After, in effect, four sets of proofs since March, we uploaded the complete PDF file of the book to the printers (Clays of St Ives) three days ago, five days before the deadline. There will be no celebrating, however, until we have received, read and returned their final proofs of the book, the jacket and the 150th anniversary bellyband. Clays have a fantastic reputation, and their customer care has been wonderful, but I have begun to have nightmares again about the time I took delivery of a book of mine from ‘the best printers in Cambridge’ and found they had left the title page out…
In my own publishing efforts I have been guided since the 1970s by Oliver Simon’s classic Introduction to Typography (Faber & Faber, 1963). I’ve repeatedly consulted it this time round, too, concerning things like margins and the layout of the ‘preliminary pages’. If you want rules, for instance about when to put a number on a page and when not, or whether to start a new section recto or verso, Simon’s your man.
But, of course, things are vastly different in this age of digital printing. Sam2 has more experience of it than me. It’s been a pretty vertical learning curve and rather humbling. For instance, on a mature consideration I decided the Dedication must go centre page, but every time I looked at the proof of that page the Dedication seemed too low, although it had been digitally positioned dead centre. Then I suddenly remembered Mrs Stringer telling us in year three at primary school (1956) that the optical centre is higher…
We have consulted about ten recently published hardback biographies in the course of our decision-making, and it has revealed a fascinating thing: they break the typographical rules all over the place. For instance, a best-selling biography that I have written about on Calderonia hardly has any pages that are ‘bottom-justified’, i.e. the verso and recto end at different levels. This book has lots of short quotations in it, and it looks as though the publisher simply decided to give up on bottom-justifying. Mind you, just as astonishing is the fact that when I read this book I never noticed!
A more recent biography, published by Jonathan Cape, has such narrow top and spine margins that the text almost looks cramped on the page. Whereas Simon recommends setting the Index in a font two sizes smaller than the text, this book’s Index is set about four times smaller and in three, not the more friendly two, columns. As with almost all the recent biographies I have looked at, it has no blank pages at the end. Books have to be printed in ‘signatures’ of sixteen pages, so if your book ends on page 533 (as ours does) it has to have another eleven blank pages after it to complete the ‘signature’ (to break that up, we have printed a Sam&Sam bibliography on page 535). I conclude, therefore, that publishers are cramming text onto the page, reducing font sizes and starting sections verso rather than recto in order to cut the cost of blank end pages.
Some publishers, I have noticed, now ignore the tradition of avoiding ‘orphans’ (single lines of a new paragraph left at the bottom of a page) and ‘widows’ (the last line of a paragraph carried over to the top of the next page). In Boris Johnson’s The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (Hodder & Stoughton, 2014) there are so many ‘orphans’ that you feel they are a new design fad.
The experience of publishing George Calderon: Edwardian Genius ourselves has also given me insight into features of modern hardbacks that have always mystified me. For instance, it’s not uncommon to see a final ‘f’ fused with a following apostrophe (like that one), or any final letter in italics collapsed upon the roman inverted comma or bracket following it. To rectify this, minute spaces called ‘hair leads’ have to be inserted between the two characters. This is almost hand typesetting, and terribly time-consuming, so it’s not surprising if in many of today’s books the blemish is ignored. Similarly, I can now understand why garbage appears in a printed book for exotic characters that were correct in the proof, or why some Index references are out by precisely a page: (1) you just cannot predict a computer gremlin, (2) if top and bottom justification has to be fine-tuned after the final proofs, the Index is not going to be adjusted accordingly.
A new hardback nicely published by Chatto & Windus, HarperCollins, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, or Faber, has a natural authority. It convinces you that everything about it is meant to be just as it is. However, my experience this year has shown me that it is more of a quantum world in there than a Newtonian one. Increasingly, I think, anything goes. And that really makes me wonder whether printed books will be around forever.
