THE WHOLE PROCESS STARTED WITH A STACK OF IDEAS. There are ideas written on the backs of envelopes, on Post-it notes of every description, little scraps of paper torn off of class notes, and sent in letters and e-mails from friends and people we have never met.

It was a huge stack. We had lost count at seven hundred and eighty, and we knew there had to be more than a thousand--a lot more. We decided to take the five hundred best.

It wasn't easy. A lot of the suggestions were very good, and it was tempting to include all of them. But we persisted. We removed all the ones that were repeats of other items, and we combined similar ideas in other suggestions. We corrected grammar, spelling and added punctuation. (We discovered that a lot of MKs aren't very good at spelling!) There were some that we re-wrote entirely so that they would make more sense. We laughed a lot. As we went, we slowly typed them all into a single document on the computer. When we printed it out, it was over twenty pages long and set in type so small that you could barely see it.

It was still too long. We shared it with friends on MKnet, and a number of them pointed out errors that we had missed, and helped us find duplicated entries. One person sent us three pages of errors! It was humbling, but we appreciated the help. Finally, after four weeks of editing, we had our final list of 500 ways to know that you're an MK.

(Actually, we only had 499. But we didn't figure that out until we had already printed the first edition. Second editions are a wonderful time to correct the mistakes made in the first.)

We took our list down to the print shop. There, we had a friendly guy named Josh do the initial layout for us on the computer, as Andy was working on a lot of stuff for school right then. Andy then took what Josh had made, and worked on it until he had it just the way he wanted it.

From there, Andy took the final printouts of the pages, and started working on a light table. To save money and time, we decided to print four pages on a single sheet of paper, and then later cut them apart.

Each book is assembled completely by hand. We've walked a number of miles around the kitchen table, talking with friends and laughing as we collate 64,000 sheets of paper. It would be tedious, but generally, friends don't let friends assemble books alone.

Once we've gotten a boxful or so of the inside pages, we throw the boxes in the car and go over to a small, nearby shop that has binding equipment. There's a guy named Shannon there, and he's been a big help to us, because he lets us do the binding ourselves. We always do it as a team: Andy takes the inside pages, and punches them with a special machine that makes the square holes in the paper. It's a big, hot machine, and every time Andy hits the foot switch, it sounds like a huge stapler with a motor in it. Once it's punched, the book gets passed on to Deborah, who makes the final assembly. Another special machine opens up the black, curled plastic "combs" that hold the books together. She can do two at once. She puts on two back covers, then threads the pages over the tines on the comb, adds the front cover, and throws the lever back, allowing the plastic combs to curl shut again.

Many books are packaged right there, and taken down to the little post office just down the hall in the same building. From there, they are mailed out directly to the people that ordered them.

And that is how your books were made.