This morning I received a parcel that I’ve been waiting on for around a week. When I say a week, what I really mean is two years, but lets not get too technical.

I’ve been meaning to get a proper printed copy of my dissertation since I wrote it back in 2006. After the uni kept the one copy that I hand-bound myself, I hadn’t got anything tangible left, and considering it’s one of my favourite bits of work that I produced during my studies (for a variety of reasons, not in the least that it was on a topic that none of the staff in my department had a clue about), I really wanted a hard copy for myself.

The original was bound in a wrap around cover and held together with some brass binding screws, but I couldn’t be hassled with going through the rigmarole of pillar drilling and lining up of all the bits and pieces involved again, so about a year ago I decided I’d get it professionally done with short-run online printers, Lulu.

Well, in total I probably spent two weekends worth of time wrangling with the document, trying to convert my highly formatted text into a size that could be printed on, but failed repeatedly times before finally producing a copy that was passable. And so it went to press.

So this morning when I peeled back the layers of bubble wrap I was really pleased to find one case bound copy of my dissertation. Maybe the cover could have been a little less glossy (by I can’t remember having that option to choose a satin finish), but aside from that I’m really pleased I’ve got closure and a decent copy of the work.

My advice if you ever consider using Lulu; always design to their templates from the word go; never try to work it the other way around, especially if you have in the region of 80 pages with illustrations, custom margins and things that inevitably will fall apart the minute you have to resize anything. Otherwise, the process was straight forward enough, and the end product looks top notch.