Creating a book
or a "thank you" post
With the publication of A Woman's World, my third book in collaboration with Dan Jones, I've found myself reflecting a lot on the last six years - all of which I spent working on our beloved books, and I can't help but feel grateful for the opportunity to be one of the names behind such an extraordinary and unique project as our The Colour of Time series. I take huge pride and have no shame in recognizing that we have helped to create a new movement with it.
When the first book came out in 2018, colorization as we know it today was still a novelty, and there were very few people doing it (some of them started way before me and I should always be grateful to them.) Seeing so many iconic photographs in color for the first time felt like walking through a gateway into a magical and colorful land (someone described the experience once as “an acid trip”, and I quite like this definition).
A few things have changed since then: Peter Jackson made a film whose main appeal was the restored and colorized footage of the First World War, more people got involved in the colorization business, more hobbyists joined us too, other books followed the premise of TCOT, AI became a thing, etc. Certainly, with time, that novelty factor has worn off. The technique has been highly used and has had many different applications in recent years, which is fantastic. But exciting new projects are coming up all the time and people still have a visceral reaction to them. This is something that hasn't changed even a bit over the years, which just goes to show that it was not the "novelty factor" what made the practice so popular, but rather the emotional impact it is able to make.
I consider myself extremely fortunate to be able to make a living working with something that I genuinely enjoy. And my books play a significant role in that.
The process
Each book takes us about two years to complete. Although we have already developed a method for making the process go as smoothly as possible, we still have a lot of decisions to make and a lot of work to do. Typically, we'll start by brainstorming and putting together a long list of potential events and names within the broad theme we've chosen to explore.
In A Woman's World, we had a list of probably 230 names or more, and they all made sense. That is, we were not just tossing random people in the list for the sake of volume. We had a reason to list every single name - and finding that ‘reason’ isn't as easy as it sounds: not only the stories we select have to be engaging, interesting and historically relevant, but we also need to have photos that are good enough to be used in the book. Things like photo resolution, quality of preservation, copyright restrictions, really matter. In order to try to find photos that match this criteria, we need to bury ourselves in photo archives (Getty is a crucial partner in the project), type in the name of every single person/event, once at a time, explore every page that will show up, selecting and listing photographs that could potentially be used (assessing their quality, the context, the story behind them, the date in which they were taken, etc), and, finally, repeat the whole process again and again, for every name and topic on the list.
The research process can be exhausting and sometimes even boring - but, of course, you can't create a good book - any kind of book - without it. And it was doing this preliminary research that I stumbled upon dozens of inspiring, jaw-dropping, emotional and powerful stories.
I had so much fun investigating who was the first woman to do x thing or to achieve y, who invented the paper coffee filter (God bless Melitta Benz), the ice cream maker (Nancy Johnson) or even the windscreen wiper (Mary Anderson). None of these women ended up being mentioned in the book, but they made me think about how many of these “silly” things we take for granted in our daily lives. We never take the time to appreciate the fact that they didn't appear out of nowhere: one day, someone (in this case, a woman) had to have an idea and turn it into a reality.
What next?
The next step is crying out of despair - or almost. This is where we need to take our big list and cut it in half - which means picking "only” 200 exciting names and topics among a sea of exciting names and topics. And for each one of these 200 names and topics, we'll have at least 3 photographs - sometimes even 20 or more -, all selected during the preliminary research, to choose from and pick our favorite, the one that will end up in the book.
The problem is that our favorite one will not always work. And sometimes I only notice that halfway through the colorization process. To the bin it goes, and back to the list we go to choose our “second favorite”. But sometimes the second choice won't work either - and, one more time, we have start all over again.
As a result (and because we're two obnoxious obsessive-compulsive perfectionists), I always colorize far more images than the 200 required for the book. We replace photos and names until the very last second.
Finally, Dan - who is also responsible for assembling the historical timeline and for making sure that the chapters are flowing nicely and the order in which the photos were placed makes sense - writes the captions. It's annoying how good he is at it.
The captions are revised, tweaked, the photos are adjusted, we make last-minute changes and that's it.
Published!
Except that it isn't.
Because then come the agonizing months of waiting until the book finally arrives on your doorstep. Months I spend desperately texting Dan, wondering what I'm going to do with my life since “only 10 people are going to buy the book and I'll become homeless and all that work will be for nothing”.
This is what I always expect, but surprisingly, far more people buy and enjoy them. They even make it into the bestseller charts (the real and important ones) sometimes.
This is a brief summary of the past six years. "A rollercoaster of emotions which I greatly enjoy" is the best way to describe it. I'm incredibly proud of this project, and I believe in it with all of my heart.
Like any person who makes a living from art, I do get insecure sometimes. But you show me again and again that what I do really has a greater meaning - be it by buying the books and prints, sharing my work on social media, talking about it with a friend, or just subscribing to this newsletter.
In the end, this is just a "thank you” post.
Having you here is a real pleasure, and a great honor.
If you enjoy my work, please consider buying a copy of A Woman's World, our latest effort at trying to bring history closer to you.