13 Nov 2012 louie   » (Master)

Thanking Contributors by Printing the MPL

As part of a general drive to get rid of stuff, I’ve recently become increasingly willing to part with my old books. This has been a painful process – books have many happy memories for me – but I think also a good and focusing one. As part of my emotional reaction to this, I’ve become increasingly interested in making beautiful, printed texts – things that stand up better to the test of time than the paperbacks I’ve been thinning out.

In 2010, as part of this process, I bought Typography for Lawyers, and incorporated some of what I learned from that into the HTML version of MPL 2.0. In 2011, as I was putting the finishing touches on the final draft of the MPL,  I attended the holiday fair at the San Francisco Center for the Book (neat Flickr stream), and ran across some work from Painted Tongue Press- beautiful broadside printings of poetry and wedding vows.

This gave me the idea to thank the most involved contributors to the MPL with a hand-made, printed copy of the text of the license.

The wonderful Kim Vanderheiden, of Painted Tongue, worked with me over the course of several months to plan this process, and then she and her team put them together. First, we designed the layout, not just of the text, but of the relatively unusual accordion-fold binding, which allowed the final product to be displayed like an A-Frame or by hanging the entire (very long!) thing from a wall. Then we picked paper for the text, and cloth and ribbon for the bindings (the ribbon symbolising both the fact that these are gifts and traditional bindings for legal documents). Kim’s team then hand printed them on their presses, and Kim used watercolors to paint the colored highlights (including the yellow highlighting that replaces the ALL CAPS text). Finally, they were bound.

The end result has been fifteen copies of beautiful, tangible, printed words, which I am now in the slow process of distributing to various contributors. I hope that this token of the maintainers’ appreciation for their assistance (in a variety of ways) is appreciated.

The front cover of the MPL printing, showing the ribbon and bow. The dino head, hand-colored. Hand-colored replacement for ALL CAPS. The thank you page.

The thanks and colophon is as follows:

Thank You!

This revision of the MPL would not have happened without your  help. Please accept this hand-crafted printing of the license as a token of our appreciation, and a reflection of the effort and care you put into your contributions to the license.

The MPL Module Owners

Mitchell Baker
Harvey Anderson
Gervase Markham
Heather Meeker
Luis Villa

-o-

Colophon

The type was set in Equity by Matthew Butterick (typo.la/equity – used with permission of the typographer) and Droid Sans Mono by Google (droidfonts.com – used under the Apache 2.0 license). The book is printed on Somerset Velvet Radiant White and covered in Duo Cloth Birch.

Design, printing, binding, and painting were done with care by the excellent team at Painted Tongue Press, Oakland, California (paintedtonguepress.com).

This edition of MPL 2.0 was printed in August 2012 to celebrate the publication of, and thank contributors to, MPL 2.0. You are holding copy # __
of 15.

Syndicated 2012-11-13 06:03:27 from Luis Villa » Blog Posts

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