Charles Apple: The history behind the history pages of the Further Review coffee table book out Friday

Greetings, Spokane. I’m the guy who creates the Further Review pages for your morning newspaper!

I hope you’ve heard by now: We have a hardcover “coffee table” book collecting a big batch of my stories on American history coming out this week. The official release date is today, in fact, although I’m hearing reports from around the country that some folks already have theirs.

Also today, I’m flying from my home in the suburbs of Atlanta to Spokane. Sunday afternoon, The Spokesman-Review’s book club, Northwest Passages, is hosting a book launch event at Gonzaga’s Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center.

There, I’ll be interviewed on stage by the paper’s editor, Rob Curley. We’ll probably have time for audience questions, so come prepared to ask me something interesting – other than “Why do you make so many typos?,” I mean.

And then we’ll have a book-signing session. Which should be interesting, given that I severely injured my right arm a few weeks ago. My orthopedics guy says I should be good to go. He hopes.

Building my Further Review book was an awful lot of work. But it was also an awful lot of fun.

During my visit to Spokane last August, Rob first mentioned to me that he would like me to build a book reprinting my stories. I’ve done graphics for books by that same publisher, so I immediately demonstrated to Rob how I’d simply take our tall newspaper pages – we call that size “broadsheet” – disassemble the parts, move everything into a format filling two facing book pages, and then glue it all back together.

It sounded so easy. And, y’know, I kind of thought it would be – especially since these pages are all researched and designed and published already. I probably don’t have to tell you that researching and fact-checking everything is the REALLY had part of this job.

By January, I was getting excited about this project. I had considered so many directions we could take for this collection: science, pop culture, politics, sports … But I decided history would be the most productive way to go. I chose the Further Review history pages I’d like most to rework into book spreads. And I began practicing on a few stories – just to see how it’d go.

In some cases, things went smoothly. You’ve probably noticed that nearly all of my pages have an “on this date” component: 50 years ago today, 120 years ago Sunday, and so on. I wouldn’t be able to write that on pages in a book, so I took that bit out of the text for each story and instead added a little label with a date for the extreme upper left of each book spread.

By February, the folks at Pediment publishing had given me official page dimensions. So I could finally begin building live pages! Sure enough, those dimensions were slightly different from the ones I had used on my practice pages. Which meant that everything had to be rebuilt from scratch.

But that wasn’t totally unexpected: Every photo I planned to use in the book had to be reworked anyway. You see, photos in print are typically made of thousands of tiny dots of ink in four colors: cyan (a watery blue), magenta (kind of a pinkish-red), yellow and black.

In the world of newspapers, we typically print 200 of these dots per inch. And the fine folks at The Spokesman-Review printing plant do a fabulous job of making the photos and graphics I use look terrific, I think!

But a book uses slicker, higher-quality paper than we use in newspapers. So book photos and graphics need to use 300 dots per inch. This mean I had to pull new copies of all the photos I used and then “tone” them – yes, we use Photoshop for this, but we’re careful to not change anything in photos – for more dots per inch. That’s what we call “high resolution.”

While yes, this took a lot of time, it also resulted in gorgeous, smooth-looking photos. Which I knew would accompany the graphics I typically use in many of my pages.

Again, another newspaper printing lesson: We have a LOT of space to play with on a newspaper broadsheet page, but there are rules – You can come only so close to the edge of a page.

But in a book, you can run a photo or a graphic all the way up to the edge of a page! You can even bleed it off the page! You can even run something on one page, across the “gutter” and onto the facing page! You wouldn’t want to do any of this with words. But images? Books are a whole new world for a newspaper designer!

Wanting my book to be big, bold and splashy, I took advantage of this. I ran graphics and color blocks off the edges of pages. I ran graphics – and, occasionally, photos – across the gutter. The wish was to make every spread in the book – all 97 of them – a visual feast. This, I hoped, would accompany the stories I had written. Which I hope will be interesting and informative.

By the end of March, I was pretty much done. In a few cases, I had built new pages for the newspaper that I know I’d want in the book. In a few cases, I converted pages into book spreads before they even appeared in The Spokesman-Review.

The chief of the paper’s copy desk – Managing Editor Lindsey Treffry – re-read all my pages for me, just to make sure I didn’t mess up anything with my remodeling work. We did most of that work over the summer.

We sent off pages to Pediment in mid-August. They came back with a few requests for tweaks here and there but began printing the book on Oct. 10.

In the meantime, I revised a large batch of pages I’ve done over the years on elections and our federal government for a special section that ran on Sept. 15. And on Oct. 4, The Spokesman-Review ran my 1,000th Further Review page, in which I wrote about myself and the work I’ve done for you.

So it’s been a busy fall for your Further Review guy. And all that culminates Sunday with the official launch of our book.

I hope you guys enjoy it! I hope you guys buy it!

And I hope I’ll see you Sunday!