Hellooo and good morning and happy weekend,
Update:
Editorial re-design is underway now. When I was with my printer, Mr Segun, I saw that whenever he looked at the pages of the book, he would squint and drop the book within seconds. Mr Segun’s head is full of hair, white hair. I wasn’t sure if it was natural greying or if it was dyed. But he is a grandfather. And the font was too small for him.
Watching his response made me realise that the font size is a bit uncomfortable for even me. The book is small already, A5. It looked pretty as is—a lot of white space on the page, which got compliments the two times I’ve gone to Lagos to show the work in progress, in November and in January—but I want grandmas to pick it up from stands/shelves at church, Gather market, Jazzhole, Rovingheights, Spine and Label, The Booksellers, an airport bookstore, etc. and not drop it back after 5 seconds.
So, back to the drawing board I went. Besides the font change, which will change everything 🥲, there are also other formatting changes to be made to move the editorial aesthetic from magazine to book. Not a lot will change because afterall, it’s an anthology not a novel. But people might get two separate objects in their mail when they place an order. 🤭 I’ve sent our editorial designer, Radhika, a list of these changes, and I’ll be getting the revised pdf in the coming weeks.
And after that, I’ll have to decide what goes where to match different paper types and colours. I am so nervous about that part, and about the book in general. I realised the other day that I am afraid that I’ll have to eat my words, afraid that I should have just dropped the stubbornness and opted to print in India. Every time I have printed test copies, for example, the page numbers have not come out in the same position on every paper. It’s a slight detail but it was noticeable to me in my book-consumer hat on because as a consumer, I examine books like a rocks person examines rocks. At the presentation event at Soto Gallery in November, when I began to point out all these things, a voice in the room pointed out that I could also think of any such ‘errors’ as quirks that reflect the very conditions I’m working in.
(Also, come on, please how would I have learnt more about making things/manufacturing/different economies in Nigeria if I had done this elsewhere. I’m obsessed with this country, and obsession is less a virtue and more a trauma response here, if you ask me.)
This past week, I watched a snippet of the printing process for Chimamanda’s Dream Count here. And later, the process for Tim Minshall’s book Your Life is Manufactured: How We Make Things, Why It Matters, and How We Can Do It Better (formerly titled: How Things Are Made: A Journey Through the Hidden World of Manufacturing, which by the way, I NEED. That’s my sonnggggg.)
Printing in Somolu is like if the one factory machine you see in the video was spread across 14 square kilometres, an ‘ultra-modern’ food market, other stores and many people’s homes in between. The days I went, the sun was loud, and the streets—tarred to different degrees—were full of sounds of generators, machines in action, cars and car horns, people calling out to each other, people chatting as they folded papers or sat in front of their shops, kids running errands, people buying and selling things, the smell of fried fish, the smell of full gutters, and the sight of men visibly in pain pushing big stacks of paper on wheelbarrows from the loading buses to retailers and printing shops.
Printing in Somolu is your book going through several shops—sometimes on different streets—for printing, for cutting, for embossing (or whatever customisations), for binding, for sewing, and for gluing before it is handed back to the person who runs the ‘[Insert name] Prints’ shop that your publisher goes to. What takes the machines in those videos minutes can take you days or weeks in Somolu, with each shop having its own schedule of orders.
This is as Nigerian as our national anthem.
More on this later, more on this later.
As Radhika does her thing, I’m rewriting the Editor’s Letter (now: Introduction), taking new photos to replace some of the current images, and looking at books on my shelf to see if I can find alternative binding methods to gather inspo from. I looked into the binding methods used in Maryam Kazeem’s experimental publishing project in Lagos, Iranti Press. They make art books (so far, usually, in limited editions—a one-off sculpture or an edition of 50), and their work focuses on experimentation with paper-making (with banana leaves once) and the craft of book-making.
When I expressed my desires for a book that opens flat, Mr Segun said they no longer have the machines that do that around in Somolu but that I should check with somewhere called ‘Research’ around Yaba/Somolu. Not only did I struggle to think of how I’ll find a place called ‘Research’ (he gave me directions, you know, like when you come out like this, you’ll see x and it’s on the way, and I typically don’t compute directions that way), I was also physically and financially drained. So if anyone lives or works in that area of Lagos and knows the place popularly called ‘Research,’ please let me know. It’s probably a research organisation, but if I remember correctly, the last time I looked at Google maps of the area he described, it wasn’t only one research org I saw in the area.
I will cry the day I hold the final book in my hands. And I will bawl the day I sell the first copy. I will weep my last tears.
Other words:
Speaking of tears. When I was making Sweet Medicine, the weeks before what was essentially a 9-week performance were soooo mind-ly challenging. Because of the doubt-cockroaches! You know what you’re doing and you have no doubt in it, but you can see and hear other people’s doubts; they appear as cockroaches in your mind. They smell the food and want some too. This past week was similarly mind-ly challenging.
I’ve suffered the challenge most likely because my defences were down. I’ve been house hunting since December, and because of false estimates, I’ve been all packed up since then with nowhere to go. Housing worries really fucks with one’s mind. Slashes at your mental fortress. It’s hacking seriously at my Tree™️. All my kinspeople are begging the gods, making sacrifices, and just generally being Inside Out 2’s Anxiety as they listen to the 24/7 hacking.
Otherwise, the year is looking good. From an IG post, I drew in a group of volunteers to work on a Culture Pay Survey to promote financial transparency, to inform us workers in this industry about our industry’s pay landscape, and to stir a public conversation about pay in the culture industry and perhaps Nigeria at large. The survey will go live early next week. I’ll share the link in my next newsletter. Better soup, na money kill am.
I love my job because it affords me the ability to move freely and easily from idea to creation. And I love that it allows me to make an impact at the only level I currently personally truly believe in—direct people/community impact.
See you next week.
Immaculata