I've been doing some fact checking on PediaPress and came upon the most glaring factoid right away. Smack dab in the middle of their WikiPedia entry it states that "PediaPress has contracted with Lightning Source, a subsidiary of Ingram Industries, to print the books".
I can't find a PediaPress book with an ISBN. Lightning Source requires an ISBN to print a book. Furthermore, it costs a fair amount of money to set up and print even one copy of a book through Lightning Source. But still, you need an ISBN. There are services out there that allow publishers to do one-off jobs but this ain't one of them.
I suspect that when I receive my copy of Peter Nicholson, Architect, I'll find out from whence it comes. It's not a huge factoid, but it's why Wiki information is just a bunch of digital garbage. Sure, I use it for convenience for blogging. I would never use it as a reference in a print form or for when I need truly dependable information.
Grouching over. I'm working on Thomas Martin's Circle Of The Mechanical Arts at the moment, a project long put off. The text content is assembled, the plates ready and it's just a matter of putting the two together and checking each of 700 odd pages to make sure they're in the right order.
Each copy of Circle that I've seen has the plates in different spots: at the beginning; the end; parsed throughout; lumped in a few spots, etc. Some of the plates are numbered and some are not. I'll make a valiant effort to see if I can figure out where they should be and if they ever should have been where they should be or if Martin intended them to be lumped together at the end of the text or the beginning.
At well over 700 pages and 8.5x11, most likely in hard cover, this will be a flower press book. Not Webster's, but sizable. Martin did a fine job of covering everything in the known world within one book.
Till next, Gary
