As I’m getting closer to the end of the letters, I think what I’m going to do with the World War II stuff is to have the book have no art other than the cover (easier from a production standpoint) and then have bonus content on this Web site (instead of sample chapters) that will include stuff like my grandfather’s gazillion photographs, his cute little drawings, and the art side of the postcards.
I think that wouldn’t be too horribly time consuming, and that way people will have some access without having to go to the Museum of World War II and getting into the archives. My grandfather was pretty good about identifying the people in his photographs, and sometimes included where and when, so I think it might be useful to family and historians to have the photos in particular be more accessible. I am going to have to rope off the more-graphic surgery photos in some fashion, but that should be easy enough.
I have a cover mock-up that my sister doesn’t entirely like but (as she said) it’s my book (honestly, I think she’ll like it more, or at least understand it more, once she reads the letters). And I have a title that we both like. Once the letters are all typed up, I plan to give copies of them to various family members and tell the side that doesn’t know that I’m planning to make a book out of this, so you know—totally looking forward to splitting the family and being disowned. “Everyone mentioned is dead, so they can’t sue” while legally accurate is, I suspect, an argument that will work less well with relatives….