Related
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
George Calderon c.1901
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Captain of the 11
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George Calderon, 1912
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
What I have learned about today’s books
After, in effect, four sets of proofs since March, we uploaded the complete PDF file of the book to the printers (Clays of St Ives) three days ago, five days before the deadline. There will be no celebrating, however, until we have received, read and returned their final proofs of the book, the jacket and the 150th anniversary bellyband. Clays have a fantastic reputation, and their customer care has been wonderful, but I have begun to have nightmares again about the time I took delivery of a book of mine from ‘the best printers in Cambridge’ and found they had left the title page out…
In my own publishing efforts I have been guided since the 1970s by Oliver Simon’s classic Introduction to Typography (Faber & Faber, 1963). I’ve repeatedly consulted it this time round, too, concerning things like margins and the layout of the ‘preliminary pages’. If you want rules, for instance about when to put a number on a page and when not, or whether to start a new section recto or verso, Simon’s your man.
But, of course, things are vastly different in this age of digital printing. Sam2 has more experience of it than me. It’s been a pretty vertical learning curve and rather humbling. For instance, on a mature consideration I decided the Dedication must go centre page, but every time I looked at the proof of that page the Dedication seemed too low, although it had been digitally positioned dead centre. Then I suddenly remembered Mrs Stringer telling us in year three at primary school (1956) that the optical centre is higher…
We have consulted about ten recently published hardback biographies in the course of our decision-making, and it has revealed a fascinating thing: they break the typographical rules all over the place. For instance, a best-selling biography that I have written about on Calderonia hardly has any pages that are ‘bottom-justified’, i.e. the verso and recto end at different levels. This book has lots of short quotations in it, and it looks as though the publisher simply decided to give up on bottom-justifying. Mind you, just as astonishing is the fact that when I read this book I never noticed!
A more recent biography, published by Jonathan Cape, has such narrow top and spine margins that the text almost looks cramped on the page. Whereas Simon recommends setting the Index in a font two sizes smaller than the text, this book’s Index is set about four times smaller and in three, not the more friendly two, columns. As with almost all the recent biographies I have looked at, it has no blank pages at the end. Books have to be printed in ‘signatures’ of sixteen pages, so if your book ends on page 533 (as ours does) it has to have another eleven blank pages after it to complete the ‘signature’ (to break that up, we have printed a Sam&Sam bibliography on page 535). I conclude, therefore, that publishers are cramming text onto the page, reducing font sizes and starting sections verso rather than recto in order to cut the cost of blank end pages.
Some publishers, I have noticed, now ignore the tradition of avoiding ‘orphans’ (single lines of a new paragraph left at the bottom of a page) and ‘widows’ (the last line of a paragraph carried over to the top of the next page). In Boris Johnson’s The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (Hodder & Stoughton, 2014) there are so many ‘orphans’ that you feel they are a new design fad.
The experience of publishing George Calderon: Edwardian Genius ourselves has also given me insight into features of modern hardbacks that have always mystified me. For instance, it’s not uncommon to see a final ‘f’ fused with a following apostrophe (like that one), or any final letter in italics collapsed upon the roman inverted comma or bracket following it. To rectify this, minute spaces called ‘hair leads’ have to be inserted between the two characters. This is almost hand typesetting, and terribly time-consuming, so it’s not surprising if in many of today’s books the blemish is ignored. Similarly, I can now understand why garbage appears in a printed book for exotic characters that were correct in the proof, or why some Index references are out by precisely a page: (1) you just cannot predict a computer gremlin, (2) if top and bottom justification has to be fine-tuned after the final proofs, the Index is not going to be adjusted accordingly.
A new hardback nicely published by Chatto & Windus, HarperCollins, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, or Faber, has a natural authority. It convinces you that everything about it is meant to be just as it is. However, my experience this year has shown me that it is more of a quantum world in there than a Newtonian one. Increasingly, I think, anything goes. And that really makes me wonder whether printed books will be around forever.
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