I promised some more scoop on the BBook this week, so I thought I'd share some photos from the "making of" the BBook. I might've posted some of these before, but not all of them. From a press release for the BBook here's a quick summary of what it's about:

The BBook of Geek breaks down geekdom into eight pillars of knowledge: science, literature, hardware, software, gaming, movies, TV and the Internet. Each pillar has 16 topics that range from Einstein to emacs, from Stan Lee to Star Trek and everything in between. Also, to make the transition from computer to book easier, The BBook of Geek comes installed with hexadecimal page numbers for its 256 pages (00-FF).

To expand on that a little. Each of the 128 topics has two pages dedicated to it; a "fact" page (and if' you're a frequent reader of BBspot you'll know why fact is in quotes) and a "story" page. The fact page gives a quick summary of why the topic is geeky then lists six "facts" about the topic. The facing page is the "story" page and features BBspot-type content about the topic, be it a top 11 list, quiz, fake news story or something else.

Each topic also has a photo on the fact page. Most of them are of me (BB) as the topic. Depending on the topic it could be a recreation of a famous photo (like Einstein) or a more abstract representation (like for caffeine). That's 128 pictures included at no extra cost.

These pictures required me to hunt down or create some geeky props and costumes (I'm set for the next 128 Halloweens). It also required that I set up a photo studio down in the BBasement. Luckily, we have a friend that has been trained as a photographer and does weddings and graduation pictures on the side. I say luckily because I never would've been able to afford the standard rate of a photographer for as much time as we spent on it. I'm also not sure I would've dressed up in some of the things that I did for a stranger.

I'm pleased with how the writing and the pictures turned out. I hope you are too.

Here are some images taken during the creation of some of the photos for the BBook.

This is the first picture I took for the BBook. It's me imitating the famous Einstein. I did this to insert into some mock pages I created for my editor, when we were still developing the concept for the BBook. The final version in the BBook looks much closer to the real thing.

Here's a picture of Mike and I at work taking one of the photos for the BBook. You can see our studio setup in the BBasement pretty well. It's one of the tamer photos.

For a few of the images I had to put on some makeup. Here I am in complete whiteface. The first attempt, I had some cheap Halloween makeup that sucked. I ended up ordering some professional clown makeup, which worked much better. I have enough whiteface makeup for the next century.

You might remember I asked for advice on spiking up my hair for one of the photos. I got some great advice involving egg whites, sugar, and lots of blow drying. I think I had to run outside with this hair to give something to my son as he left for the bus. I don't think the neighbors trust me any more.

And finally for today, we struggled to come up with some ideas for the cover of the BBook. At one point I suggested I combine many different topics to create an uber-geek image. Ultimately, we never went with that idea, but here are some of the images from that shoot.

As we get closer, I'll post some more information about and more images from the BBook. I might even be able to convince my editor to let me post a couple sample pages from the BBook so you can "look inside." Stay tuned.

That's all I've got for now. Stay geeky!