RE: Edward Tufte Course on Presenting Data and Info-book

["Ridder, Fred" <Fred -dot- Ridder -at- Dialogic -dot- com>]

On Tue, 21 Mar 2000, Beth Friedman wrote:

>In our previous episode, Kay Robart wrote:
>
>>         Envisioning Information. You can get it at amazon.com.
>>
>>         Kay Robart
>
>At Amazon it's $48, excluding shipping.  At Fatbrain, Barnes & Noble, 
>Spree, or Borders, it's $33.60, excluding shipping.  Worth doing a bit of 
>checking around for.  I like bestbookbuys.com as a comparison site.

Another approach is to purchase it directly from the publisher, who
are perfectly happy to accept mail orders.  Note that the book publisher
is Prof. Tufte's own company, because no commercial publisher has ever
been willing to take on books like these that are both very expensive to 
produce and destined never to be true best-sellers.  I, for one, do not
mind paying the full price for a book if I know that all of the money is
going to the author rather than a whole chain of middlemen.  According 
to information on the dustjacket of the "Envisioning Information" book,
the book costs $48 postpaid if ordered directly from:
    Graphics Press
    P.O. Box 430
    Cheshire, Connecticut  06410
(The prices for Tufte's other two books are slightly less.)  It may also
be possible to order books by phone or fax using the numbers that are
printed on the leaflets about Prof. Tufte's public lectures (the publishing 
company also arranges and promotes the lectures), but I don't have a 
copy of one of his brochures handy.

In his lectures, Prof. Tufte frequently tells the story of how an Ivy 
League professor of statistics came to be the owner of a publishing 
company (literally out of his garage until he could afford to build a
small addition to his home to house the office and rent warehouse space
for his self-financed inventory of printed books). One anecdote on the 
subject of how expensive the books were to produce relates to the 
section of a Swiss government topographic map which he reproduces
in the "Envisioning Information" volume.  This particular plate required 21 
separate press runs which had to be very precisely registered to each other.
Rather than using conventional 4-color process printing, which is inherently
limited in resolution and color accuracy, this high-resolution map used a 
separate ink color for each different shade of gray and blue and green 
and brown (as well as good old black) because his whole point was how
color was used to convey information in this map.  If I recall, he said his
yield rate on the initial printings of the book was on the order of 2%, and
many of the rejections occurring late in the process when one of the late
impressions was out of registration.  This uncompromising approach to 
quality, and Prof. Tufte's willingness to invest his own money to produce
these wonderful books is another reason why I'd rather buy directly from
the publisher even if it costs a few dollars more.

My opinions only; I don't speak for Dialogic or Intel...
Fred Ridder (Fred -dot- Ridder -at- Dialogic -dot- com)
Senior Technical Writer
Dialogic, an Intel Company
Parsippany, NJ