Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Sample page. (Click on the image to download the whole book.) I originally intended this for print, but it soon became Adobe's most-downloaded e-book. It also got heavily Slashdotted when Adobe for put legally silly access restrictions on PDFs, and then Lawrence Lessig lambasted them with it.

This product was a "labor of love," according to Roger Parloff, writing for Inside.com about the whole affair. Indeed, "Zelchenko painstakingly re-created each typographic detail...from Carroll's original 1865 London edition (which is in the public domain). The book was then released for free in three formats: as a plain PDF file, as a BookVirtual Digital Edition and as an Adobe Glassbook Reader edition." (Glassbook was founded by my fellow PLATO alum Len Kawell, who'd asked me if he could use the e-book for demonstrations in his souped-up format. Adobe had been offering the book separately as a plain PDF.)

Well, and I also printed hundreds of copies — bound in a beautiful cover colored by my friend Bill Sosin — to show off the on-demand printing platform. The reason I retypeset the work was to create a classic e-book that was not a facsimile scan, but an efficient fonted and keystroked product. The entire PDF fit on a 1.44 MB floppy.

A diverse few of the more interesting books I've designed. From left to right: Saddle-stitched catalog for the Henry George School that I did pro bono for the school. The same product, showing off the cover, a collage of Henry George's face made from economic terms (zoom in to see). A custom cookbook design prototype for former Barnes & Noble VP of New Technologies, Ken Brooks (I did a lot of samples for Ken at B&N when they were looking into books on demand). The clever and unique thing about this design was the cover, which had a fancy die-cut window thickly laminated on both sides, with the customer's name custom-printed on the first page of the block. Hence, no need to custom print the name and then laminate the cover; they'd be manufactured in bulk. (This was for the web site of the world's largest pasta manufacturer.) The official guide to the League of Women Voters' I Am the Government project. I also co-wrote the book. The cover, by the way, was done on paper I had leftover, with only color stamps from Paper Source, not printed.The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. An exact duplicate of the Canto offset product, printed on demand on my platform. The Adobe Alice, printed on demand. The binding is falling apart because this was sent back to me from a binding expert who had driven over it in his car to test it. Bernard Brindel. This was actually an experiment in on-demand hardcover binding. It was not easy to do, but I bound hundreds of these books hardcover by hand, with no machines.

Just to show the detail on the League of Women Voters work shown above. This was a foldout flowchart of the voting process that the great Terry Williams (of the League) and I developed. I bound it into the back of each of the several hundred books we printed.

As the Board of Elections' Lance Gough once put it, "Terry's forgotten more about elections than most of us ever knew." It is always a great privilege working with this old suffragette. She really cares about voting rights.