Arctic Lace is now available on our ordering page (or from your favorite local book or yarn shop). Arctic Lace has generated an enthusiastic following, due in no small part to its wonderful author, Donna Druchunas. Check out her blog at http://www.sheeptoshawl.com/blog.php, and her Arctic Lace page at http://www.sheeptoshawl.com/arcticlace.html.

Publisher (and knitter and writer and artist) Deborah Robson also has a blog, located at http://independentstitch.typepad.com. Get an inside look at the very small publishing world, our four-footed office assistants (we pay in kibble; none of them seems to mind), get updates on shoveling progress in the currently snowy state of Colorado, and check out what Deborah is knitting.

Spinning in the Old Way is now available to order directly from us on our ordering page (or from your favorite local book or yarn shop). We hope you enjoy it!

Happy new year!

We have updated our books page and have publication dates posted for both Spinning in the Old Way and Arctic Lace. That’s two books coming out in 2006! Unfortunately we have had to move the publication date for Knitting Cowichan Sweaters back to 2007; the book keeps getting bigger and we do not want to release it before it is ready. Our apologies to anyone who has been waiting patiently for it to show up; it is in production and we are making progress.

We have also added a News Archive page; the news page was getting awfully long and the new page should help with that.

Things just keep moving along here, and it is difficult to remember to slow down enough to update the news page!

First up, those of you have have read the Home Page recently have probably noticed that there is a new section on the Nomad site. Dogtooth Books is devoted to imaginative fiction for middle-grade and young adult (and adult) readers. Please wander around the new section and let us know what you think!

Knitting in the Old Way is one of the three finalists for the IPPYs (Independent Publisher Book Awards) in its category (How-to / Crafts / Hobby)! Visit the Independent Publisher site to find out about other finalists and winners.

Knitting in the Old Way is also one of ten finalists in the ForeWord Book of the Year Award in its category (Crafts & Hobbies). Check out the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Awards section of the Foreword Magazine site to find out about the other finalists in the category.

We are thrilled about both of these placements and were up against some very tough competition.

It should be possible to order Knitting in the Old Way and Simple Socks directly from us beginning sometime this month. It will be through PayPal, though we hope to have another payment option at some point in the future. We would not hold our breath on when the alternate option will show up.

The final piece of news for right now is that the Nomad site will be undergoing a redesign in the near future. We hope you like the new look! (We hope we do too; we have yet to determine what, exactly, it will look like.)

If you are looking for an earlier news post, please see our News Archive page.

Our apologies for the apparent lack of news in the last few months. We have been scrambling to keep all the current balls in the air and the News page was one that managed to escape. Our current web site–related project is to provide individuals with the ability to order directly from the Nomad Press site. We hope to have this operational in early January 2005, but we just might manage it sooner. It could happen.

In other news:
Simple Socks is in its fourth printing
Don’t miss Ann Budd’s “Old Way Gansey” in the Winter 2004 issue of Interweave Knits. Ann made a gansey based in Knitting in the Old Way’s design on page 246. She used Blackwater Abbey worsted-weight yarn, and fulled the fabric. Beautiful!

Happy holidays to all from Nomad Press!

Since this update was such a long time in coming it will be rather extensive.

What have we been doing that has caused such a gap on our news page? Well, here goes:

General news
Both Knitting in the Old Way and Simple Socks are in their third print runs—17,700 copies of Knitting in the Old Way and 11,000 copies of Simple Socks paperback so far this year.
Deborah attended BookExpo in Chicago. Miles and miles of books! It took several days to get through it, and even then she is sure she did not see everything.
Both Deborah and Rebekah attended Convergence and helped out at the WARP booth.
We have decided to publish a few books in the middle-grade/young adult fiction realm. While this may seem somewhat at odds with the current selection of Nomad Press books, we feel that it will be a fun addition to our current title list. Also, Rebekah is quite familiar with the genre and Deborah’s BA is in creative writing for children. See the bottom of the books page for a bit more information.

Upcoming knitting books and author news
Priscilla had a wonderful article in the Winter 2003 issue of Interweave Knits: her “Eastern European Footlets” presents one of her intarsia techniques along with a low-cut pair of socks that would make great slippers. Those are also Priscilla’s fingerpuppets in Melanie Falick’s Weekend Knitting.

Donna Druchunas went off to Alaska for firsthand experience with the Oomingmak Musk Ox Producers’ Co-operative in preparation for her book, tentatively titled Arctic Lace and due in 2005. Donna’s book from Lark, The Knitted Rug, will be available in September. To be kept in touch with its progress, you can sign up at Donna’s web site. Donna also had an article in the Spring 2004 issue of Interweave Knits, “Uncommon Gardening Gloves.” She combined cotton with elastic to get washable gloves that fit.

