easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

Two weeks ago I got back from the 2025 ATypI conference in Copenhagen. This was the first time ATypI had gone to Copenhagen since the 2001 conference – which took place just two weeks after 9/11. As you can imagine, being an American in Denmark in those two years had quite different resonances. In 2001, before George W. Bush turned an atrocious crime into a misguided war, the reaction of people abroad was aghast sympathy. This year, the people I spoke with in Copenhagen mostly offered wry commiseration, along with lots of questions. (There was one Persian taxi driver who had a good knowledge of U.S. politics and with whom I had a fascinating conversation on the way from hotel to conference venue.)

The conference was held at the Royal Danish Academy (Det Kongelige Akademi – Arkitektur, Design, Konservering), in buildings that had once housed part of the Danish Navy. The lead local organizer was Sophie Beier, who teaches at the Academy and heads up its Centre for Visibility Design (and has spoken many times at previous ATypI conferences about legibility and readability). This year there were two tracks of programming, in two separate spaces in the same building – the same building, but you had to go outside to get from one to the other. As at most events like this, you finally figure out how to get around and how to find all the places you need to be just before the event ends – and that hard-won information is stuck in your memory with no possible future use. I can say that if you got dropped off at the Academy’s address by a taxi or Uber, it would take you a while to find the entrance to the conference. But people at the Academy were quite willing to direct you.

One thing that had struck me when I first looked at the program and the list of speakers was that most of the names were not familiar to me. That could be disconcerting but was mostly encouraging; it means that the Association is not mired in old habits but open to new people and new ideas. Indeed, a large number of the talks were unrelated to traditional European typography and type design; there were even, on the last day, two different talks about aspects of Chinese type scheduled opposite each other. (Okay, that might be excessive; I would have liked to listen to both.) I am not a fan of multiple tracks of programming, since you always have to choose one or the other, but the organizers this year were very good at keeping the two schedules coordinated and giving people ample time to move between the two tracks at will.

And what did people talk about? Oh, you know, the usual: type, typography, reading, publishing, various scripts, technical underpinnings of typesetting and type design. Just to give you an idea of the range, here are the first two talks, which were on opposite each other on Wednesday morning: “Knud V. Engelhardt, a Danish Typographic Pioneer” and “Streamlining and Flexible Traditional Chinese Type Design with Open-Source Character Set.”

There were several talks on fonts for African languages, and a panel discussion of designing for the Arabic script in different countries, Arab and non-Arab. Niteesh Yadav’s talk on “Typography as a Living Medium,” about adapting text for use in Augmented and Virtual Reality, particularly caught my attention: what he said seemed like a logical extension of the concerns I’ve been involved with for several years for readable typography for the screen. (I asked Niteesh to write something for the Scripta Typographic Institute site, which I’ve let languish for far too long. The conversation could use a refresh.)

It’s never possible to see everything and talk to everybody. In the interests of my ATypI history project, I had lunch with the organizers of the previous Copenhagen conference, Henrik Birkvig and Torben Wilhelmsen, and quizzed them for their memories, with my trusty voice-recording phone turned on. A number of people offered new information about past conferences, some from personal memory and some from knowledge of older documentation. (I’m working on the chapter about the 1960s now, and it’s going to be a work in progress, as I try to fill in the holes in the fossil record.) On the first days, when the weather was unwelcoming, the only place to foregather easily was the relatively small hallway outside the main auditorium with its excellent coffee bar; but when the weather improved and the sun came out, people would spill out onto the grass, which was also where various demonstrations were set up under a tent. Apart from the coffee bar and a cafeteria, the options for meals required a bit of a walk, but there were some water-side restaurants and a popular outdoor food court not far away.

The Poles managed the conference’s infrastructure brilliantly. The Finns and Brazilians got me into late-night trouble with unending parties. The Chinese got us all talking about hanzi. The Danes, of course, welcomed us to their country and their typographic traditions. I enjoyed both social and intellectual interaction with people from Australia, Britain, Germany, India, Lebanon, Poland, the Netherlands, Argentina, Portugal, Austria, and even the USA. That’s one of the pleasures and also the values of an ATypI conference.

