Dear Supporters and Fellow Pilgrims,

Big News on the Book!

Hot on the heels of my recent update, I received late yesterday from my book editor at St Tikhon’s the new “final” book file, which includes all the 4-color photo files inserted into the layout, plus the corrected texts from the professional proofreader. This is the meat of the matter, and what we have been working towards these many long months, and even years!

He and I are both reviewing the entire book for any quirks that may have been missed. I have already caught several items, some as small as spacing between a period and the start of a new sentence, others involving an odd turn of phrase which can be edited to provide a better reading experience.

We have also made a couple of important final decisions on versions of images to use; now is the time to do it, before we print the proof copy, so we can see how it looks when done in offset printing.

On a personal level, I’ve noticed it’s very helpful that I haven’t looked at the earlier PDF book file since early December, as the book is now rather fresh to me once again, like seeing it with unsuspecting eyes. Not only does it allow me to quickly see issues which need correcting, but it allows me to appreciate the (hopefully positive) impact of the images and the flow of the book.

I cannot emphasize enough how much I appreciate your great patience during this extremely long pre-press process. Now we truly are at the final steps before printing the book itself.

Watch for more updates when we send the book file for the proof copy to be printed (hopefully middle of next week), followed by my report on the results, which will precede sending the actual finished book file to press.

With immense gratefulness to you, and thankfulness to God,

zosimas