Publishing in the Shadows

• Lots of illustrations by a professional artist and integral to the text.
• Horrendous struggle by the author to detach it from a printer who promised more than he could deliver.
• Muddy cover, which will be replaced in the next printing.
• Complete authorial control of text, design, and artwork.

The resulting book is a labor of love by a writer clearly knowledgeable and dedicated to presenting a clear, nontechnical introduction to Jung's concept of the shadow with the goal of providing the reader with a clear enough understanding to recognize personal and social projections of the shadow and to "minimize the negative and maximize the positive in your own shadow."

Plumb uses the fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast, to show the shadow, in all its shifting shapes, at work. She writes of the power of naming our own shadows, introducing us to two of her own, the Preacher and the Princess. And she uses both of them in shaping her book. The Princess, with her insistence on the importance of detail, got her way with the illustrations. And the Preacher lets loose with a major section, The National Shadow.

I'm grateful to Plumb for creating this book. It was a refresher for me, and a needed one. (It's the nature of the shadow to stay out of plain sight.) But I'd love to see the next edition available in a trade paperback from a national publisher at a lower price. It would be more enticing that way, and therefore more widely recommended, given, and read.