'early-twentieth-century'?"

"Esyllt uses 'blackface' all-one-word in the introduction. Do the captions to those photos use the same spelling?"

Most of this necessary nitpickery took place at UMP's offices at the U of M, but on Tuesday afternoon, we traveled to Doowah's downtown offices for a final look-see.

This diptych shows David scanning the Esyllt W. Jones' introduction ONE LAST TIME in Doowah's board room.

(Please note all the UMP titles on Doowah's trophy wall...in addition to the eminently recognizable posters for Keanu Reeves' 1995 turn in 'the Scottish play' and the RWB' 1998 production of Dracula.)

Ariel Gordon
UMP Promotions/Editorial Assistant

SNEAK PEEK #7: The Blurb!

In publishing, there's nothing like a good blurb.

They're not so much reviews as recommendations. So it matters who you have blurb something. The person blurbing is saying "You must read this." And if you're a fan of the blurber, that recommendation means something.

As such, we were thrilled when director Guy Maddin agreed to blurb Imagining Winnipeg.

"L.B. Foote's Winnipeg is a boomtown of staggering abundance and meanest privation. His city teems with a mad sense of community—everywhere people, people and more people, throngs of new citizens forever gathering, spilling over, lining up; everyone held rapt and almost intoxicated by grand ceremony, fevered ritual or political upheaval. So much giddy newness plopped down on top of the nations that came before and on the timeless, pristine, soon-to-be-bedevilled plains. Foote honours human, city and prairie alike with his peculiar and ennobling eye." — Guy Maddin, director of My Winnipeg.

Those of you familiar with UMP's books may have noticed that we published a book on Maddin's work, entitled Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin in 2009.

The collection was edited by David Church, a PhD student at Indiana University, and while it featured many of Maddin's contemporaries and collaborators, Maddin himself wasn't directly involved.

So it's nice to come full circle, first with a book on "the aesthetics and politics behind Maddin's work" and second with a book on the aesthetics and politics behind Foote's work, as blurbed by Maddin.

 I think it's also a great reminder of the influence Foote's images have had - and hopefully will continue to have - on generations of artists.

Ariel Gordon
UMP Promotions/Editorial Assistant

SNEAK PEEK #5: Duotones!

Friesens in Altona, MB, prints the majority of UMP's books. Last week, they sent duotone tests for some of the images in Imagining Winnipeg: History through the Photographs of L.B. Foote.

According to Wikipedia, a duotone is "a halftone reproduction of an image using the superimposition of one contrasting colour halftone (traditionally black) over another color halftone. This is most often used to bring out middle tones and highlights of an image."

For Imagining Winnipeg - like with John Paskievitch's The North End and Gerry Kopelow's All Our Changes - we'll be using "warm grey" along with black.

In Winnipeg Modern: Architecture 1945-1975, on the other hand, we opted for "cool grey."

The three sheets  you see on the floor of UMP's offices represent different amounts of each ink.

Steven Rosenberg of Doowah Design, who is the graphic designer for this project, selected a range of photographs for the test. He then took each of those photos and sent both the original as we received it from the Archives of Manitoba (and other sources) and a version that he'd processed in Photoshop.

Apparently, one of the issues with this book is that Foote used a variety of cameras over the course of the four decades he was photographing the city and its people. Which means that the images, though all black and white, are all a little bit different...

Ariel Gordon
UMP Promotions/Editorial Assistant

SNEAK PEEK #4: Captioning!

Writing captions for Imagining Winnipeg - the book's proper title, as opposed to my usual "Foote book" - was a two week project.

UMP Director David Carr and I split up the 150+ images and set out to write comprehensive captions for each of them.

Most - but not all - of the images came with captions, written either by Foote himself or by an Archives of Manitoba staff person.

In some cases, the captions were cursory, likely intended to jog Foote's memory when he searched his extensive library of images.

We were after captions that more closely resembled those in a newspaper: at the very least, they had to provide a where and a what.

And so, we tried to attach proper names to the photos if possible, which meant names and/or affiliations for the subjects of photos. We also tried to pinpoint the location of each photo.

The goal was to provide enough information to readers that if they wanted to, they could easily do further research on the person/place/thing.

Sometimes, it was a matter of removing incorrect information from the captions. Foote was human and so made human errors over the course of his long career.

We consulted Google maps, archival maps and the Winnipeg Free Press archives...as well as authorities in a variety of fields.

There were also often subtle clues in the photos themselves - such as the shingle of a small business that included its address - all of which meant we were able to add more information to the images.

When we'd made radical changes to the Foote/Archives captions, we printed out evidence to support the changes to share with author Esyllt Jones.