Beth Brown-Reinsel has an almost-complete manuscript on Scandinavian sweaters. We’re working with her on it with a planned release of 2006. For those who would like to become familiar with Beth’s work in advance, you can visit her web site, locate a copy of her Knitting Ganseys (Interweave Press), or see her recent “Beyond the Basics” articles in Interweave Knits: “Different Ways to Knit” (Spring 2004) and “Working with Two Yarns” (Summer 2004).

An aside: speaking of “Beyond the Basics,” this series is terrific. In addition to Beth’s contributions, check out Pam Allen’s coverage of thumb gussets for the Winter 2003/2004 issue of Interweave Knits.

KnitLit, Too
Deborah’s essay in KnitLit, Too examines the reasons she spins—other than the incomparable, can’t-be-bought yarn that handspinning provides her with. For a photo of Deborah and of the dog we adopted last October (see 10/25 posting), see
http://www.knitlit.com/too/contributors/robson.htm
We also attended a Christine Lavin concert in Boulder, where we took our knitting and joined the knit-in. . . . Christine Lavin is another of the contributors to KnitLit, Too.
Deborah gave a reading at the Boulder Bookstore with fellow KnitLit, Too contributors Tara Jon Manning (Tara’s new book is Mindful Knitting) and Beth Walker. Tara, who grew up in a Buddhist family, is uniquely qualified to consider the contemplative aspects of knitting. Beth, a multi-talented writer, has a special interest in women and ADD (as do we). It was great to meet and spend an evening with these two fascinating women!

Not Nomad books, but books you may want to check out if you like to knit outside the lines (as we do): Annie Modesitt’s new, independently published Confessions of a Knitting Heretic. Along the same lines, if you missed or need an excuse to re-read Anna Zilboorg’s Knitting for Anarchists, now’s a good time!

It’s been a whirlwind around here since January! We keep (relatively) peaceably working along on image-processing and editing for Priscilla Gibson-Roberts’ Knitting Cowichan Sweaters, between flurries of activity related to Knitting in the Old Way, Simple Socks, and various computer issues.

Reviews of Knitting in the Old Way have appeared in (in alphabetical order) Black Sheep Newsletter (Winter 2004), Interweave Knits (Spring 2004), Knitter’s (Spring 2004), Knitter’s Review (December 2003 and January 2004), Midwest Book Review (January 2004), PieceWork (March/April 2004), Spin-Off (Spring 2004), and Vogue Knitting (Spring 2004). The book has been intermittently out of stock because copies have been selling faster than we could print them, but that should even out soon. The second print run is being distributed now, and we are ordering the third print run this week.

Simple Socks has not received the same review attention because it’s a re-release in paperback, but it, too, has already gone back for a second print run.

Crafter’s Choice^® Book Club offered Knitting in the Old Way beginning with a January mailing, and will include Simple Socks in May.

Meanwhile, author Donna Druchunas is in Alaska, visiting with knitters and other supporters of Oomingmak Musk Ox Producers’ Co-operative for her next book, tentatively titled Arctic Lace, which is scheduled to be published by Nomad in 2005. (Donna’s Knitted Rugs will be issued by Lark Books in fall 2003, and the Spring 2004 issue of Interweave Knits contains a pair of gardening gloves Donna made.) She is posting regularly in a blog, at www.domanddonna.com/alaska/alaska.php, for those of you interested in reading about her experiences. She has also posted some pictures of baby musk oxen!

Deborah Robson has finished knitting a Cowichan-style sweater—it’s being blocked right now, and will get its zipper later in the week. A devoted fan of fine yarns and needles, the bulky-but-not-cumbersome garments from this tradition are giving her a whole new view of the knitting world. She’s a convert.

An essay of Deborah’s appears in the newly published KnitLit Too: Stories from Sheep to Shawl . . . and More Writing about Knitting, edited by Linda Roghaar and Molly Wolf (Three Rivers Press, 2004).

The first reviews of Knitting in the Old Way are coming in! Knitter’s Review’s Clara Parkes calls the book a guide to “off-road knitting” (we love the image) and has included it in a pretty short list covering the best of 2003’s knitting-related developments. (Although it’s a 2004 title, its review copies were mailed in late 2003.) www.knittersreview.com.

Both Vogue Knitting and Interweave Knits have indicated that they’ll be reviewing the book in their Spring issues.

And Crafter’s Choice Book Club will be featuring both Knitting in the Old Way and Simple Socks, Plain and Fancy as alternate selections.

Wow! Where does the time go? Since late October, we have redesigned Simple Socks and sent it to press, shipped out many review copies of both Knitting in the Old Way and Simple Socks, and half of our human workforce have come down with and recovered from the flu.

