You Want Pitchers? I Got Yer Pitchers Right Here!

I’m emerging from more than a week of radio silence.  I’m not apologizing for it, as I was feverishly selecting, identifying editing, and captioning somewhere close to 500 pictures for VIRTUOSO: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley. This was from an inventory of over 6,000 photos in my computer, which does not include the ton of pictures Chris took nor the ones Narayan was not happy with.  I would guess that if you gathered all the files from each time we snapped a picture it would number somewhere north of 10,000.  I had begun the process about the time I submitted the written manuscript a month ago, but it resumed in earnest once Chris had the manuscript edited for me to work with two weeks ago.

This does not include the glamor shots or other photographs that will be employed as galleries or visual punctuation as Chris Schwarz, Wesley Tnnner, and Narayan Nayar hammer out the final design and layout for the book.  It would not surprise me in the end if the book has up to 600 illustrations.  I’ll have to look it over one last time, but we have had enough conversations that I am certain they know what I want it to look like.

For tomorrow afternoon I have a handful of photos to shoot (literally, less than a dozen) then I will let the manuscript sit unstirred for 24 hours and read it one final time before washing my hands of the whole thing as I send it to land on Chris’ desk with a plop on Monday.

Good riddance, I say.  Come next week I will be free from my chair to work on the firewood pile, the new door for the root cellar, trying to impose some sort of order in the barn, continue reviewing Roubo 2, working on the preparations and marketing for the exhibit of the Studley collection…