easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

Time to mark one of those arbitrary points on the calendar that mean so much to us. October 21 is the 80th birthday of one of the finest American writers, Ursula K. Le Guin. Her novels have embodied a thoughtfulness, a humanity, and a pragmatic sensibility that have resonated with me since I read the earliest ones when I was just a teenager. Her essays, beginning with The Language of the Night, edited by Susan Wood, joined the most intelligent conversations in print, the ongoing weaving of ideas and their telling that humans have been engaged in since they first had time to speculate.

She’s got a great laugh, too. Happy birthday, Ursula!

[Photo: Ursula Le Guin, by Eileen Gunn]

Categorized as books, culture, events, writing & editing |

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 |

Everybody has forwarded this link to me, though Deb Gibson was the first. I’m familiar with the book, Geoffrey Dowding’s Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type (1954, reissued in 1966), though all I have is the Hartley & Marks reprint from 1995 and a xerox of the original that Steve Renick gave me many years ago. I have not actually seen this remarkably poor binding typography face to face, but if it is really the way the title was embossed on the cloth in the original edition, I can only speculate about what Dowding might have said about it at the time. As Loren MacGregor put it to me the other day, “I suspect the book was bound by someone not familiar with the contents.”

The “Fail” folks aren’t the first ones to notice this unfortunate conjunction of title and execution; it was also noted on the Hoefler & Frere-Jones blog back in January, under the title, “Precisely What the Author Had in Mind” – a longer but perhaps clearer description than the noun-cluster “Proof of Concept Fail.”

Dowding’s book is well worth seeking out, though even the Hartley & Marks edition is out of print. I think he carried his argument for tight spacing slightly too far, but he was right in principle; and he gave close thought to the details that make text typography good or mediocre.

Categorized as books, design, typography |

I had nothing new to bring with me to Seattle’s typographers’ pub last Tuesday, so I brought something old: my copy of Hermann Zapf’s little book, About Alphabets: Some marginal notes on type design by Hermann Zapf. I’ve always liked the ambiguity of that subtitle-cum-author’s-name: yes, the book is by Hermann Zapf, but it’s also true that the type designs discussed in it are all by Zapf as well. So it works either way.

It seemed appropriate to bring this particular book, since November 8 was Zapf’s 90th birthday. I’m not sure what kind of celebration was held in Darmstadt, but I know it was an anniversary that was appreciated in many corners of the world.

In Paul Standard’s preface to the 1960 book (my MIT Press paperback is the 1970 edition), he writes: “If the foregoing lines say much of books, it is because type designs have no independent or detached existence. Types are produced with great effort at great cost, produced for use in printed matter required for learning or study or for industrial or commercial needs. And HZ’s supreme concern, whether in writing or in printing, is never the single letter but the fusion of such letters into a working text.” Although digital type can be produced without the great cost inherent in the older industrial technology, a good text face – which is what Standard is talking about – still takes enormous effort and skill. And their purpose is still, as it always is, their weaving together into meaningful text.

Categorized as books, fonts, letters, type designers |

One of my favorite American poets, Hayden Carruth, died in September at the age of 87. I had the honor and the pleasure of designing two of his books, for Copper Canyon Press, as well as designing a new cover for a reissue of his Collected Shorter Poems. One of the new books I designed had the wonderfully evocative title quoted above (“It’s what we used to have for breakfast,” he said).

Recently, I finally got around to subscribing to the long-running magazine Poetry, and the first thing I read when my first issue arrived was not a poem but W.S. di Piero’s account of spending time with Hayden Carruth. Di Piero’s final anecdote, about Hayden going walkabout before a TV interview, particularly pleased me. I can’t claim to have known Hayden more than slightly, but I do recall an evening in New York City a few years ago when Michael Wiegers and I picked up Hayden at his hotel and took him downtown to the New School, where he was supposed to do a reading. He claimed it was going to be his last city reading (“I hate this place,” Mike remembers him saying), and perhaps it was; I haven’t checked.

The taxi we caught to take us downtown was driven by a classic New York cabbie, the kind of long-time driver who regaled us with tales of his encounters with savvy traffic cops over the years. (“But officer, there was no sign there telling me I couldn’t turn left.” “Sure, buddy, but you’ve been driving a long time; you know perfectly well that there used to be a sign there. I’m giving you a ticket.”) This character and his stories delighted Hayden.

At the New School, there was a noisy social gathering upstairs before the event, and after a while I noticed Hayden ducking out the fire door to the stairs. I figured I’d better follow him; I knew Mike had told me that he worried that Hayden would bolt. I found Hayden on the sidewalk out front, sitting on the curb and smoking a cigarette. I don’t smoke, but I joined him on the sidewalk, and we talked companionably for a while. When he was done with his cigarette, we just got up and took the elevator back up to the event, where Hayden gave his reading to great applause.

Categorized as books, culture, events, 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 |

What was once a recondite literary movement in the science-fiction field has blossomed into a popular-culture phenomenon, and as far as I can see it’s done so overnight. When the New York Times starts writing about “steampunk,” you know it’s attracting wider attention, and has probably already passed its peak. Written steampunk took a cyberpunk sensibility and injected it into a substrate of Victorian technology and sartorial style; it married our fascination with the brass-gears science epitomized by the Time Traveler’s machine in the 1960 movie The Time Machine with a noir-ish outsider take on 19th-century society. The extension of this into popular culture has been fun, though often silly. Some of the “steampunk” clothing appearing now just looks like retreads from The Wild, Wild West; and the application of clockwork skins to digital electronics is basically a matter of decoration.

This seems to have gotten up the nose of someone at Design Observer (that design website that I always intend to keep up with, but never do). Randy Nakamura wrote a screed about the humbug of steampunk; I noticed it when Bruce Sterling, who has some implication in the development of steampunk, quoted from it (“Design Observer Hates Steampunk”) and exclaimed, “Man, this is priceless. The backlash has begun!”

But my favorite bit, which makes this worth writing about, is a momentary fantasy that Bruce spun between quotes and comments: “Maybe Randy Nakamura would like ‘steampunk’ better if it was called ‘Eamespunk’ and involved making computers out of bent plywood.”

Categorized as books, culture, society, tech |

People are always asking me what I’ve been reading, whether it’s a conversational ice-breaker like “Read any good books lately?” or a real inquiry about recent intellectual activity. When someone asked me this recently, I found that I had a good, tripartite answer.

In the past year, I’ve read three remarkable nonfiction books: The stories of English, by David Crystal; The world that made New Orleans, by Ned Sublette; and 1491, by Charles C. Mann. Each of these books enlarged my understanding of my own world, and did so in a highly readable, engaged, intelligent manner.

The stories of English traces the history of our language, but does so while exploding the idea that there is only one English language, with all its variants being secondary. Nationalism began imposing a central language on people all over Europe in the 16th century (in France there was an explicit policy of translating what had once been written in Latin into French, and using the language as a tool of state expansion). In the 17th and 18th centuries, the idea of a “standard” language caught hold, with strenuous efforts made to regularize and regulate the national language, and to make one version of the language (usually what was spoken in the capital, or at court) the template for everyone else. Although the English proved too anarchic to set up a national Academy, the way the French had done, there were plenty of pundits in the 18th century trying desperately to do so. And they did succeed in imposing the notion of “correct” language – and by implication to make all other versions “incorrect.” The chapters of Crystal’s book about the English language before and after the Norman conquest are the most fascinating, though everything in the book puts our language into a very welcome and original perspective.

The world that made New Orleans: from Spanish silver to Congo Square does for American history what David Crystal’s book does for the English language: lifts it out of cant and doctrine and exposes its multifarious roots. Ned Sublette has written before about the complexities of New World culture, in Cuba and the its music, where he made it very clear that historically, the ports of Havana and New Orleans have been intertwined since they were founded. What he does here, superbly, is make us feel, not just know, how the cultures of Africa and of Latin America have been integral to the culture of North America all along – not just adjuncts or footnotes or incidental flavorings, but part and parcel of our culture. The world that Ned Sublette portrays is infinitely rich, and it’s ours.

1491: new revelations of the Americas before Columbus is probably the best-known of these three books; it’s had a high profile. I was a bit skeptical of it at first, expecting a woo-woo mishmash; but it’s nothing of the sort. It’s a well documented, carefully described investigation of some of the new scientific information that has emerged in just the last few years about the peoples of the New World before (and immediately after) the arrival of the Europeans. It upsets received notions and refuses a simplified catch-phrase portrayal of either the native cultures or the European cultures that colonized them. Some of what he writes about I already knew – such as the widespread use of fire as a way of modifying the growth of trees and other plants on the pre-Columbian eastern seaboard, which I learned about in reading the cultural geographer Carl Sauer – but much of it was new to me; much of it is simply new, coming from extremely recent research. My skepticism was assuaged when a friend of mine who is a specialist in pre-Columbian art spoke highly of this book and its accuracy. 1491 is not one of those “everything you know is wrong” crowd-pleasers; it’s an enrichment of our understanding, a book that leaves us with more than we thought we had.

Categorized as books, culture |

Can this be the first book to be promoted with a YouTube video? (Probably not.) The music and presentation seem terribly retro (I was thinking France in the 1920s, though the combination of i and j made me think of Dutch, where ij is a diphthong), but it appears to be something brand new – a book, by Marion Bataille, that’s coming out next fall. A simple alphabet, but treated anything but simply. I wonder what the manufacturing costs for this book were.

A tip o’ the hat to Jeff Barlow for pointing this one out.

Categorized as books, letters |