Sneak Peek at the dust cover

The Press has sent us a mock-up of the dust jacket complete with the watercolor of Pine Canyon in Big Bend National Park. My sister, dean of graduate studies at Midwestern University, plans to present a copy of our book to the school library. Since there is no book yet, they asked the Press to create a facsimilie for the presentation in October, and here it is.

IT'S FINISHED, Walt packs it up for mailing

Today Isabel and I finished proofing and indexing the final version of our book and put it in the mail at 12:42:32PM headed for Texas A&M University Press. It was a hard slog. Our editor gave us three weeks to proof the text and index it.

Our first pass at selecting words to index produced over 2,000 index cards. It took two hours per chapter. Then came alphabetizing and weeding. One thousand words made the final cut.

Proofing was a tag team effort. One read aloud every word, every punctuation mark, every diacritical mark in the edited manuscript while the other marked errors on the proof text. It sounded like Victor Borge's phonetic punctuation skit, just not so funny.

By working ten-hour-days we completed three weeks of work in two weeks and two days.

Isabel alphabetizing 2000 index cards

Indexing at Blinding Speed

Isabel and I have indexed 10 of our 16 chapters as of 8:15 this evening. Each one takes about 2 hours and from 150 to 200 index cards. One minute we are arguing over how to list something, and the next we are laughing at what someone said during one of our interviews. Three chapters in one day is our best production to date.

We are more than half way through one of the three jobs we have to do before September 30. After recording all the words we want to index and the pages on which they occur (job 1), we have to construct a single alphabetized list (job 2). Indexing completed, we then have to proof read the whole thing again (job 3). That means reading aloud and calling out every capitalization, every punctuation mark, every diacritical mark. We are not looking forward to that last bit.

First Pages Arrive

The first pages (sometimes called page proofs)for our book showed up mysteriously on our doorstep Tuesday afternoon. FedEx didn't bother to ring the bell. The layout is beautiful and the typestyle, Dauphin, is one both of us have used frequently on other projects. It is amazing to see our work looking more and more like a real book.

We went to work immediately on the index and finished the preface and chapter one before bedtime. This afternoon we got almost through chapter 4. Isabel reads, calls out words to index, and highlights them on the manuscript. I write the word and the page number on an index card. By the end of a chapter we have covered a card table with cards. Then we gather them up in alphabetical order and throw them in a cigar box. We start the process all over again with each chapter. At the end of 16 chapters we will have to have a bigger table to alphabetize the whole thing. The work is tedious and we get a little slaphappy from time to time, but it keeps us out of trouble. We have to finish indexing and final proofreading by September 30.

More About the Book

The border of Texas is longer than the Amazon River, runs through ten distinct ecological zones, and outlines one of the most familiar shapes in geography. In 1955, Frank X. Tolbert, well-known columnist for the Dallas Morning News, circumnavigated Texas in a Willis Jeep and sent back dispatches to the newspaper that were eagerly awaited by his readers, including thirteen-year-old Walt Davis. Fifty years later, Isabel and I repeated Tolbert's exploration of the boundaries of Texas.

Each of the sixteen chapters opens with an original drawing by Walt representing a segment of the Texas border where we selected a special place—national park, stretch of river, mountain range, or archeological site. Using a firsthand account of that place written by a previous visitor (artist, explorer, naturalist, or archeologist), we then identified a contemporary voice (biologist, rancher, river-runner, or paleontologist) to serve as a modern-day guide for their journey of rediscovery. This dual perspective allowed us to attach personal stories to the places we visited, to connect the past with the present, and to compare Texas then with Texas now.