Exploring the collection of "baby books" at our local library, we noticed a striking absence of any mention or depiction of breastfeeding. Our child, Mez, seemed particularly attracted to books with photographs, and we found plenty of pictures of babies eating solid foods (like chocolate, ice cream, and even orange cheese curls), but no images to which a breastfeeding baby or toddler could relate. Breastfeeding is now recommended by experts across the board, so where are the baby books that depict it? We decided to create one.
The photographs for this book were shot on Saturday, September 4, 2004. To fill gaps in the narrative, extra photographs were shot on Sunday, September 5, 2004. The images were captured with a Sony DSC-F707 digital camera in 2560X1920 JPEG mode. The images were converted to black-and-white using adjustment layers in Adobe Photoshop. Each page was laid out using the illustration program Sketch (now called Skencil), which is free software. The back page was typeset using LATEX, which is also free software.
The pages of this book were printed by Rohrer Corporation in Wadsworth, Ohio. This book was hand-assembled and bound with organic cotton in Las Cruces, NM.
It is rare these days to find a children's book (or anything else for that matter) that is designed, printed, and assembled in the USA. We are very proud that we have been able to accomplish this. We can assure you that we will never outsource any of our work overseas.
Saturday with Mez is an open source book. The complete source files, including high resolution image files, are available for download from the Internet Archive.
This book and its source files are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. As long as you give us credit for our work, you can freely redistribute unmodified copies of this book or the source files for non-commercial purposes.
