easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

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 |

If you’re in Seattle this Thursday, don’t miss the opening of an exhibit of brilliantly creative letterpress printing by the late Chris Stern, at the Design Commission (121 Prefontaine Place S., near 4th & Yesler). Chris and his wife and partner, Jules Remedios Faye, formed Stern & Faye, Letterpress Printers, and founded their “printing farm” in the Skagit Valley north of Seattle. Each of them was a fine, and unusual, printer and artist before they met, and their work together has been amazing. When Chris died of cancer a year and a half ago, many of us lost a friend and we all lost an original talent.

The exhibit is in several parts: in addition to Chris’s printed work, there will be photos and artifacts from the printing farm, and prints produced by friends, colleagues, and students of Chris and Jules’s, inspired by their work. Much of this will be for sale, to benefit Jules and help pay off Chris’s outstanding medical bills.

The opening runs from 5 to 10 p.m. (this is “First Thursday,” Seattle’s monthly arts walk in Pioneer Square). If you can’t make the opening, the exhibit will be accessible during business hours at the Design Commission for the rest of the month.

Yes, the exhibit includes a copy of the magnificent volume that Chris created from my little story “Roman Seattle.”

Update June 6:

I’ve posted a few photos from last night’s opening.

Categorized as book design, culture, design, events, letters, printing, 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 |

Today in his blog on Wired.com, Bruce Sterling wrote a post called “Historical Musings About the Future Ruins of Seattle,” with a link to a “future tour” of the ruins of Seattle’s ancient 520 bridge (“Come Visit the Historic Ruins of Highway 520”).

This made me think of a short piece I wrote in the late 1980s, when the local culture of the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle included ingenious artistic flyers posted on telephone poles – all sorts of art and text, quickly xeroxed and stapled to the wooden poles, soon to be soaked and weathered away, or torn away by irate citizens, or simply covered over by the next layer of new flyers. Many were ads for bands and clubs, part of Seattle’s well-known poster culture. But what I did was create tiny stories, each one complete in itself, and post them on the phone poles in the neighborhood.

One of them was called…

Roman Seattle

from The Mossy Stones Speak: A Handbook of Roman Seattle

It’s easy to see, as you walk around the top of Capitol Hill, the remnants of the ancient Roman city. The capital-less columns on the side of the hill are only the most obvious reminder; now they overlook the freeway, but once from that spot you could have looked west toward the colony’s busy port. The Gallo-Roman tower at the northern crest of the hill, now used for the storage of drinking water, may in fact pre-date Roman settlement, although it shows no sign of Phoenician influence. (Excavations in the vicinity of Volunteer Park have not uncovered any evidence that the tower was connected with the aqueduct system, which implies that its use as a water tower is of much more recent origin.)

Very little else remains of the Roman city, yet its stones and paving have been used again as the building blocks of modern Seattle. It is easy to see fragments of concrete pavement in the walls shoring up the city’s terraced yards today. These chunks of paving have often been brought from more than one site and jumbled together, making it virtually impossible to reconstruct the original location, despite the wealth of material. There are very few inscriptions dating from this period, even fewer than one might expect from random jumbling; it is possible that the local people ransacking the ruins for building materials deliberately discarded fragments with inscriptions on them, or turned the incised sides toward the earth for aesthetic or superstitious reasons.

The plunder of ancient Seattle still goes on, to the despair of archaeologists specializing in this area. The city continues to feed off its own rich and lengthy past, and if it diminishes the record in the process, it does assure a continuity in the successive waves of history that have crested here.

(© 1991)

In 1991, Chris Stern turned my little story into a gorgeously printed letterpress book, hand-bound in boards with accordion-fold pages, hand set and illustrated with his own woodcuts, which were printed in five different shades of gray. I have letter “A” of twenty-six copies. The image at the left is a detail from the principal illustration.

Categorized as book design, culture |

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 |

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 |