Daniel's Imagination
-William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgement
A Preface & Epilogue to the History of the World
A Preface and Epilogue to the History of the World an illustrated philosophic vignette. It grapples with the existential fact of being aware of the present moment, through which atemporal memories may emerge. It asks, “why now?”
You can read the excerpt here or download the book at Goodreads.
The Union of Magic and Mystery
The Union of Magic and Mystery is an illustrated allegorical history of Magic and Mystery. It is a retelling of Platonic erotic philosophy, particularly from the myths of the Symposium. Its my attempt to comprehend the duality of inner and outer worlds.
Its my most recent little book, in fact, I didn’t think I’d make another and then it just happened. I used this as an opportunity to understand ebooks and laying out EPUB files.
You can read the excerpt here or download it at Goodreads.
The Alchemists’ Dream Is Now Achieved.
The Alchemists’ Dream Is Now Achieved. traces a mythic history of alchemy from pre-Socratic days to the present moment. Science and technology have achieved the material goals of alchemy, however it is the individual’s free choice to achieve its spiritual goals. This book offers a mediation in honor of that freedom. This is my first black and white little book. I wrote it in Michigan between Georgia and San Francisco and illustrated it when I first got to California.
You can read the excerpt here or download it at Goodreads.
On Realizing Divine Identity
On Realizing Divine Identity presents ideas, intentions, and meditations that aim to expand the consciousness of one who practices them. They are collected from a variety of sources, notably the Buddhists and Theosophists. I wrote this book for my friend David Prichard, who asked me how one would be experiencing the spiritual world described by the Theosophists and some lucid dreamers. There wasn’t a conscise and comprehensive enough book for my tastes, so I decided to write it.
You can read the excerpt here or at Goodreads.
Ester Escapes from the Shadow
My brother wrote a story about a Winne-the-Pooh talking toy who lived at my grandmother’s house when we were very small boys. When you pulled the string, he would say things like, “hmm, I’m hungry”, “I’m just a bear and bears love honey”, and, the inspirations for this character, “I’m Pooh and I love you”.
This is our first (only) writing/illustration collaboration, although we’d like to do some more. You can read an excerpt here or at Goodreads.
How to prep black and white illustrations EPUB files.
I’m in the process of converting my physical books into ebooks. All my books have black and white illustrations. The process of laying out an ebook is describe in an another post.
A problem I encountered was image format. When I had alternating text and images, I just used JPEG by default and the EPUBs were always around 1 megabyte. However, when I started using 100% image files, then I started to run into file size problems. These books involved text and image together, one on top of each other. This style is a fixed layout, which means its more suitable to PDF than EPUB because EPUBs are all about flowing and scalable text. For example, this is one page:
My books have a dozen or two of these pages. As JPEGs 600px wides, they were are around 200K with a lot of artifacts. For images like these, there’s a much better solution: the index PNG file. This is from a 650px wide PNG at 30K.
Here are the steps in GIMP:
- Scale image to desired size, this must be first because it complains about scaling an indexed image. IMAGE MENU > Scale image
- Index colors. IMAGE MENU > Mode > Indexed. For these images, I let it generate the optimum color map, using a maximum of 16 colors.
- Save as PNG
I found that indexing worked well for line images, but distorted text in an unpleasant way. Rather than indexing the PNGs, I converted the mode to greyscale. After I made a new directory of images, I used pngcrush to optimize them further, without a loss of text quality.
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