Photo Edits, Final Proofreading of Text near completion
Dear Friends and Fellow Pilgrims,
CHRIST IS RISEN! INDEED HE IS RISEN!
I hope you all have had a good Lent and Holy Week, and a most radiant Pascha! What with the liturgical cycle, tax season, and other filing requirements it’s been a full plate here, and I apologize for the lack of updates over the past several weeks. The good news is St Tikhon’s and I both been busy, and I have much to report since my previous update in late March.
The Final Proof Copy of the Thebaid book was every bit as affirming as my initial impressions led me to hope, with only eleven images requiring any edits, almost exclusively regarding brightness. Out of over two-hundred images, that’s only about 5% that needed any further attention. My original hope for the Final Proof Book images was to reach 90% completion, with no more than ten percent (~20 images) requiring any further edits. To hit 95% was a major achievement, and gave our publishing team some real “wind in our sails” as we turned towards Holy Week. Out of the eleven revised images there are two which need an additional adjustment, then the images will be completed and ready to go to press.
The final proof-reading of the text is being finished by a member of the St Vladimir’s Seminary Press editorial team, and I’m looking forward to that status report during my weekly pre-press phone call with St Tikhon’s Press tomorrow (May 9). Of course, I also went over the text and format elements myself, and identified a “baker’s dozen” or so items for correction, mainly having to do with spacing and ligature, or punctuation.
Perhaps most engaging for STM Press and me has been the completion of a few final design elements which we had deliberately left until the end of pre-press. Deciding on a 2-page-spread image for the book’s end sheets was particularly enjoyable, and further, helped us decide on two other 2-page spreads in the front matter to highlight some important components of the book. No spoilers, so I will decline to say anything further, except to express my hope that you who have been following this project most closely will appreciate the opening pages of the book and why I kept it under wraps.
My weekly pre-press phone calls with St Tikhon’s Press will continue until we go to press. If you were looking at the side bar on the Thebaid website and didn’t see anything scheduled for the past few weeks, that was due to an oversight on my part, now corrected, where my calendar entries for the Pre-Press Phone Calls were tagged for my personal calendar, not the Thebaid Book Project (which is synched to my Thebaid Website). As soon as we have future dates for sending the file to press, and an expected date for receiving of the book shipment at St Tikhon’s, I will post those also.
Lastly, on a different topic, I am pleased to share with you about the recent launch of a new podcast series which you may enjoy: Homilies of Fr Ambrose Young. (I included with this post a favorite photograph I made of Fr Ambrose serving at Pascha in 2013.)
Adapted from the podcast description:
Hieromonk Ambrose (Young) is the author of numerous books and articles about Orthodox Christian life, and was editor of the journals Nikodemos and Orthodox America in the 1970s and 80s. Born in 1943, then Craig Young, at the age of 27, converted with his wife, Susan, and their small son, Ian, from Roman Catholicism to Orthodoxy, taking the name Alexey, for St Alexis, the Man of God. In 1979, he was ordained a presbyter of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR), serving mission parishes for the next twenty years. After the death of his wife in the late 1990s, Fr Alexey, a spiritual son of Fr Seraphim Rose, was tonsured a monk and became Hieromonk Ambrose. For the last ten years, Fr Ambrose has been limited by illness.
I feel blessed to have been in close orbit around Fr Ambrose and the Skete of the Entrance of the Theotokos in northern Ohio (where he served in retirement as chaplain) for several years. One of the goals our small community had was to begin collecting and republishing Fr Ambrose’s writings, and perhaps record and distribute his homilies. It is therefore a great blessing to see this first series of his talks come to light and make its way to the internet. Fr Ambrose kindly give his permission and blessing for me to include in The North American Thebaid Book his article, “What is a Holy Pilgrimage?”, which was transcribed from a talk he gave at a retreat in the late 1990s. This article is one of the pillars on which the Thebaid Book is based, and there is, to my knowledge, almost no other article on pilgrimage like it, breathing the savor of Holy Orthodoxy, which makes it all the more important that it now will be seen by a wider audience. Thus it is a providential and timely occurrence that this new podcast series should be launched just as we are preparing to send the book to press.
With that blessing in mind, I wish you all a peace-filled remainder of Bright Week, and a luminous forty days to the Ascension of the Lord. Watch for more news coming very soon, I hope and trust.
Yours in our Risen Lord,
zosimas