[Above: attendees at the official reception in Copenhagen’s ornate City Hall; the building at the Royal Danish Academy where the ATypI program took place; Taurai Valerie Mtake on “The future is ancestral.”]

Categorized as events, people, type history, typography |

When I started working on a history of ATypI in 2018, before the Covid-19 pandemic, it was a project that I expected would take two or three years and would produce a series of small booklets, one on each topic or period in the association’s 70-year history. With backing from the Board, I researched and wrote a first chapter, outlining ATypI’s “origin story,” and published a draft of that chapter on Medium. At the 2019 conference in Tokyo, I gave a talk about the project and my progress thus far.

But then the pandemic hit, shutting so many things down, including both in-person ATypI conferences and the backing for the ATypI history project. I’ve been wanting to get back to it ever since, but I’m in no position to take it on as a purely volunteer project, and after the financial hit of the pandemic years, the Board isn’t able to back it at this time.

So I’ve launched a GoFundMe campaign for the ATypI history project.

This is not, of course, meant to compete with any direct financial of ATypI; it’s a separate, complementary endeavor. If I can raise the money, I hope to complete the project over the course of the next year, and ideally present it in a published form in time for the 2026 ATypI conference, wherever that may be. I’m not foolish enough to make any guarantees, but that’s what I’m aiming for.

Researching this has been fascinating. I started out digging into the association’s beginnings, when it was initially proposed by Charles Peignot in 1955, and its formal kickoff in 1957 in Lausanne. I’ve read through archives at the University of Reading and the Bibliothèque Forney in Paris, and I’ve interviewed a number of the early members. (Not all of them, of course, are still with us.) There is both formal material (proposals, resolutions, minutes of meetings) and anecdotal accounts (“Do you think you have to be a nasty person to be a good type designer?”). So far I’ve focused on events that were before my time; after Type90, which was my first type conference, and especially after I joined the ATypI board in 2000, I have first-hand recollections and documentation.

Why is the history of ATypI important? Because there has been no other organization that so thoroughly embodied the typographic community and the business and technology of type and type design. And because ATypI’s initial goal – protection of the rights of type designers – has proven so elusive over the years.

In lieu of a handy billionaire or Medici prince, I hope to cobble together enough funding through this GoFundMe to enable me to complete the project.

[Images: covers of two ATypI publications from the 1960s (500 years of Czech printing, and Type in our time).

Categorized as culture, education, events, type history, typography, writing & editing |

Last week, on a visit to Boston, I got to visit the Katherine Small Gallery in Somerville. It’s a gallery, because it does have exhibitions, but it’s most obviously a bookstore. An inviting, dangerous bookstore.

Michael Russem, the proprietor, greets each new arrival with the same welcoming line: “This shop deals only with graphic design and typography, so lower your expections!” If your tastes and interests are anything like mine, however, this introduction will only raise your expectations. And the shop exceeds them.

The shelves are full of books about typography, both current and rare. I was relieved to see that many of the most inviting were books that I already possessed; but not all. Naturally I ended up leaving with a bag full of books, which Michael bundled up in such a way that I managed to fit them into my carry-on bag for the flight home. (Such restraint I showed! As I told him, if I had wandered into a shop like this thirty years ago, I would have bought far more of the books – if I could have afforded them.) Then there was his own collection, which were not for sale but were displayed behind the desk and available to browse.

In a fit of perfect serendipity, I found that the current exhibit was on the book-jacket designs of Michael Harvey. I am a big fan of Michael’s distinctive lettering style (and of the man himself, now much missed), so this was a must-see for me. The germ of the exhibit was a small collection of mock-ups for covers and jackets, which were exhibited alongside the finished dust jackets. The glassed-in tops of two display cases were full of Michael Harvey designs, and flat-file drawers underneath them held many more.

I can certainly recommend a visit to Katherine Small Gallery if you’re in the Boston area. Michael Russem’s dry sense of humor is displayed in the folded map that he handed me: “A Complete Checklist & Map of Brick & Mortar Typography & Graphic Design Bookshops in & Around Boston.” Open it up and you find a lovely map of Boston, with exactly one shop: his.

[Top: Proprietor Michael Russem at the bookshelves behind the desk. Middle: a display case showing three sketches/mock-ups by Michael Harvey for a book jacket. Bottom: “A Complete Checklist & Map of Brick & Mortar Typography & Graphic Design Bookshops in & Around Boston.”]

Categorized as book design, books, culture, design, typography |

I’ve been engaged in a wide variety of book projects in recent months. First, the limited editions of Little, Big (numbered, lettered) were finally released, after an extraordinarily long gestation. Then there was an even more limited edition (five copies, officially) of Cory Doctorow’s “Martin Hench” novels Red Team Blues and Bezzle, one tucked quite literally into the other, and hand-bound in purple leather by master bookbinder John DeMerritt.

At a completely different end of the production spectrum, I just finished designing and typesetting Sandra Bond’s novel Three Men in Orbit, the third of her books that I’ve designed for Canal Press, an independent imprint run by the redoubtable Michael Dobson. Michael uses Amazon’s publishing machine to actually produce the books; their production methods are so stripped down that they don’t even want crop marks on the cover file, and the placement of a bar code on the back cover is always a bit approximate. But they produce physically readable books; it’s my job to make sure that it’s optically and typographically readable. The official publication date of Three Men in Orbit is August 1, and copies will be for sale at the Glasgow worldcon.

A project that began either 20 years ago or a year ago, depending on how you look at it, just got published: The Sleep of Reason, Michael Swanwick’s collection of very short stories based on images from Goya’s Los Caprichos. The stories were originally published online on The Infinite Matrix, and are now in print via PS Publishing in the UK.

Meanwhile, I’m still in the midst of a collaboration with Arabic type designer Mamoun Sakkal on a bilingual book of commentary on the Quran – a fascinating project for someone who is neither Muslim nor a speaker or reader of Arabic. The publisher asked me if I offered any classes or workshops on book design…

Another long-running project has been the complete works of poet JT Stewart, Our Bones Sing of Salt. Since I had designed two of JT’s earlier chapbooks and quite a few broadsides and related ephemera, it made sense for me to not only edit the manuscript but put it into an appropriate design. We’re in search of the right publisher at this point (and I’m fully aware that a publisher may want their own design rather than mine), but we’ve produced a nice package for them to consider. I don’t want to publish it myself, but that’s always an option.

Then there’s the book of my own selected essays, tentatively titled Working with Words, which is currently at a publisher. Whether I’ll end up getting to design that one is an open question.

Oh, and I’ve put together a couple of speculative proposals for small, entertaining books that riff on typographic ideas. All very much in the realm of Maybe, at this point.

So I guess that with design, writing, editing, typesetting, production management, and marketing, I’m still very much involved in the creation of books. Appropriately enough, I’ve done three talks in the past year about aspects of book design, and written an article on the subject for Jean François Porchez’s revived Typofonderie Gazette.

Categorized as book design, books, design, publishing, typography, writing & editing |

At long last, after more than 17 years of ups, downs, and circuitous side trips, the 40th anniversary edition of John Crowley’s Little, Big was published in late 2022, and the limited Numbered and Lettered editions are finally being distributed. The extra delay on the limited editions involved two different shipments of slipcases being lost en route from China, as well as a painstaking on-site check to ensure that each of the individually signed and inscribed four-page signatures got into the right individual copy. Plus, of course, the apparently inevitable twists and turns of fortune that have accompanied this project from the beginning. (Ben Kamm attributes this to the troublesome whims of the fay. I just say it must be Coyote.)

The Trade edition won an award at the Publishing Professionals Network (PPN) Book Show last year. (As manager of the judging team, I was involved in the judging process, but I recused myself from any consideration of my own book. As did judges whose books had been submitted.) The Trade edition itself is a luxurious book: 800 pages including etchings and prints by Peter Milton, exquisitely printed in a 7.5×10-inch format on Mohawk Superfine by Brilliant Graphics in Exton, Pennsylvania. The Numbered and Lettered editions (which sold out years ago) include a new short story by John Crowley, as well as the slipcases with more Peter Milton art. In the Lettered copies, Crowley wrote out a short passage from the novel in his elegant chancery italic handwriting.

The vision behind this project was Ron Drummond’s, publisher of Incunabula and instigator of ambitious undertakings. Ron and I collaborated over many years on the details of the book’s design; the overall page grid and the details of typesetting were mine, with Ron deciding on image trims and specifying the placement of Peter Milton’s art. Ron also commissioned three different essays about the book, to be published on the generous flaps of the dustjackets, one for each of the three editions. (On the Trade edition, which you can still purchase, the essay is by Neil Gaiman.)

It’s been a very long process. As I’ve written before, there were times when I took to referring to this as “Zeno’s book project,” because like Zeno’s arrow it seemed that it would never reach its target. Amazingly, it has. And it seems to be a bulls-eye.

[Images: The three editions of the Little, Big 40th anniversary edition: Numbered (top), Lettered (middle), and Trade (bottom).]

Categorized as book design, books, design, editorial design, people, printing, publishing, typography, writing & editing |

My usual self-description is “editor and typographer,” and most of the time this blog concerns itself with the second part of that description. In this blog post, however, I am putting on my editorial hat.

Earlier this month, our local daily newspaper, the Seattle Times, reprinted an article from the New York Times about the lack of measurable snowfall this winter in New York City. As I read the article (in the online “replica” of the printed pages), I was stopped by an awkward bit of wording: “Conditions already were in place for a relatively warm start to the winter, meteorologists say.” Already were?

I got curious – curious enough to go find the original article on the New York Times website and scroll down to that paragraph. In the original article, that sentence read, “Conditions were already in place for a relatively warm start…”

Editors often re-edit a news story in various ways, such as chopping this original long paragraph into two short ones. But in this case, an editor at our local Times had changed the completely natural word order (“were already in place”) into something awkward and unnatural (“already were in place”). Why?

I think it comes from some mistaken ideas about where adverbs normally fall in English sentences. Words like “still” / “already” / “often” / “probably” find their most natural place after any form of the verb “to be.” When the verb has two parts (a compound verb), the place for such an adverb is between the two parts: the adverb is usually found in the middle. That is both the natural rhythm of a spoken English sentence, and the placement that most grammarians and stylists agree is correct.

But somewhere along the line, someone came up with the notion that you shouldn’t “split” a compound verb. I’ve just learned, after a bit of googling, that this is known as the “split verb rule.” I also found a lovely and lengthy analysis on Language Log of where this bogus rule came from and exactly why it makes no sense. Quite simply: the natural place for an adverb is between the parts of a compound verb.

This supposed rule, like its cousin the “split infinitive rule,” must have been invented by hair-splitters. The usual excuse is to hark back to Latin, where an infinitive is a single word (findere) and there’s no way to split it. But an English infinitive is two words (to split), which naturally invites any relevant adverb to fall in the middle. Trying to extend this unnatural idea to compound verbs is even sillier than avoiding split infinitives. Both “rules” ought to be laughed off by any good writer. Or editor.

The example I gave from the two Timeses doesn’t involve a compound verb, but I suspect that the second editor was influenced by the split verb rule (which the paper definitely seems to believe in) and treated “were in place” as a phrase that shouldn’t be broken. But it should be.

Seattle Times, are you listening?

[Images: paragraphs from the same news story in the New York Times (top) and the Seattle Times (bottom).]

Categorized as writing & editing |

I’ve just finished reading Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life of Evan S. Connell, by Steve Paul (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2021). Connell is a peculiar writer, impossible to categorize; he’s been a favorite of mine since I first discovered his writing through North Point Press, my favorite American book publisher of the 1980s. He’s probably best known for his bestseller about Custer, Son of the Morning Star, which examines the Battle of the Little Big Horn from both sides, with its antecedents, its contexts, and its implications. He’s a master of finding the arresting detail, and his prose is wry and precise.

