Giving Thanks, Yet Again

Today I give thanks to all my readers who take time out of your very busy lives to spend some of it here educating, instructing, or entertaining yourselves with the stuff I’ve posted.

And I thank the accumulated wisdom of technology that’s given me amazing abilities to extend myself farther than ever, and for the people who thought up social media.

I’m grateful to Jill, who supports me in every way on this wild ride.

I’m grateful for my son, due home from university overseas in a few days.

I’m thankful for the ability to sit down and write a pretty decent blog post, even if it’s at eleven at night. Or twelve. Whatever.

I’m gratified by all the people I’ve met online, through my blog or on Twitter mostly, and for being able to pass on some link juice whenever I can.

I’m grateful to Yaro Starak, Brian Clark, and Jeff Walker for teaching me about moving my business online.

I’m forever in the debt of my father, who entered the printing apprentice program in 1935, and who passed along to me a very small bit of his wisdom.

I’m grateful that I live in a time when it’s possible to make a living designing books, or blogging, or any of the other things we get to do.

I’m thankful for Francesco Griffo, John Baskerville, Claude Garamond, Hermann Zapf, Carol Twombly, and all the other type designers, named and unnamed, whose work we take for granted every single day.

Also don’t forget W.A. Dwiggins, to whom I am most thankful for his creation of the typeface Electra.

I’m indebted to Evernote, Dropbox, WordPress, HootSuite, and all the makers of absolutely essential technology who let us use it for free.

And I’m grateful for Dan Poynter, John Kremer and the other pioneers of modern self-publishing, for teaching thousands of people how to do it when nobody would mention it in polite company.

Thanks also go to all the people who took the time to review my book this year, real generosity.

I’m thankful that I’ve gotten to practice every printing technology in the history of printing, from hand typesetting and printing through automated letterpress, to offset printing and digital technology.

I’m grateful for my health and generally positive outlook, and for all friends everywhere.

I’m grateful that someday, someone will come along and invent a way to typographically design e-books.

I’m grateful for Happy and Dancealot and Bhakti and Mazel and Suzy and all the others but most of all to Presto and Jake, my good friends.

And I’m grateful that Mary taught me how to see the good in every person, and to celebrate it.

And so I celebrate this holiday of thankfulness with you.

(*I’ll see you back here Sunday for the next installment of Self-Publishing: The Carnival of the Indies.)

Photo by BBM Explorer