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Minnehaha Press

Minnehaha Press / P.O. Box 723 / Stone Ridge, New York 12484

02/06/06 ~ Stone Ridge, New York ~ Freedom of the press is for those who own one, or at least a Brother HL-5150D laser printer, and that is the way we are printing up copies of The Era of the Clipper Ships: The Legacy of Donald McKay for now. This is a galley proof-draft Special Edition, a practice run to get a handle on the whole publishing process. Then get some final feedback from our wide circle of friends in the maritime world, purge all the typo Gremlins, round up the last of the pictures that have eluded us for the longest time, and make the final selection of pictures for the 16-32 color pages that will eventually be included with this book when we print up an offset press 1st edition later on whenever we get it all together to do so.

We launched the book last spring and have printed up somewhere around sixty copies so far and mailed them off to the people who have sent in orders for this book and have gotten some wonderful feedback from many of them. We've edited the book over the past year as we go along between new toner cartridge printings every few weeks, or so. All the while we have been gathering new pictures, especially the color ones, that we want to include in the final selection. We'll be buying a new Brother color laser printer soon and be printing up a Special Edition color pictures selection to then send on to all the people that we have already sent books to so far and the pages can then easily be inserted into the comb-bindings of the book. Whatever works! For now we are just sailing along by the seat of our pants under jury-rig some of the time, and its taking us longer than we ever thought it would, but we just do the best we can with whatever we have to work with.

This is a comb-bound 8 1/2" x 11" 320-page book with 220 black & white pictures, and laid out in double-column format with 10-point Times New Roman fonts. A sampling of which can be seen in the following pictures.

This Special Edition looks just fine, is long overdue, and we are launching it now for $50 shipped anywhere in the world with the understanding that we will also send you the regular offset 1st edition of this book whenever we get around to doing our first offset print run in the not too distant future. That is certainly a good deal that we hope will bring in some cash flow as we pull ourselves up by the bootstraps into the publishing world, and launch The Era of the Clipper Ships "on spec."

We do hope that you all realize that this publishing venture is a serious effort to reclaim our long-lost clipper ship maritime heritage one book at a time, a "Little Red Hen" approach to shipbuilding. In that, if you really want to get something done, you just have to do it yourself. We are also borrowing the game plan of "The Little Engine that Could." For we McKays are all rather bored just waiting around our whole lives for someone else to come along and build an American clipper ship. So we're going for the brass ring in this lifetime, and with a little bit of help from our friends in the maritime world, we just might be able to pull it off. We certainly have to try.

We just want to build and launch a clipper ship "on spec," gather up a hearty crew, hoist sails to the highest of places, and run for the open sea.

Buy this book to find out more, tell your friends, and make it all happen. Book Order Form.

Happy sails,

Don Ross

1st-cousin-4-times-removed to Donald McKay