Hello Gang!
When I started working intensively on “The Cloth of Egypt: All About Assiut,” I envisioned a 125-140 page book that reveled in the glory of this magnificent cloth. Commonly called assiut (or one of its numerous alternative spellings including assuit, assiout, asyut, etc. etc.) but known as tally, telli, or tilli in Egypt, throughout North Africa, and across the Middle East. The book has grown – expanded to about 260 pages – thanks to the generosity of my backers over on Kickstarter! They allowed me to purchase image rights and ephemera to illustrated the history chapter that blossomed from a mere 12 pages of text to a lavishly illustrated 60+ pages with historic images that tell the story of assiut cloth between 1900 and 1940.
I’m just a few images away from completing the layout of the book – and then I’m moving onto the painful process of placing the text and then making the final edits on the project. We are now so close to publication, that I can taste it! So I thought I would share a little taste with you. I haven’t placed the words yet, but here are just a few of the spreads. In these 10 pages, 5 spreads, you can get a sense of the layout, the quality of the images, and the general look.
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And now, I’m diving back into the layout process. Today it’s another 10 images of lovely dancers to crop, convert to black and white, adjust the contrast, and.. and.. and… With luck, the layout will be complete by this Friday!
I look forward to returning to blogging on a regular basis as soon as we hit send on the final version and it hits the presses!