8 Comments

Add a Comment
  1. Que suave! Looking forward to ordering one. Thank you for doing this.

  2. Nice proofreading tip! I’ll try that.

  3. This volume will be a major help to many people.

  4. I also learned the read upside down method. One of the old guys at the local newspaper where I learned some of my printing talents also read upside down and backwards. bottom right, left, all the way to the top left.

    I can’t wait to get my copy of the book. I’ve done a lot of H3k rebuilding, but I have one that has me completely stumped. Doubt the solution is in any book, but I hope a tip on how to solve the issue.

  5. I’ve been editing copy for 20 years and never heard the reading upside-down trick. Clearly your skills are better than mine because I went through the book and didn’t find any mistakes at all.

    1. heh, you learn it by standing at the back of a printing press and watching printed sheets get deposited top-down in a delivery chute rapid-fire. Reading upside-down disrupts the normalcy of word forms and forces the reader to really pay attention to the words instead of just reading. If you’ve ever seen those sentences where they strip out all the vowels and you can still understand it, then you get the brain’s ability to gloss over mistakes. In a print shop, the press operator is the last line of proofing, and there were a *lot* of times I’d have to send a job back to typesetting after already setting it up and doing print makeready. Back in the days of cold typesetting, film line negs and photographic metal printing plates, that was no small screw-up. :D

  6. Great! Another Repair Bible for the bookshelf.

    I didn’t know about the printers’ trick of proof-reading upside down. I tried it with a page from a vacuum cleaner manual that was on my counter. I could read pretty well, but I was sort of amazed at how strangely I processed the words – as if it were written in a foreign language. Ah, the mysteries of the mind.

  7. I cannot wait to try this one out! Great job. Nice to see you guys working together on this!

Leave a Reply to John Munroe Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.