easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

Both publisher Ron Drummond and I were pleasantly surprised to discover a story in Wednesday’s Guardian all about the upcoming 25th anniversary edition of John Crowley’s Little, Big. It’s another excellent goad to finishing up the preparatory work (which often seems endless) and getting the book ready for the printer. Several people asked me about the state of the project at the recent Potlatch, a small literary science-fiction convention that Eileen and I were at last weekend in Sunnyvale, California. As I assured them (truthfully), we’re in the endgame now. Of course, since this project is being executed by an exaltation of perfectionists, even the endgame isn’t simple or easy.

The Guardian story, by David Barnett, is appreciative and informative, even if he never mentions that this edition will include a sumptuous selection of artwork by Peter Milton that complements Crowley’s text (without in any way being illustration). It’s the integration of art and text that has taken so long, but it’s one aspect that will make this edition unique.

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

A little-noticed item was tucked into the goody bags handed out to members of the ATypI conference in St. Petersburg: a CD-ROM with a bright red label sporting the logo of the conference, plus titles, in Russian and English, saying: Первенцы гражданскйо печати / The first-borns of secular printing. The English subtitle explains it: Moscow editions 1708–1711. This little CD contains full scans of thirty-two books printed in Moscow in the very first years after Peter the Great’s drastic reform of the Russian alphabet.

“As they say in the supermarkets, an ‘unadvertised special’,” explained Maxim Zhukov on the ATypI members’ list. “A little gem hidden deep in the bag, just sitting there, waiting to be discovered.

“The idea of throwing into the ATypI’o8 goodie bag the CD-ROM prepared by Irina Fomenko and her friends of the Russian State Library (earlier known as Lenin Library) came very late in the game, two weeks before the conference opened. It turned out that (a) the ‘autorun’ thing only worked on IBM-compatibles, and (b) the introduction was in Russian. That was not surprising, given the usual target audience (domestic) of the RSL and its Rare Book Dept., and the OS most of the people in the world use (Windows). Translating, reformatting and reprogramming the CD-ROM would have taken forever, so we decided to offer the CD-ROM to the attendees of the SPb conference as is.”

The content is in Russian, but the images are wonderful no matter what language you read. And even if you’re viewing on a Mac and can’t take advantage of the “autorun” feature, it’s easy enough to just click on the links to the various PDFs, or open the PDFs directly, and browse through them. Among other things, this CD includes the complete printed specimen of the new Civil Type; we’re used to seeing an image of the first page, with Peter’s hand-scrawled corrections, but how many of us have seen the rest of the booklet? It’s here.

“Of course,” says Maxim, “the image resolution is not press quality. And yet, we never had it this good. For decades, all there was were the tenth-generation reproductions, heavily retouched, most of them coming from Abram Shitsgal books. And now… thirty-two Petrine books and other printed pieces scanned cover-to-cover! Isn’t that something.”

It is.

[Photos: top, interior spread from the first type specimen of the new Civil Type; below, a page from a 1710 book on geography, in the new type.]

Categorized as books, letters, printing, publishing |

I’ve been reading Cory Doctorow’s new book of essays, Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, and finding it easy to read. This is not surprising, since I designed and typeset the interior of the book myself, but it’s reassuring when I actually have time to sit down with a copy of the finished, printed book and test that it’s truly readable. It is. (I’m not talking about the prose here; Cory’s writing is compulsively readable, in pretty much any format.) The author seems pretty happy with the design, too.

I’ve done a lot of book interiors for Tachyon Publications, but this was somewhat different from most of them. I wanted a typeface that was serious yet not too literary; it would have seemed silly to typeset Cory’s essays in Bembo, for instance. And it had to be very forgiving: it had to make a lot of different combinations of ALL CAPS and C4PS&NUMB3R5 look good, not like big undigestible chunks clogging up the flow of the prose. Normally I would use old-style figures in a book, and small caps for acronyms and anything set in all-caps. But in these essays, Cory uses a lot of acronyms – DVDs, FBI, RIAA, VHS, and DRM are just a few from a single essay – and there are some combinations of capital letters and numbers or other symbols that come from Leetspeak or keyboard-based typing habits that rely on the simplicity of plain ASCII characters. They’re part of the flow, not an interruption of it. This was not exactly an edition of the Penguin Classics.

The typeface I chose was Chaparral Pro, a sort of humanist slab-serif text face designed by the very talented former Adobe type designer Carol Twombly. Chaparral doesn’t have much variation in the width of the strokes, so it doesn’t look “bright” like Times Roman or Janson; but its letter forms are comfortable, familiar, and easygoing, and it reads well in long text. Chaparral has been a favorite of mine since it first came out, though I don’t often get a chance to use it in a book; it might seem a little strong for, say, a book of fiction. But it hit the right balance here. And its caps and its full-height lining figures don’t overpower the lowercase the way they do in some traditional book faces.

Although Chaparral does have old-style figures, the only place I used them was in the table of contents. Similarly, the font includes true small caps, but I only used them in the front matter and the running heads. In the body of the text, it was full caps and lining figures all the way through – in the spirit of the prose itself.

In making the physical object – what Cory calls the p-book – comfortable for carrying around and reading on the fly, it helps to keep it small and light, printed on flexible, off-white paper in a binding that opens freely. Worzalla, the printer, did a good job of this. The strikingly simple cover that Ann Monn designed stands out from other books, and it gets curious glances when you’re reading the book in a coffeehouse. The spine will also stand out on a bookshelf, a useful selling point for physical book-product.

The essays themselves? Read ’em.

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

I’ve been intending to write an article about Steve Renick and his work ever since his sudden death in 2002. Even before that, I had the idea in the back of my head. And clearly, such an article needs to be written, since when I google him in various ways, in search of the best link for his name above, in the first sentence, everything I come up with is partial and oblique. But this is not that article; it’s just a few notes towards one.

There isn’t a current exhibit of Steve Renick’s work that I can point you to, unless you drop by the offices of the University of California Press, where he was Art Director for twenty years. In their library/meeting room, last time I was there, they had a lot of Steve’s work on display; even without that intention, any display of books from UC Press in the past two decades would show a lot of Steve Renick’s work, either as designer or as art director. He was a consummate book designer, with an understated style in a sort of classical Modernist tradition. He was a typographer in the best sense; I remember that he had a Monotype type-specimen poster, from the days of hot-metal typesetting, under the glass top of his drawing table. We would talk about typefaces and books and the details of typography; I believe it was he who gave me a photocopy of the long-out-of-print book by Geoffrey Dowding, Finer Points in the spacing & arrangement of type.

I would try to visit Steve at the Press whenever I was in the Bay Area. He was always friendly, helpful, informal, and curious about whatever was new. I remember arriving one day when he had just gotten his hands on a Mac and an early version of QuarkXPress; he was noodling around, trying things out, finding out how the software worked, thinking about how he could incorporate these new capabilities into the way he designed books. At that point I had never used XPress, but I had been designing and typesetting books digitally for several years; we compared notes on digital type and how it was set.

Many of the most high-profile books to come out of UC Press were Steve’s work, either designed by him or produced under his art direction: Henry Thoreau: a life of the mind, with Barry Moser illustrations; Geisha, by Liza Dalby; Poles apart: parallel visions of the Arctic and Antarctic, by Galen Rowell; the Allen Mandelbaum translation of Dante’s Inferno. He designed the remarkable English-language facsimile edition of Jan Tschichold’s Die Neue Typographie, the first time this classic of Modernist typography had appeared in English. That book, in fact, I had some responsibility for: I had been corresponding with Ruari McLean, Tschichold’s biographer and sometime translator, about getting his unpublished translation of Die Neue Typographie into print, when I found out that UC Press, all unknowing, was contemplating commissioning a translation, not realizing that a translation already existed in manuscript. I got hold of Steve, who put me in touch with the editor of the project; then I got the editor and McLean together and then left them to work out the best way to approach the book.

In contrast to his elegant, spare book designs, Steve’s hobby was fixing up old hotrod cars. (No doubt the engine details were as finely crafted as his typography.) I recall the first time he drove me to lunch in his current rod, and how flabbergasted I was at the apparent aesthetic contradiction of these two wildly different styles.

Steve was famously generous with his time and advice; everyone who has worked with him, been on a book-show jury with him, or just spent time with him remembers this. He was also resolutely unpretentious; in a group photo from a book-industry event, he would be the one over on the end with the rumpled jacket and oblique tie. He had an eagle eye for typography and a fine hand for design; his influence is easy to spot in the work of innumerable younger designers. Most of all, for book buyers and readers, he quite simply produced a wealth of books that we can read easily and that we can feel happy to have on our shelves.

Categorized as book design, publishing, typography |

I’ve just recently gotten printed copies of two books that I designed, for different publishers, both printed by print-on-demand or extremely short-run printers. And I’ve been surprised and pleased by the results.

