A Brief History of BoneQuest Books

March 24, 2024

A BoneQuest Special Presentation

On sale now:

Everybody Loves Deuce (paperback, first ed, $9)
Leo the Lion & Other Poems (paperback, 2nd ed, $9)
BoneQuest: Quest for the Bone (A Big Dumb Walkthrough) (paperback, first ed, $9)
How to Operate Your Frog (zine, 2nd printing, $4.50)

2003

Our first printing experiment was The Big Book of Jerkcity, comics gathered from the first 6 years, lovingly laid them out in book form. About 200 books were printed in total, sold over time through the Rotten.com store for about nineteen dollars. The first edition was published under our (short-lived) boutique publishing imprint called Baby Milk Factory.

The printer was super patient with us, explaining DPI and bleed and all that stuff.

2009

From the not-sure-why-we-made-this department: A one-off, 577 page (!!) hardcover book titled DEUCE'S SHITS containing tweets from deuce, 1 per page, from 2007-2009.

Sadly we never released this to the public or printed additional volumes.

2010

We experimented with on-demand printing by creating two volumes of BoneQuest comics laid out as poems in Leo the Lion and Other Poems and All Those Prostitutes and Other Poems. We sold books on Lulu but, somehow, never saw a dime from them. The original volume is available as a Kindle book from Amazon. We were never paid for this either! What a rip-off.

2012

Nine years after the first edition of BBOJ, we managed to raise money through Kickstarter to re-print The Big Book of Jerkcity. The second edition included an index and properly rendered our GIF images at a printable DPI. Both editions contain a typo on the back cover, we cannot spell the word "Camaro" to save our lives.

The book came with, among other things, a zine called How to Operate Your Frog which took on a life of its own at frog.tips.

The Kickstarter Edition sold about 100 copies and we eventually sold out of the remainders over the next... 11 years.

All of the material from the Kickstarter is available in digital form for free here: bonequest.com/book/

2023

After the launch of the BoneQuest Store, we printed several paperback books:

Leo the Lion and Other Poems was re-edited and re-printed. We laid out Leo the Lion by-hand using Adobe Indesign.

We created our first paperback of comics titled Everybody Loves Deuce immediately after Leo was finished. We make our paperback books using the website's custom sysop-only controls then blast them into High-Quality PDF form by way of Typst. Front and back covers are laid out with Adobe Illustrator.

The design was inspired by the original 1960s-era Peanuts paperbacks.

2024

To celebrate the launch of our massive multiplayer interactive fiction game BoneQuest: Quest for the Bone, we generated a walk-through of the game in paperback form: BoneQuest: Quest for the Bone (A Big Dumb Walkthrough)

Every command required to win the game – including all game output – has been lovingly reproduced. This edition includes a secret link to a map of the game.