The first copies of Knitting in the Old Way have reached readers . . . and the first news of errata has reached us. We have strong perfectionist tendencies. A computer glitch affected the entire first printing. Working with the printer, we found the source of the problem—an electronic box swapped two files between final proofing and the press (a group of Swedes now precedes a group of Norwegians).

For a half-day we wept, gnashed our teeth, wailed at the heavens, and considered hara-kiri.

Then we realized that computers are computers; that hara-kiri precludes further knitting (not acceptable); and that the significant errata (so far!) can be summarily corrected in two short sentences that will fit on the smallest size of Post-It^® note:

Pages 131-142 should be pages 146-157.
Pages 143-157 should be pages 131-145.

Perhaps this is the spirit trail of human imperfection that gives us the opportunity to continue our work.

For those who would prefer the alternative, our wonderful indexer has produced an alternate index that corresponds directly to the first-edition page numbers as printed, and we have a slightly adjusted page 7 (the affected portion of the table of contents), both of which will be posted later this week in PDF format.

NEW! Corrections page.

A couple of weeks ago, we reviewed the printer’s proofs of Knitting in the Old Way. It looked fantastic—all that work coming together in a form knitters can use and love! This is a book you won’t outgrow. It has concepts for beginners, and it leads the experienced to continue learning and enjoying our craft.

Simple Socks, Plain and Fancy came out as a hardcover in 2001 and we’ve sold a lot of copies. In fact, it has sold well enough that our distributor asked us to release it as a paperback. It’s due in March 2004 in yarn shops and bookstores. Always looking for ways to make books clearer, easier to use, and friendlier, we aren’t taking the easy way out. We could have decided to simply reprint the hardcover, but one thing led to another. . . . We’ve lightly re-edited, laid out the pages again, refined the illustration files. The information is essentially the same, but the presentation is (we hope) even nicer—and it’s got a brighter cover, to help this edition hold its own in a larger marketplace.

Limited quantities of the hardcover Simple Socks are still available, primarily through yarn shops (some of the shop owners have ordered extras because they like the hardcover format). If you would prefer to have the additional durability offered by the sewn binding and solid covers, order it from your local store soon!

In other news, both Knitting in the Old Way and Simple Socks are now listed in a variety of online bookstores’ databases, making it easier for those knitters who do not have access to a local bookstore to get their hands on our books. The books should be in all the major databases before long.

Completely off-topic, we now have two dogs and a cat assisting in the office. The extra dog was an escape artist at her former home. Our Border collie had already tested all our fencing thoroughly, and the new dog seems content to hang out while we work.

Lots has been happening. We sent Knitting in the Old Way to press last week! After all the slow detail work and then the waiting and then more slow detail work, we are suddenly in a flurry of activity. The proofs arrived yesterday and look great and have been shipped back to the printer. A year and a half of intensive work (and close to another year of preparation and pondering) are coming together. More news soon. . . .

Simple Socks has been reprinted. A new print run is always a cheerful thing; it means that the books in the previous printing have made their way to readers, who we hope are enjoying the books as much as we do.

Priscilla Gibson-Roberts has an article in the Fall 2003 issue of Interweave Knits. Her instructions for “Love Stamp Socks” give knitters the opportunity to sample several ethnic intarsia techniques.

Deborah Robson is knitting yet another pair of “simple socks.” These will accompany an essay that will appear in an anthology next year (details in a future news note). Of course she’s using Priscilla’s toe-and-heel techniques (which have revolutionized her sock-knitting). She’s embellishing the legs of her indigo-colored socks with Barbara Walker’s “Lace Rib,” from A Treasury of Knitting Patterns (Pittsville, Wisconsin: Schoolhouse Press, 1998; page 48).

We’ve proofed our copy for the catalog that National Book Network will use to present its new publishers—including Nomad Press—to bookstores beginning in early September. The cat continues to monitor our work at the computer. She has, fortunately, been content with a “paws-off” approach to management and we don’t think she has made any new editorial changes.

Much of our time over the past month has been spent organizing the foundation tasks common to all businesses, and we’re looking forward to getting back to the activities that we prefer: designing books!

We have just signed a distribution agreement with National Book Network, Inc. (NBN). That’s big news for a small press, and we’ve scrambled to get together information and images for the catalog deadline.

Yarn shops also had an opportunity to see samples of the new Knitting in the Old Way at the June trade show sponsored by The National Needlework Association (TNNA) and to order advance copies of the book, which will be shipped as soon as they’re off press this fall. No, it’s not too early to reserve individual copies or place orders with the wholesalers or NBN!