It's a book. A real book!

This is the galley, or ARC -- Advance Reader Copy -- for The Pericles Commission. It's a very small print run destined for advance reviewers. Whereas the the final book will be hardcover, this is trade paper format.

The white blobby thing on the cover says Advance Uncorrected Proofs. This was printed after the copyedit review, but before we checked the final pages, in which we found a few things that had been missed. The back cover of this issue is precisely the page from the St Martin's catalog of books, in black system font on a white background (there's a picture below).

It's a totally surreal experience to open a book and see your own words. Words I've only ever seen on a screen, or printed on A4, were there inside, as if they were part of a real book.

You've seen the picture on the left in a previous post. It's the copyedit of the first page. I scanned the first page of the real book and put it alongside: