easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

Bruce Sterling just noted Shelley Jackson’s “Skin Project,” the 2,095-word short story being published in an “edition of one” by being tattooed, one word at a time, on the bodies of 2,095 different people. Although I’ve never met Shelley Jackson, I’ve participated indirectly in this project: in November 2006, I provided typographic assistance to editor Ellen Datlow and writer/editor Kelly Link, who were in Austin, Texas, for the World Fantasy Convention and who were both about to get tattoos as part of this project. Each of them had a single word to be turned into a tattoo: for Kelly, “skin”; for Ellen, “device.” (including the final period).

I gave them several choices of typeface, based on what they told me they’d like and on what I thought would work in a tattoo. (Admittedly, this was a brand new production consideration for me.) The four typefaces I tried out were Monotype Baskerville, Requiem, Monotype Bell, and Adobe Garamond. Ellen picked Monotype Bell; I don’t recall which typeface Kelly chose.

Early stages of this project were shown in Ina Saltz’s book Body type, a collection of photographs of tattoos that involve words, but the “Skin Project” was far from done when Ina’s book went to press. (In fact, it was on the shelf in Austin’s excellent bookstore Book People when Kelly went there to do a reading during the convention.)

Which typefaces got used, ultimately? Ellen picked Monotype Bell (third one down in the image at left). I don’t recall which one Kelly ended up choosing.

Categorized as books, culture, fonts |

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 |

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 |

A book project that’s nearing completion is the 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, by John Crowley. I’m designing it for Incunabula – for whom, fourteen years ago, I designed Crowley’s short-story collection Antiquities. This edition will present the definitive text, carefully edited by Ron Drummond and approved by the author, and it will marry Crowley’s prose with art by artist/printmaker Peter Milton.

These are not illustrations; they were not done for this book. They work as complements to the text; both the text and the art existed independently long before they came to be combined in one edition. Making that juxtaposition work, of course, is the hardest part of designing the book.

In June, Ron Drummond and I drove from Ron’s home near Albany, N.Y., to northeastern Vermont, to Stinehour Press, to supervise the printing of a poster that would serve as a print test for the book. Most importantly, it would prove to us – and to Peter Milton – that what we were planning and what Stinehour could deliver would do justice to his art, in a format that would still be a comfortably readable volume. We picked up the printed posters first thing in the morning in Lunenburg, and drove down to southern New Hampshire in time to have lunch with Peter and Edith Milton in their large, art-festooned old house in Francestown, where Peter signed off on our print sample (literally, as Ron prevailed on him to sign several of the posters). Then we drove west to Conway, Mass., at the edge of the Berkshires, to have dinner with John Crowley and his family, and get his approval. We covered the complete range of the project in that one day.

The project, like most labors of love, has taken a little longer than we anticipated, but it’s in its penultimate stage. This week, John Crowley was in Seattle, teaching a workshop and giving a reading at Richard Hugo House, and I had the pleasure of handing him a bound blank book, a sample of the binding. It’s a heavy object, but not unnecessarily weighty; I like to call it “the Oxford Lectern Little, Big,” and in fact the lectern at Hugo House looks a bit like something you’d read a sermon from. Hefting the book and looking at its blank pages, Crowley said, “So do I get to keep this and use it as a journal when the project is finished?” Yes, of course. When the project’s finished.

Categorized as books, design, events |

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 |

Newly arrived from the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press: Alphabet Stories: A Chronicle of Technical Developments by Hermann Zapf. This tasty edition is the latest in a series of beautifully designed books about the typographic and calligraphic work of Hermann Zapf. It was published simultaneously in German by Linotype, as part of its recently instituted Mergenthaler Edition line.

The volume itself is designed by Hermann Zapf, and its text uses two brand new typefaces designed by Zapf, along with Linotype typographic director Akira Kobayashi: an update to the much-abused Palatino, called Palatino Nova; and a sans-serif companion, Palatino Sans.

I haven’t had a chance yet to do much more than browse through the book, reading just the first few pages, but it’s clearly one of those well-made volumes that is going to be a pleasure to read and peruse. It’s a limited edition, so if you’re interested, you might want to get in touch with the Cary Graphic Arts Press at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) right away. I don’t yet see it on their website; but then, this was billed as an advance copy.

Categorized as books, type designers |