The main problem with POD printing has been in the paper and the binding – the manufacturing, essentially, rather than the printing. Too many POD books are printed on overly bright white paper, often with the grain running the wrong way (the grain should be parallel to the spine; otherwise, the pages tend to curl from top to bottom), and bound much too tightly for easy opening and reading. The binding is still not perfect (despite being what’s misleadingly called “perfect bound” – a poor excuse for properly sewn signatures), but it’s more flexible than it used to be; and once you know how the bound book will open, you can design your pages with sufficient space in the gutter so none of the text gets lost in the glue.

These two books both have personal connections for me: the first, The WisCon chronicles: volume 2 (Aqueduct Press), is co-edited by L. Timmel Duchamp and by my partner Eileen Gunn; the second, Pushing leaves towards the sun, is a first novel self-published by my nephew Mark L. Berry, who in his “real” life is a pilot for American Airlines. I designed and typeset both books, naturally. The WisCon Chronicles was printed by Applied Digital Printing, in Bellingham, Washington, who have done quite a few short-run books for the publisher, Aqueduct Press; I made specific requests about paper stock and how flexible the books would be, and they managed to make it happen. Pushing leaves was printed by BookMobile, which was recommended by Michael Wiegers at Copper Canyon Press (when Copper Canyon has to reprint a book with a short run, they often use BookMobile); not surprisingly, the result is quite readable. Both books were printed on off-white paper, so that the pages won’t glare brightly in your face while you’re reading. While neither book lies flat when it’s opened, as a book should, they’re no worse in this than most commercially printed books these days. What this means is that both books can be comfortably read – and that POD or short-run printing is no longer the spavined, jury-rigged approximation of real printing that it once was.

Categorized as book design, printing, publishing |

A few months ago, the Font Bureau published a small book about the type designs of David Berlow. The typefaces shown in this specimen-style booklet are only a subset of the larger Font Bureau type library, but it’s remarkable to realize just how many of those typefaces are Berlow’s work. Seeing them all in one place like this is eye-opening.

David Berlow has always been a consummate type designer, crafting new faces and new versions of old faces for any number of specific, practical uses. He may have done a few designs just for the hell of it, but it’s obvious that the great majority of these typefaces were created for a purpose, often for a particular client. (Many of them first appeared as proprietary designs for publications, later released to the general font-buying public.)

When Berlow and Roger Black founded the Font Bureau in 1989, it was aimed squarely at the realm of editorial design. In the nearly twenty years since then, anyone reading a random sample of U.S. publications has probably spent a good deal of their time reading typefaces designed by David Berlow. He has designed subtly varied series for newspaper production, exuberantly expansive families for headline and display use, and carefully honed text faces that – if they’re deployed well – never call attention to themselves in a page of text.

He has worked with a wide variety of collaborators, and navigated the shoals of changing technologies. Anyone who has heard David speak at a design conference knows that he’s funny, quirky, and opinionated. He’s also prolific: according to this booklet, the Font Bureau has developed “more than 300 new and revised type designs” in the past nineteen years, and a large percentage of them have been partly or wholly David Berlow’s work.

[Images | Above left: detail from the title page of the Berlow type-specimen book. Top: detail from a type-specimen page for Bureau Grot, the expanded family originally called Bureau Grotesque. Bottom: two of the five “grades” of the newspaper text face Bureau Roman.]

Categorized as fonts, publishing, type designers |

John L. Walters, editor of Eye magazine in London, writes that Eye is about to go solo – leaving Haymarket, the media group that bought the magazine three years ago, and striking out on its own. Walters, along with Simon Esterson (Eye’s art director), and Hannah Tyson (business director at Esterson Associates), has set up an independent company, Eye Magazine Ltd, to publish the magazine, beginning with the new Spring issue (which, coincidentally, has an article of mine in it).

This sounds like good news for Eye. Any publishing venture is risky, but Eye is an established design magazine with a deservedly strong reputation and a loyal readership. Simon Esterson’s design has made it a pleasure to read (even with the perfect-binding that never allows the pages to lie flat – something that is inexplicably popular in magazines these days). The articles and reviews are thoughtful. I’ve been subscribing, with only one break, since the second issue. (It would have been the first issue, but I got my subscription in too late.) Design magazines tend to be seen as cuckoos in the nest of any large publishing group; they don’t fit in, and the owners never know quite what to do with them or how to promote them. I’m looking forward to seeing what Eye does now that it’s free to soar.

Categorized as publishing |

Thursday’s column by Jon Carroll in the San Francisco Chronicle (which I read online at the excellent SFGate.com, since these days I’m usually not local and can’t pick up the Chron on the street) was all about newspapers. About how newspapers, which everyone says are dying, aren’t dying at all – although, he suggests, they might be signing up for a mutual suicide pact. As Jon Carroll points out, newspapers do make money – in fact, as Roger Black has pointed out, they make profit margins that would cause some other large businesses to break out in great big smiley faces all day long. (Check out the profit margin in supermarkets sometime.) It’s just that someone upstairs thinks they’re not making money – or not enough money.

As an editor/designer who has put together a book about the design of newspapers, not about their business, I’m no expert on the profit-and-loss sheets of our nation’s daily papers (not to mention those of other nations around the globe). But it’s perfectly obvious that newspapers are still a profitable business, overall; and also that they are a fundamental part of our information system – in other words, in how we think. The good ones are worth their weight in, well, paper (not such a cheap commodity these days), and even the mediocre ones offer an astonishing value for a pittance every day. Plus, they’re good for wrapping fish.

Newspapers: still not dead. Changing, yes; that’s usually a sign of what we call life.

Categorized as information design, publishing, society |

I’ve been reading Ken MacLeod’s 1996 novel The Stone Canal, in its 2000 U.S. edition (actually its 2001 mass-market paperback edition, published by Tor). The book’s enjoyable and well written, but what struck me was the editing. Ken MacLeod is a Scottish writer, and his books have been published first in the United Kingdom, then republished in the United States. I know that the U.S. editions have been given an editorial once-over to “Americanize” the language; it’s a common practice, at least in popular-genre writing, though it’s one that I dislike and that I feel shows a fundamental lack of respect for our shared language. (Do American publishers “Americanize” the prose of Kingsley Amis, Doris Lessing, Patrick White, Rebecca West, Evelyn Waugh?)

There was one point where the prose of Ken MacLeod’s novel had not been Americanized, and I suspect it was a slip on the part of the copyeditor: a reference to a husband getting someone’s address out of his wife’s “diary.” In the UK, a diary might be nothing more personal than an appointment calendar – my own annual calendar is a hardbound datebook called A4 architects & designers diary – but in the US a diary is something a great deal more personal: one’s intimate daily thoughts, recorded privately in a handwritten book for no one’s eyes but our own. (Or published far and wide on Livejournal; it depends on the diarist’s sense of privacy.) The American sense of “diary” gave that brief sentence an emotional weight that it was clear MacLeod didn’t intend; figuring that out took me out of the story and broke my concentration for a moment, which was not what was called for at that point in the novel. Tinkering with a writer’s prose is risky; but smoothing it out and then missing something gives whatever you’ve missed more importance than it warrants.

Whoever copyedited this book also had a habit of combining “on” and “to” into “onto” profligately, without apparently stopping to think about whether they really did belong together. They don’t always; and the same may be said of “in” and “to” vs. “into.” If you drive down the street and turn in to the police station, you haven’t suddenly metamorphosed into a police station; you’ve simply entered its parking lot. By the same token, moving on to the next subject is not the same as moving onto the next subject. (Ouch!) I have no idea whether this thoughtless glitch was introduced in the U.S. edition or the original British edition, but either way, its results were distracting. Editing can never be done automatically.

I enjoyed the book, though.

Categorized as books, publishing, writing & editing |

Browsing through a local bookstore yesterday, I kept picking up interesting-looking new books and opening them, only to put them down again when I saw the inside typography. An uninviting text page can put off any reader; it’s just that as a typographer and a book designer, I can tell exactly what it is that puts me off.

Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, in Penguin trade paperback: typeset in an overly contrasting version of Baskerville (probably ITC New Baskerville, though I couldn’t be sure), in lines that were two or three picas too wide for comfortable reading. John Crowley’s The Solitudes, in the newly reprinted edition from Overlook, is set in Rotis Serif, a typeface that looks superficially attractive but consists of a mismatched set of letterforms in which the most common letters are quirky and draw attention to themselves.

The Landmark Herodotus sounded fascinating: a spacious volume, informatively annotated, bedecked with useful maps. But its text type appears light and blotchy throughout. The typeface is Matthew Carter’s excellent ITC Galliard, but it looks like the early Adobe version, which was indifferently digitized and has a poorly spaced italic. The numbers are all set in lining uppercase numerals, jutting up to full cap height, instead of old-style lowercase numerals, as befits any text, and especially a translation of a classic. In addition, the page design doesn’t quite fit the binding; it’s a thick book, and the gutters are too narrow, which would make reading uncomfortable.

I found one fine exception: Maps: finding our place in the world, edited by James R. Ackerman and Robert W. Karrow (University of Chicago Press). The typeface is Dolly, which is robust and easily readable in extended text, and the page design uses it effectively. That one I might actually buy. It’s the shame the same designers didn’t take on the Herodotus.

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