Way back in December of 2001, after the entirety of Symphony No. 1 was out, Truss got curious about just how substantial the full Symphony would be if printed like a regular book. To find out, he dumped it all into Word and converted it to a small proportional font (Verdana 8, if you're into that kind of detail), then scrounged around in the resulting heap of files for hours and hours converting -emphasized bits- into italics and what not by hand. He also designed a nifty presentation for all of the various pieces' first pages:

Once the files were all converted and arranged, with blanks added where necessary so that each movement/chapter/whatever started recto (i.e., on the right-hand side of the spread), Truss designed a cover and some spine art, and we took the lot to Kinko's (remember those?) up in Burlington and had it printed and Velobind bound (Velobound?).

The result was somewhat more substantial than I had initially assumed it would be. With everything put together the way we had it, and in a pretty small font to boot, the full text amounted to 400 8½×11 pages, not counting front- and endmatter. That makes for a pretty thick book.

I can't remember now how many of these we had made, but I can tell it you wasn't very many, because they were expensive. As you can see on the cover, this copy is a "second edition", but I don't recall now whether the "first edition" actually saw print beyond possibly a prototype.

The print version contained the full text of the Symphony, from Wounded Rose to Pavane for a Dead Princess. Wherever we had a blank page (after the chapters that had an odd number of pages, mainly), we threw in some line art, mostly either drawn by Phil or taken from a Shinya Hasegawa artbook, except for the endpage of Hogtown Rhapsody, which is a grayscale conversion of Anne's design sketch for Goth Miki. The only other extras were a tongue-in-cheek colophon I wrote in the O'Reilly and Associates style, of which I offer here an excerpt:

The animals featured on the cover of the Symphony of the Sword No. 1 Perfect Memory Album are Rose Duelists, a subtype of human being (Homo sapiens) known for their courage, honor, integrity, loyalty to friends, capacity for love and passion for justice. They are easily distinguished by their forthright, honest actions in an increasingly corrupt universe, their semi-hierarchical society based on mutual trust and merit, and their predilection for melee weapons requiring both strength and finesse for proper use. True Rose Duelists are quite rare, yet are almost never found singly.

The back page, as is often the case, features an advertisement for another title published by the same company.

There was a similar treatment made of Symphony No. 2 (in similar very limited quantities), but since No. 3 was never finished and No. 4 took until after we'd all gone our separate ways and I moved back to Maine, the project was never continued.

And no, I cannot score you the source files. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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