One bundle, many benches. Each bench is an independent skill — usable alone — and this file is the floor plan: which bench does what, in what order, and which numbers flow between them. The distributist point of the shop: the whole craft lives on Charlie's own bench, no Vellum, no InDesign, rebuilds are deterministic scripts at zero tokens.
The benches
| Stage | Bench (skill) | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| 0. Market | niche-scout |
Is the niche worth printing into? (optional) |
| 1. Intake | markitright (PDF) / textutil (.doc/.docx) / WebFetch (URL) |
Render ANY source into a clean markdown master first. Markdown is the WORDS layer; nothing goes to CSS that isn't markdown yet. |
| 2. Draft | book-writer + book-quality-loop |
Only for books being written, not reprinted |
| 3. Finish | manuscript-finisher |
Proofread/copyedit pass before layout — content locks here |
| 4. Interior | design-to-book |
Trim, margins, typography, CSS→Paged.js render → out/book.pdf |
| 5. Cover | cover-concept (brief) → kdp-cover-wrap (front/spine/back wrap) |
Needs FINAL interior page count first — see dependency map |
| 6. Listing | KDP Toolkit skills (CIA/publishing/KDP Toolkit/) |
Title/subtitle/keywords/categories, back-cover copy |
| — Facsimile lane | facsimile-edition |
Scan→faithful-reproduction jobs bypass benches 1–4 |
Cross-bench dependency map (why order matters)
trim size ──→ interior margins + gutter (kdp-print-sizes.md §margins)
words ÷ words-per-page (+1/section opener) ──→ page count (even, ≥24)
page count × paper factor ──→ spine width (kdp-print-sizes.md §spine)
trim + spine + bleed ──→ full cover-wrap canvas (kdp-cover-wrap)
Never build the cover before the interior page count is final. Spine text requires ≥ 79 pp. Gutter grows with page count. Cover trim = interior trim + bleed.
House defaults (CLM imprint)
- Pocket encyclical / tract: 4.25 × 6.87 in, black ink on cream, Cormorant Garamond ~12/16.6. Clone scaffold:
publishing/CLM Publishing/Catholic Land Movement/book/— the canonical template (fonts, colophon, CSS all in place). - Full book: 5.5 × 8.5. Anthology: 6 × 9.
- Front matter (half title, title page, copyright page w/ public-domain edition language, publisher's note) follows the shipped CLM editions:
design-to-book/reference/front-matter-conventions.md.
Order of checks
Content → design → then the end-stage passes, in this order (they're invalidated by any re-pagination): orphan/widow pass (p { orphans:2; widows:2 } + PNG scan), blank-page scan, hyphenation-at-page-break scan, even-page + ≥24pp gate, TOC folio verification. All specified in design-to-book/reference/hard-won-rules.md — read it before any non-trivial layout job.
Staffing (model routing)
The benches run on Sonnet (routine agent or model: sonnet) — every bench has rails (a SKILL.md, a scaffold to clone, a script to run) and is exactly the "documented pipeline" case. The orchestrator (Fable/Opus) does only: bench sequencing, verifying outputs at handoffs (Read the rendered PNGs, diff extracted text against source), taste calls (trim/typography when NOT cloning a house template), and patching SKILL.md gaps the run exposes. Text-fidelity verification on source texts (encyclicals, reprints) follows the ensemble gate: extraction diffed against an independent second source (e.g. vatican.va for encyclicals) — pdftotext drops ligatures silently (fi → #), so never trust a single extraction.
Reference shelf
design-to-book/reference/kdp-print-sizes.md— trims, words/page math, margins/gutter, spine formula, page limitsdesign-to-book/reference/hard-won-rules.md— accumulated typography/pagination rules from every shipped bookdesign-to-book/reference/front-matter-conventions.md— title page, copyright page, publisher's note, colophon patterns- Live KDP policy numbers drift — confirm at kdp.amazon.com before final upload
Intake rule (the one new discipline)
Whatever Charlie points at — a Vatican PDF, an old .doc, a webpage, a Vellum export — bench 1 renders it to a markdown master before any design work, stored as <project>/book/manuscript.md (or content/). Footnotes become markdown footnotes ([^n]). The markdown master is the single source of truth; every downstream artifact is a deterministic rebuild from it.