easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

Cory Doctorow just posted a note on Boing Boing about a book I designed: Rewired: the Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel (San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2007). He wasn’t writing about the design, of course, but about the content; still, it was startling to scroll down the page and come upon my own cover design. The infrastructural photo was taken at a construction site south of Market in San Francisco; the photographer, Patty Nason, went roaming one night with Tachyon editor Jill Roberts, in search of a suitable cover image.

The book’s title is in a typeface I’ve always liked but never expected to find an actual use for: Jonathan Hoefler’s Gestalt. It could never be used for an unusual name or word; the letterforms themselves are so unusual that the word has to be familiar and easy to recognize. (The repetition of re in the word “rewired” helps that recognition.) I always get a frisson of pleasure out of finding that one perfect use for an unusual typeface or type element.

I’ve designed several anthologies for Tachyon, including the three (soon to be four) Tiptree Award anthologies and a previous Kelly/Kessel collaboration, Feeling Very Strange: the Slipstream Anthology. It’s always an adventure dealing with an anthology, where the material may be in all sorts of divergent forms (and will inevitably arrive in a host of incompatible formats). It’s most satisfying when I’m designing both the cover and the interior, so the two will be integrated; even better is when I design an entire marketing campaign, with a consistent message and graphic style, as I did three years ago for Eileen’s book when Tachyon published it.

I’ve been carrying Rewired around with me, testing it out as a physical object and finally reading the stories that I didn’t get to during book production. I’m pleased with the way this one came out; it’s light and portable, even though it’s a big book, and it seems comfortable to read, which is the whole point. (The typefaces used throughout, apart from the title on the cover, are varieties of Josh Darden’s Freight family.) Good stories, too. Cory’s own remarkably moving story “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” is one of the highlights.

Categorized as book design, books, fonts, publishing |

While we were in Japan, Eileen’s book won the Sense of Gender Award, in the category of works in translation. It’s an award to “celebrate works that invite us to reconsider gender in various fields, including literature, movies, and manga”; it was established in 2001 by Mari Kotani, Reona Kashiwazaki, and Noriko Maki, for the Japanese Association of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy. There was an amusing, thoughtful awards ceremony on Sunday, Sept. 2, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama, and Eileen came away with a handsome little crystal trophy and a great big smile.

That’s why we were in Japan at such a hot, humid time of year: because the convention was then. Eileen’s collection of short stories, Stable Strategies for Middle Management, which I had designed and produced for Tachyon Publications in San Francisco, had been translated into Japanese as 遺す言葉、その他の短編 and published last year in Japan by Hayakawa Publishing. The Hayakawa edition owes nothing to my design, but it’s a handsome volume in its own right: a well-made hardcover (complete with silk ribbon!), intelligently and allusively illustrated both inside and out, and as far as I can judge well designed typographically. The title story of the Japanese edition is “Coming to Terms,” which had been recently published in Hayakawa’s SF Magazine, rather than “Stable Strategies for Middle Management,” the title story of the U.S. edition. “Coming to Terms” is a title that doesn’t lend itself easily to translation, though; the Japanese title for the story seems to be closer to something like “Testament,” which is also multivalent and appropriate to the story.

Categorized as books, design, publishing |