This is 99% invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

Andrew Leeland has always loved to read.

As a fifth grader, he was the kid who sat on a utility box during recess reading The Hobbit while everyone else played

kickball. In middle school he learned the trade names of the book imprints that

published the druggy contemporary fiction that he was starting to get into.

And in 2003, he dropped out of

college and moved to San Francisco to work for his favorite publisher, McSweeny's.

It was my dream job, and working there exacerbated my already intense

fetish for print. That's Andrew. I got to live out my fantasy of being an

ink-stained wretch even if that meant logging 12-hour days at an ink-less computer.

I edited essays and interviews, laid out articles,

and took a weird amount of pleasure in typographical minutia,

like italicizing commas and rewriting headlines

so they fit the frame just so.

At McSweeny's books and magazines were never just containers for words.

They were works of art unto themselves.

And I was trained to take as much care with the look and feel of the print as I did with the expression of the ideas in the text.

But as much as Andrew loved print, he still loves it in fact, he also has a condition that will eventually change his relationship to it pretty radically

I'm going blind really slowly

Right now. It's like I've got a foot in both worlds, blind and sighted.

I have a degenerative retinal disease that's given me severe tunnel vision,

...