(no subject)

[rhu]

I'm making progress on my siddur (prayer book) project, but I'm frustrated by how it's grown.

The first prototype was 94 pages. Since one of my goals was to have it be lightweight, that was wonderful.

But it's pointless to have a siddur that, for example, optimizes the layout of the common prayers for the holidays but lacks the special prayers for each holiday (such as B'rach Dodi), so now I've been adding all the once-a-year (or so) stuff. The Torah readings for weekday mornings, each of which is read thrice a year, take 20 pages. The hoshanot for Hoshanah Rabah, which is recited once a year, are 8 pages. For comparison, the single optimized Amidah, which is recited almost 2,000 times each year, is 20 pages.

So prototype three will be about 180 pages. Which is still less than one-fifth the page count of the Artscroll siddur, but it's a bit less sleek. And all those new pages need typographic care and feeding.

Comments

[cellio]

Torah reading and hoshanot are separate parts of the service (unlike, e.g., an insertion into the middle of the amidah) and, by definition, can't happen without a minyan. Given that, is it so bad to have to switch to a different siddur (or volume) for those parts? Are any of the other occasional additions discrete enough and large enough to be worth similarly offloading? (Hallel?)