Book Review of DIY Autoflowering Cannabis: An Easy Way to Grow Your Own by Jeff Lowenfels, 2019

Jeff Lowenfels knows his subject. His text is informative and well written, perfect for the beginner indoor cannabis grower, which I am. The chapters are well organized consecutively to parallel the steps you would take. I have read two other books, admittedly old ones from the 1980s, on cultivation of cannabis published years before the widespread cultivation of autoflowers, but this book better informed me about cannabis generally, and of course about autoflowers specifically.

One thing for which I do not blame the author but the editor is the constant comparison to growing tomatoes that the author erroneously assumes all his readers have done. I am an experienced vegetable gardener both outdoors and indoors, but I have never grown tomatoes in my life. That is a foolish assumption on the author’s part, and a stupid omission on the editor’s part for letting stand that repeated reference. And I do mean repeated. Toward the end of the book, the chapters become irrelevant to the cannabis connoisseur, and especially the chapter of recipes that includes junk ingredients almost all of which I would never eat. Those chapters are easy to skip. It would have been easy, too, for the editor to delete them. Still, 6-stars for the text!

But this book hurts my eyes. My eyesight is fine, so I do not think I need to get my eyes examined. Perhaps the publisher and the book designer need to have their heads examined. The font is too small and the inking is too lightly applied, akin to “draft quality” as a printing option to save on the cost of toner ink for your home printer. After half an hour, I repeatedly had to stop reading out of frustration, not with the author, but with the book designer.

While its tiny type reduces the page count and potentially therefore the price, the text occupies only half the width of the page, which bumps up the page count and thereby negates any benefit of tiny type. Worse, the wide margins are on the outer edges, but better belong along the inner edges, which in book design is unfortunately called the gutter. I got out my ruler and measured. The text is 3.75 inches wide, while the left and right blank margins total 3.5 inches. What a waste of space. Sure, a few photos and illustrations do fill that wasteful space, but only on a few pages, maybe one out of every ten. And there are way too many inexplicably totally blank pages. The illustrations are superb, but the photos often are too small and blurry, so ultimately useless. Just look at the photo on the book cover, big and blurry.

But wait! A solution is at hand. Skip the printed book and instead purchase the eBook, for which you can enlarge the font size at will. And you can increase the contrast on your monitor to compensate for typeface’s faintness.

Please be aware that I am not faulting the author, because the author has little control over the look of the book. (Mine is the voice of experience.) But potential future authors signing on to this DIY series with this publisher, take heed!