Now I have the cover of my book in place, it is time to add some content. On the left side of the book viewer is a schematic of the pages that make up the book:

The first page is the outside cover and is unnumbered. The inside of the cover is not shown (gap to the left of page 1) and is blank in the final output. The page numbered 1 is the first non-cover page (on the right) and the following page pairs are shown as they would look if the book were opened flat on a table.

I'll go with this style and make my page 1 just have the title. If I paste in the title from the cover, I get this:

No style has been applied. So I have to apply the style I want by selecting the text and control-clicking to get the Styles:

The style I have previously defined is called Title. So select that and click Apply:

to get the effect needed:

Now pages 2 and 3 are set to full page photos. What I would like to have here is a 1-up spread: a single photo that spans both pages. I click on the little triangle next to page 2 and select the 1-up spread like so:

That changes the page thumbnail to look like this:

and I can now drag an image onto the spread and adjust it to get the desired result:

There is so little color in this image that I think I will convert it to monochrome with a filter. I can filter the images in the book without affecting the version I am using. I switch to Layout Edit mode and select the image, then apply a filter from the filter pop-up:

to get this:

For the next page I want a close up image of some action. The image I want is part of a stack (the one on the right), so lets drag it onto page 4:

But it doesn't work. I get this:

The problem here is that I can only use the stack pick. But there is a way out: I can make a special kind of pick called the Album Pick. It's the pick just for this album (or book or web gallery). I select the image and go to Stack > Set Album Pick (command vertical bar) and a new badge appears to show the album pick:

Now the drag to page 4 will work, and I can close the stack it it will work as well:

For the facing page, page 5, I want some descriptive text. It's about time this book actually said something about wind and water. So I select a blank page and create a new text box, and put my text in. I select Palatino as the font and make it italic. My friends are all Romans, so the text is in Latin:

That's nice, but I want to have drop caps for the C and the second Q. However, I can't figure out how to do this with Aperture.

On the next two pages I want to use a picture of the stones on the beach as a background for lots a small images. But if I drag the same stones image to both pages it will be obvious that it is a duplicate. So I create a new version of the original and then manipulate the two before putting them on the pages:

That generates a new version and automatically makes it the album pick in a stack. So I have to drag it out of the stack to be able to use both:

I select the left thumbnail and hit F to go into full screen mode. Then hit C to bring up the cropping tool and select a part of the image:

Hit A to end the crop and F to exit full screen. I repeat that for the right thumbnail and include a rotation and a different part of the image. Here are my pages:

To use that as a background I want it to be much lighter, so I filter it with a light wash from the filter pop-up:

Next I want to add images. If I drag and drop any images they will simply replace the ones that are there, so that will not do. I need to create a new photo box for each image I want to place and then drag and drop into those.

From Layout Edit mode, I select one of the pages and the use the action menu to add a new photo box:

Then I repeat and rearrange as needed. If I want I can select preset aspect ratios for my photo boxes with control-click:

There, done:

Now I can fill the boxes and adjust the photos:

It's a pity that the typography in Aperture is not up to scratch. I am hoping that they transplant the Pages features into Aperture and make the text handling more consistent.