Hadley Burns:  

HOW IT CAME TO BE I thought of that title but I did not write it by hand nor did my wife but both my wife and I and handwriting have a part in what you are about to read. Part One: I am a "book person". I have loved and read books ever since I read my first book (Little Black Sambo) when I was three years old. I collect books (my wife calls it accumulating) for a wide number of various reasons that may make a book of some interest to me. I like unique books for whatever it is about it that makes a particular book unique. Part two: Back in 2007 when I met my wife I soon discovered she had by far the most beautiful handwriting that I had ever seen. As a kid I thought my Mom's hand writing was beautiful but my wife's is MUCH more beautiful. One thing that makes a book unique is that it may be hand written. From my collection and knowledge of books I thought of one that I felt would be the crown jewel of my collection if I could own one that was hand written. I asked my wife about writing it but although bless her heart she never did say no I could tell the project was really not her priority. But I did not give up. Off and on over the next ten years I would approach her and ask her again but her response was always the same, non-committal. Fast forward to the fall of 2017. I was in the midst of my latest request to her and she turned to me and said "If you want it that bad, why don't you write it yourself?" At first I wasn't sure. My wife's writing is delicate and beautiful. I felt my writing was too large and blocky. Oh, I could write neat enough but not in a beautiful way. The idea stuck with me though and I started investigating things like paper, pens, how easy it would be to get them, and the price. As that fall wore on I was getting closer and closer to deciding to attempt the project myself. I even took sections of the book I was thinking of and timed myself writing them to see approximately how long it might take me to write the entire book. I remember one of the "experiments" I tried was with the paper. I wanted the paper to look old and weathered. I would take perfectly good paper and spray it with various liquids (vinegar, dish soap and many others) and let it dry. That didn't work so I sprayed some paper with the same liquids and "baked" them in the oven. The brownish stains were what I wanted but the process was too SLOW. I knew I would need a LOT of paper. On a shelf in the basement I had most of a package of "glossy parchment" paper. I like the idea of parchment paper whether it was stained or not but I could not find any more like the parchment I had. Then one day I found myself at my local Staples looking for pens. I said to the clerk "I don't suppose you have parchment paper?" "We have several kinds. What kind would you like?" His comment made me think I had died and gone to Heaven. I ended up choosing a type of parchment that was a light ivory colour, twenty-four pound parchment that felt slightly "sturdy" It was not old looking or stained like I had wanted but when you held it up to the light you could see light and dark areas and it was exactly what I was hoping to see. It made me think it had been made by a process that was OLD. If I couldn't stain it as long as it was made by an "old" method that was good enough for me. Finally still with many un-answered questions I told my wife on December 15, 2017 I was ready to attempt the project myself. She asked when I was going to start and I told her I was going to start the next day. Another question she asked that I found politely amusing was "Are you going to read the original first?" My reply was that I kind of thought I kind of had to. I also told her that I welcomed her input and any questions she thought of along the way to please feel free to ask. On Dec. 16, 2017 I sat down to write. The rest is history. I had calculated it would take me from three to five years, working an hour and a half or maybe two hours a day, day in and day out. If it had taken me five years I would have been disappointed but I could have accepted three years. Little did I know that as I wrote and problems came up I was able to deal with most of them on the fly and I was able to work much faster than I had anticipated. The problems were many. What would I do about spacing? What would I do to keep sections separate? What colour of ink should I use? There were many more problems come up than I expected but I was going to gamble that I could would work out most if not all of the problems on the fly. One of the first questions my wife asked happened when I was only about 20 pages into the project. She asked if I was going to put pictures in it. I hesitated. I am not an artist. I cannot draw. If I put pictures in my project I would have to use a picture someone else had created. But then I thought the book I had chosen to hand write has many editions and most of those have pictures. I was sure that most of those pictures were not created by the "authors" so that meant I could put pictures in and not destroy the integrity of my part of the project. If you ever see my project the first picture is on page twenty. After that the pictures appear whenever I felt I was writing about a suitable topic. One of the problems that turned out to be the problem with the most pages involved happened when I was about six hundred pages in. Every few lines I would number the lines with one number per group. This created a spacing issue that over the time of creating the six hundred or so pages I had written I became unhappy with. I corrected the problem by coming up with the same numbering system I had but incorporated a spacing design I preferred. That "solution" in itself created a new problem. What should I do with the six hundred pages I had already written? To start and re-write those pages would have been very depressing and may have caused me to not finish what I wanted to do. I came up with a unique solution. I had a target number of pages I wanted to do each day. I would start at page 601 and write until I had reached my target which was usually somewhere around twenty pages. If I felt like still writing I would go back and re-write some of the first six hundred pages. Eventually I got all six hundred corrected and I was home free ... or so I thought. My wife was about to prove to me that in some cases, actually in most cases she is smarter than I am. In the course of my writing I would sometimes make small mistakes and cover them with white-out. I didn't like seeing the white-out on a page but what could I do? It saved re-writing the entire page. I started out thinking I would accept a page if it had three or fewer small sp...Expand for more