As it turns out, the four Sexton Blake Annuals were causing some of the problem. Four books with high quality (1,200dpi) scans of each page – all 640 of them – plus 600 dpi colour scans of the covers in various states from the original scan, via various stages of clean-up and re-lettering to the final published version. Shuffling them off to an external hard drive saved around 6gb (gigabytes). Juggling numerous other files saved a further 12gb and I currently have a work space of 15gb – which isn't as much as I would like as it was 18 on Tuesday, so I've filled 3gb already.
Space is always a concern while I'm working on a book that requires a lot of work, whether it is scans to send off to other people in the hope that we can identify an artist, or scans that I intend using in the book. As I said recently, I have four projects on the go at the moment and they're all picture heavy. The current leader and most likely to be first out of the gate is Lion: King of Picture Story Papers. I'm currently revising the introduction and filling in a few gaps in the index. This one will include all the annuals and maybe all the holiday specials – there may be a few too many gaps, so I may have to leave those and post them online at a later date as I did with the Hurricane Annual.
Penguin Books has merged with Bertelsmann's Random House to create the world's biggest book publisher. Pearson retain 47% to Random House's 53%. If you like percentages, the combined group will now publish 25% of all books sold globally and probably nearer 30% in the UK despite Penguin's sales falling 2% in the first nine months of 2012.
Surely it's not just me who thinks that Penguin Random House sounds like a law firm. Random Penguin is a much better name! And here are a few random Penguins... see what I did there?
As a sort-of connection, here's a nice stash of covers for Penguin's range of science fiction books from over the years:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.penguinsciencefiction.org/index.html