five little details I love about the physical book, 'A Physical Education'🎀

ATTN Subscribers to updates about Casey Johnston's forthcoming book weighing in at very reasonable 244 pages not including footnotes, A Physical Education,

News up top: First, here’s the very first available excerpt of A Physical Education, from NY Mag’s The Cut! It draws from my chapter on the first time I ever decided to deliberately eat more to gain weight and get stronger:

But I had never deliberately gained weight before in my entire life. I had gained weight before by accident, and so t enuous was my sense of self that those twenty pounds had knocked me out of orbit and careening deep into the black of disordered space. From that time on, I had organized all of my life around not gaining weight — and continuing to attempt to lose weight, just in case I was gaining it and somehow not realizing it.

I wanted to be enlightened enough to gain weight dispassionately, but a part of me hadn’t really changed. How could I be sure that, once the floodgates of eating were fully open, I wouldn’t turn into a bottomless pit? What if I threw the careful new orbit I’d found off its axis, and bulking became a pretense for just eating endlessly? What if I destroyed the beautiful equilibrium I’d finally found?

The problem was that I loved training. I wanted to be stronger. I was sick of struggling with my bench press; I wanted to do a pull-up; I wanted deadlifts to finally click; I wanted my squat numbers to keep going up. If gaining weight was all that it took, I owed it to myself to try it.

Read the whole except here.

Finding Strength in a Bigger Body

“Bulking” went against everything I’d convinced myself my body was supposed to be. Doing it allowed me to become exactly what I’d dreamed.

The CutCasey Johnston

Second: I’m further pleased to announce that the June 4 A Physical Education event at Third Place Books - Lake Forest Park will be moderated by legend Cat Bohannon, author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution. (This book crashed the boards so hard that there is even a YA edition; I am in awe!)

Third: PUB WEEK IS UPON US! A handful of folks have already posted themselves with their beautiful copies of A Physical Education. It turns out if you pre-order from an indie bookstore, the books may get there a few days early, and they’ll call you up to come get your book. (Not something I could have promised ahead of time, but delighted to see.)

This means that if, all the other times that I entreated ye to purchase ye olde copy of A Physical Education, and you said to yourself, “yeah, but that’s so long to wait to be gratified by my own hard-earned dollars; doesn’t this lady know that we live in the age of the internet, where I’m accustomed to buying something today and receiving it tomorrow, and even in that time, I will have completely forgot that I even bought anything? Does she even understand what she is up against??”

Reader: I do. But the wait is over now. As of tomorrow, A Physical Education will be for sale-for sale. Today is the last day you can even reasonably claim to have been ahead of the curve, and have pre-ordered the book. By tomorrow, you will be just buying it normal.

I know even further that you are thinking: Babe, sweetheart, most cherished girliepop—I am willing, wanting, waiting to buy your book, but some $30 for a hardcover is a lot of money. Let’s see you prove your worth on the open market first, and maybe I’ll spring for the paperback.

But let me plead my case: This book is beautiful. It is beautiful and striking in a few ways that an eventual paperback will never be. I had nothing to do with most of these choices, but have enjoyed to see them, and I hope you do too. Let me count them:

The contrast braided end band

Would you believe I watched a multiple-hour set of process videos of a guy rebinding an old copy of Dune? Believe it. I especially love the end papers he marbled himself that look like literal dunes. Anyway—I’ve never much noticed end bands in a book before. Looking at other books, they seem to usually be red or cream or brown. The dominant colors of A Physical Education’s design are pink and purple, while the end band is a cheeky little teal. Love this!

The ice cream pastels of the jacket and cover

During the design process, I remember floating a pastel yellow for the jacket background (originally, it was white; you can see the pastel yellow in the mock in the product listing). Now that I have the book in hand, I’m delighted to see the jacket background is actually a super, super light pink-purple-orange (?), while the cover of the book itself is a buttery yellow. These kinds of pastels remind me of sunset clouds; OGs of these feeds know one of my most basic hobbies is posting sunset photos.

The barbell-shaped text breaks

Toward the end of the design process, someone raised that “now we just have to figure out a design for the text breaks!” (those simple graphics that appear mid-chapter to indicate a shift in the story, argument, etc). Often they are lines or asterisks. I don’t think anyone was asking for my opinion in that email, but I responded anyway to say, “if it helps, you can make a simple barbell in text, like ||———||.” I don’t think this was actually helpful, because they do not need to be able to render text breaks with text itself. Nonetheless, I guess they liked the idea, because the book is littered with little barbells! <3

The metallic embossed spine

Not everyone gets a metallic emboss on the spine (I checked). That buttery pastel yellow hardcover has the title and my name (!) printed on it in a deep metallic purple. Purple is the signature color of the Ask A Swole Woman/She’s A Beast enterprises, so the synergy is welcome.

One of my all time favorite tweets

This is not really an aspect of the book’s design, but the epigraph for the third and last part of the book is a tweet that speaks to me deeply and belongs in the Library of Congress.

At the risk of tooting my own horn: I have a lot of books. Suffice it to say that not all of them look as good on a shelf, stand as proudly and proclaim “I Am Book,” as this book does. The more I look at it, the more I love it, the prouder I am.

So hey: If you think back on your life and can reasonably say I ever gave you $30 of delight, of laughs, of insight, of wisdom, on Twitter, on Instagram, on any of the websites I ever wrote for, I am willing to call it even if you roll the dice on my book (ideally through your local bookstore; they will love you for it and it does make a difference).

If I only gave you $15-20 worth of these things, and if you were to spot me that last $10-15, I’d be in your debt. (Please do not Venmo me.)

And now to be serious: While I am proud, I am also incredibly nervous and stressed. I’ve never published a real book before, I put my whole self into this, and I already don’t enjoy being perceived all that much. But I chose to write this book the way I did because I feel strongly about what strength training and movement and food can bring to people’s lives, and knew that all this talk wouldn’t hit the same without putting my own story (my own body!) on the line. I thought a lot about what I liked, and mostly what I hated, about every piece of content I’ve ever read about fitness and health and working out, and strove to do something different. Only you all will be the judge of whether I succeeded or not, but I stand ten toes down behind this book and say I did my best.

Thank you for following this journey! If you pick up the book and get to read any of it this week, I would love to know what you think. Feel free to respond to this email or write to casey@shesabeast.co.