Mid-way through his career, Connell became closely involved with Berkeley-based North Point Press. “Everybody there is intelligent and courteous and they all seem to know what they’re doing – which is not at all true of some people I’ve met in the NY industry.” Jack Shoemaker, North Point’s editor in chief, encouraged Connell and continued to be his editor after North Point shut down and Shoemaker had to create a new publishing company (twice). Steve Paul devotes quite a few pages of the biography to North Point, giving me more background than I knew before now. He describes Shoemaker’s and publisher William Turnbull’s desire to make quality books, though he doesn’t mention David Bullen, North Point’s long-time book designer, who was responsible for how the books looked and felt. (Nor does he mention Jack Stauffacher, who was involved at the press’s inception and set some of the typographic standards that North Point became known for). What Bullen did at North Point was a strong influence on my own ideas about book design.

The other book that Evan S. Connell is best known for is his early novel, Mrs. Bridge, which is highly respected though I haven’t read it. His examination, in detail, of the empty life of an affluent Kansas City matron has simply never appealed to me; I’m much more fascinated by his delvings into history and art. Another of his books that I’ve failed to finish, despite being history-based, is Deus lo volt! (“God wills it!”), which is so effective at conveying the spirit and mindset of the Christians who launched the Crusades that I couldn’t go on; I couldn’t stand being inside their blinkered heads. Maybe one day I’ll come back to it.

But I have read quite a few of Connell’s books, either bought new in North Point editions (which were sometimes reissues) or found and snapped up in used-book stores. Connell’s life is somewhat opaque; he was a private person, notably untalkative. Steve Paul is smart to call his biography a “writing life”; that was clearly the way Connell saw himself. Paul makes it clear, though, that Connell had connections to much livelier characters, especially when he was living in Sausalito and San Francisco. And Paul is good at weaving the strands of Connell’s life together, and at showing how the writing, the publishing, the extensive, usually solitary travel, and the thoughts he expressed were all woven of the same cloth. Or perhaps, given his fascination with pre-Columbian pottery, I should say that they were thrown from the same clay.

Categorized as book design, books, culture, letters, people, publishing, writing & editing |

Its origins are lost in the mists of time. Ron Drummond, the one-man publisher of Incunabula, reminds us that he first broached the subject to John Crowley thirty years ago: the subject being a special, celebratory edition of Crowley’s well-loved novel, Little, Big (1981). Incunabula had already published one book by John Crowley and two by Samuel R. Delany, of which I had designed two: Crowley’s Antiquities (1991) and Delany’s Atlantis: Three Tales (1995).

Incunabula, which Ron had named in a combination of respect and chutzpah, was a small press that published worthwhile literary works of science fiction and fantasy (or fantastika as critic John Clute calls it). “Incunabula,” which means “cradles” or “swaddling clothes” in Latin, is used to refer to European printed books published before the year 1501. By that time, sixty years after Gutenberg’s innovations, printing had exploded from a craft into an industry, and many of the standards of book design that we still follow were well established. In calling his new press Incunabula, Ron was drawing on a very long tradition.

I have no recollection of when it was that Ron first asked me about designing this more ambitious volume. I can find files related to the project dating back to 2003, and my earliest design file, LB design 1.indd, is dated May 9, 2005. I’ve been working on this book for at least seventeen years.

I have often referred to it as “Zeno’s book project,” for the way it seemed to keep approaching completion without ever quite arriving. I have also sometimes called it “the Oxford Lectern Little, Big,” in reference to Bruce Rogers’s monumental Oxford Lectern Bible. Our book, however, is not so monumental as to require a lectern.

The tale of how this book came to take its final form, with an intricate interweaving of original etchings and engravings by the artist Peter Milton, would take too long to tell. It has its painful interludes. Ron’s ambitions didn’t always correspond with his practical abilities, or with his never-robust health; this was a much bigger project than any he had undertaken before. But his vision was always clear: choosing and framing details from Peter Milton’s art that would create a conversation with the text of the novel.

