Meat Pie at the Landmark Café

On Saturday, Oliver and I had a lovely day in Central Queens, punctuated by lunch at the Landmark Café.

Between courses I was chatting to Olivier Sauvé about how Bryson Guptill had written a book about his walk of the Camino Francés, despite having no experience writing or publishing books. We agreed that this was a good thing, and that more people should publish books, especially now that the barriers to entry are so low. Olivier joked “Like you could make a book about this lunch.”

So, of course, I did.

The volume of maximum fun we had outstripped my ability to set and print the body of the book using traditional means, so I resorted to using word processor and laser printer means, albeit wrapped in a binding that allowed me to use my newfound bookbinding skills. Here’s what it looks like:

Meat Pie at The Landmark Café

While the book is best-experienced in printed form, that it takes 30 minutes to print and bind every copy means that doesn’t scale to the size of the blog readership, so you’re also welcome to read it as a PDF.

If it was a book in need of an excerpt for the back cover, here’s what I’d use:

Oliver doesn’t like to leave things unfinished, and he gets stressed out by the transition from one activity to another, so shifting him into a mindset where he was ready to head to the farmers’ market was stressful for both of us: there was some yelling and swearing (by him) and some subterfuge (“well, I can just go to the market by myself, I guess”) by me. It was not the finest hour for either of us, but we came out the other end.

Olivier is right: more people should make more books about more things.

What’s yours?

The Meat Pie

Comments

Chris Corrigan's picture
Chris Corrigan on June 2, 2017 - 13:36 Permalink

Mine is about the art of facilitating self-organizing meetings, but it's done through a reinterpretation of the Tao te Ching. It's available for sale through Amazon in a beautifully designed version, https://www.amazon.ca/Tao-Holding-Space-Chris-Corrigan/dp/0995182507 and also at the Internet Archive for free printing and sharing: https://archive.org/details/TheTaoOfHoldingSpace

I agree with you. More people should write books about things they know and love.

Neil Strickland's picture
Neil Strickland on July 31, 2017 - 20:48 Permalink

I just read your book (as a PDF) and enjoyed it very much. I'd have to think about it quite a bit, but I think that my book would be about singing in choirs and the effect that doing so has had on my life thus far.

Chris Corrigan's picture
Chris Corrigan on July 31, 2017 - 20:59 Permalink

I could certainly relate to that book too.