She spent several long stretches with us, verifying the captions, which were then copy-edited for consistency's sake and sent to the graphic designer.

We expect to edit them a final time, depending on how the captions fit on the page...

Next comes a compiling of all the people who contributed photos to the book and/or contributions to this blog.

It's a big list, let me tell you...for which we are immensely grateful.

Ariel Gordon
UMP Promotions/Editorial Assistant 

SNEEK PEAK #3: Page proofs!

I hate offering yet another excuse as to why the blog has gone dormant, especially as we've got a storehouse of such very good material just waiting to be posted...but. But.

By way of apology, I'm sharing this diptych of photos that shows the very early stages of ordering the photos that will be used in Imagining Winnipeg: History Through the Photographs of L.B. Foote.

These photos were taken in Managing Editor Glenn Bergen's office and feature Glenn and Director David Carr comparing the Excel spreadsheet they'd built with the page proofs created by Doowah Design's Steven Rosenberg.

The arrangement of photos is roughly chronological and then also by subject. Which is to say, sports. Or men's clubs. Or family portraits.

It's difficult to keep the details of approximately 150 photos straight, hence the need for a spreadsheet. Or as it turns out, a week or so later, several spreadsheets.

Once the order was more or less set, we moved on to writing captions. The last week has been ALL CAPTIONS, ALL THE TIME.

The trick is to provide just enough information to situate readers, so: identifying the people in the picture and the place where they're standing. Or what group, organization or business they represent.

Suffice to say, we've been googling and consulting the Winnipeg Free Press archives like nobody's business... but more on that later!

Ariel Gordon
UMP Promotions/Editorial Assistant 

SNEAK PEEK #2: ARCs!

Hey all, Cheryl Miki, UMP's Sales & Marketing Supervisor, attended the spring sales conference in Toronto this past week.

At this event, she meets with UMP's sales reps - the lovely folk at ampersand inc - and lets them know about next season's books, so they can pass along the information to bookstores.

Cheryl creates information kits about each book as well as UMP's Fall and Winter 2012 catalogue specifically for this event, but she also sometimes creates ARCs.

ARCs, for those of you not in the book business, are Advance Reading Copies.

If they're intended for reviewers, they'll be an exact replica of the finished book but with a slightly less fancy cover.

If they're intended for booksellers, as UMP's are, they include a sample chapter and/or the book's introduction with the cover as it appears in the catalogue.

Our Foote ARC had to include some photos, though of course they're nowhere near as beautiful in the ARC as they will be in the finished book.

It also includes Esyllt Jones' introduction to the book accompanied by some of the photos she discusses in her essay.

I wanted to share these pics a) because it's another step closer to holding the book in my hands and b) because ARCs are so...adorable.

Ariel Gordon
UMP Promotions/Editorial Assistant

SNEAK PEEK: Foote cover!

Hey all, we're busily launching this spring's titles and working on next fall's titles, but I've got two pieces of Foote-related news to share: first, the cover, designed by Steven Rosenberg of Winnipeg's Doowah Design.

We've used a detail from one of Foote's most famous photos, entitled "1912-13 Copper Sheathing of the Roof of the Hotel Fort Garry" (Manitoba Archives, Foote 1535 Q554).

The book's design harkens to that of UMP's two other photo books, All Our Changes: Images from the Sixties Generation, Photographs by Gerry Kopelow (U of M Press, 2009) and The North End: Photographs by John Paskievich (U of M Press, 2007), also designed by Rosenberg.

We've also arrived at a book description, which I've cribbed from our fall 2012 catalogue. (All eighteen boxes of which arrived at UMP yesterday...)

"In an expanding and socially fractious early twentieth-century Winnipeg, Lewis Benjamin Foote (1873-1957) rose to become the city’s pre-eminent commercial photographer. Documenting everything from royal visits to deep poverty, from the building of the landmark Fort Garry Hotel to
the riots of the 1919 General Strike, Foote’s photographs have come to be iconic representations of early Winnipeg life. They have been used to illustrate everything from academic histories to posters for rock concerts; they have influenced the work of visual artists, writers, and musicians;
and they have represented Winnipeg to the world.

But in Imagining Winnipeg, historian Esyllt W. Jones takes us beyond the iconic to reveal the complex artist behind the lens and the conflicting ways in which his photographs have been used to give credence to diverse and sometimes irreconcilable views of Winnipeg’s past. Incorporating 150 stunning photographs from the more than 2,000 images in the Archives of Manitoba Foote Collection, Imagining Winnipeg challenges our understanding of visual history and the city we thought we knew."

Yay! Fun!

Ariel Gordon
UMP Promotions/Editorial Assistant