Now, amazingly, Zeno’s arrow has hit its target. A couple of weeks ago, my advance copy of the trade edition arrived in my hands, a few days after Ron’s copy reached him. It’s an 800-page tome, 7½ x 10 inches, sewn in signatures, printed on luxurious Mohawk Superfine paper, rich with art, and all digitally typeset in Akira Kobayashi’s historically inspired typeface FF Clifford. I can say, having hefted the book and laid it in my lap and begun my own rereading of a favorite text, that it’s everything I had hoped for: comfortably readable pages, beautifully printed images, in a sturdy yet flexible binding. The printer, Brilliant Graphics in Exton, Pennsylvania, did a masterful job.

Fulfillment will be handled through Dallas-based literary publisher and distributor Deep Vellum. There are still copies of the trade edition available for purchase. The 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, which is now the 40th anniversary edition, is finally a reality.

Categorized as book design, books, culture, printing, publishing, typography, writing & editing |

After a bit of a hiatus, I’ve come back to my sporadic typographic memoir, this time to talk about the years in the 1990s when I was the house designer for Copper Canyon Press. In that time, I designed not only the books but all the collateral material as well, trying to keep a consistent feel to everything that came out of the press while maintaining a variety of approaches to individual books.

This chapter is posted on Medium, as are all the previous chapters of the ongoing memoir project.

I still have all the files I created in producing those books, but I was working on a Mac before Apple adopted OS X, which fundamentally changed the file formats of the entire operating system. Unfortunately for future compatibility, all of those old files, none of which had filename extensions, now show up in the modern MacOS as “Unix executable files,” for lack of any other identification. Of course, the file information is still there; add the proper extension and the file type becomes recognizable. Whether it becomes openable, after something like a quarter century, is another question. But there are old Macs and old OSes and old versions of PageMaker. Somewhere.

In a few cases, I did create PDFs of my designs, either book covers or collateral like brochures. But any instances of Minion Multiple Master, the most advanced type technology of the time, which I used a lot, got lost in translation; current Adobe Acrobat technology doesn’t recognize the old MM fonts.

Such a waste of a brilliant technology! Such a short-sighted abandonment of sophisticated design. (Don’t get me started.)

Of course, with today’s variable fonts technology, you can get many of the same effects – and more. I just hope this tech doesn’t get left by the side of the information highway the way multiple-master formats did.

Really, isn’t the point to not lose information as techology advances? Including typographic and graphic-design technology. Our books need to be still readable in 500 years; or five years.

Categorized as book design, books, design, fonts, publishing, type history, typography |

I would like to direct your attention to a typographic element that is often ignored. Allow me to point out what makes it unique.

That element? The manicule. It’s also known as a fist, a hand, and by many other names, but it always takes the same basic form: a small image of a human hand, with the index finger pointing (usually to the right). Manicules date back to at least the Middle Ages, when it was quite common for readers to annotate their books, drawing a little hand in the margin to point out a particularly important or noteworthy passage. (“Manicule” comes from the Latin word for “little hand.”) Today they’re more likely to be part of a font, and to be used typographically, whether very large in a supermarket ad or at small size as an indicator of importance in a system of typographic hierarchy. They are often given a bright color to make them stand out. (Red is the traditional second color.)

Manicules can take the style of the font they’re in, just like ampersands or currency symbols. And now, the Dutch/Finnish type studio Underware, whose typefaces range from one of my favorite book faces, Dolly, to the truly bonkers stencil typeface Plakato, has issued a small booklet they call a “Manicule specimen,” demonstrating their versatility at imagining new forms of manicules for every occasion.

This little limited-edition book has a short text running through it, changing typeface twice per page, facing enlarged manicules in the same typeface, two per page. It’s a tour-de-force in its own highly specific way. And it serves to remind us that we have manicules at our fingertips, in many digital fonts, and that sometimes it’s appropriate to use them.

[Image: page spread from Underware’s Manicule specimen.]

[Originally published on February 8, 2022, in PPN Post and Updates, the newsletter of the Publishing Professionals Network.]

Categorized as books, culture, fonts, type history, typography |