Consider the Palette
14 November 2010
It’s the night before the publication date of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and here I am about to tell you all about a palette. Now, call me thick (which is very likely), but before the other day I don’t think I quite understood what a palette really was. Here’s what happened: I get a call from reception telling me to come downstairs for a delivery. “Can’t they come up?” I say, a little annoyed. “No, I’m really sorry, they just can’t.”
So, I go downstairs, and standing there is a man with a palette. You know, one of those big wooden slatted things with an even bigger orange mini-crane thing on wheels to help move the heavy wooden slatted thing.
And the man says to me, “Where do you want it?” So I start to laugh and explain to him that he’s got to help me bring it all upstairs. Up four flights of stairs. Britt was out at a meeting, so here I was on my own with this palette and this orange thing and a lot of stuff.
Palette fixation aside, I have to tell you about all this stuff. We had asked Die Keure (our beloved Belgian printers) to send us everything they had kept while making Tree of Codes because, we told them, we “wanted to use it somehow”. So they sent us everything:
- Reject cover sheets (which is what I thought to take photos of on my phone)
- Massive un-trimmed die-cut sheets
- Long die-cut sheets
- Unused pages from books
I don’t need to tell you that I made it upstairs with everything okay and it’s sitting nicely in enormous piles in A&B Towers as we speak. The lovely tall and super talented Jon Gray stopped by the other day to take a look at it all and we’re going to make some pretty incredible stuff out of it.
We’ll let you know. You know we will. And it’ll be stunning. We’re really excited about it all. And I’ve got to admit, I’m kinda relieved I finally know what it means to get a palette delivered.
-Anna