Typophile - The dire state of book typography - Comments

Fascinating. Thanks for your

msilverz — Mon, 9 Jun 2008 20:46:29 -0700

Fascinating. Thanks for your thoughts, Will and Patty!

I’ve never seen Peter mix

jupiterboy — Wed, 21 May 2008 06:50:04 -0700

I’ve never seen Peter mix type like that. I’ll see if I can get a response from him about this. He does use larger-than-you-might-expect type, which is interesting to consider.

Patty: Thanks for that

will powers — Wed, 21 May 2008 06:11:41 -0700

Patty:

Thanks for that comment. It spurred me to go to a big box bookstore & look at all the Everyman’s Library books I could find: maybe a dozen books; the results were interesting. I own only two volumes of the EL current series. Both are set in the Bembo/Baskerville/Monotype Garamond combo. When I wrote that post above I made the assumption that all other series volumes were so set. Wrong.

I found most texts set in Bembo. I also found Janson, Baskerville, Erhardt, and one face I could not ID (hangs head in shame). All frontmatter texts were set in Baskerville. There were two different title-page arrangements: one the 2-color I mentioned, the other using Mono Garamond in black and screens.

Whether or not these type switches were done “carelessly,” as you ask is a good question. All volumes credit “typography” to Peter B. Willberg, a designer of good repute whose name I’ve seen for a long time. The “book design,” which I think must refer to case, jacket and overall format, are credited to Knopf stalwarts Barbara de Wilde and Carol Devine Carson. In the new volume I just bought, typesetting is credited also.

With top-flight designers such as these, I’m thinking the type changes had not been done carelessly. Just why they were done is an interesting question. I did not have pencil & paper, so I did not track publication dates and type use. I’ll leave that to a design graduate student.

When Bembo is used, it is subject to size variations to get the volume to a desired page count. The volume of Camus’ collected novels is reasonably set. The thin volume of “The Plague” is set in Bembo way too large for decent reading: gotta push out that page count.

powers

FWIW I thought that

Eluard — Mon, 19 May 2008 05:50:50 -0700

FWIW I thought that this

“I suppose that following my point you might conclude that “global publishing standard” is just such a constraint. You can see that Anselm Kiefer makes books but isn’t very interested in publishing standards.

Sure I’m just playing semantic roulette but every art and craft is defined by the limitations that are accepted. The link to Notre Dame du Haut was intended as an illustration of the point.”

was a great point.

My guess is that it’s been

pattyfab — Sun, 18 May 2008 21:56:17 -0700

My guess is that it’s been updated and revised over the years and carelessly by designers who fail to match the font used in previous editions. I doubt that a single designer would have used three such similar fonts in one design.

I was reminded of this

will powers — Sun, 18 May 2008 20:44:54 -0700

I was reminded of this earlier post to this discussion when I started reading a new book this weekend:

>> Everyman’s Library (produced by a division of Random House, I believe). I think that the books are beautifully made and designed (and each one includes a blurb at the back about the typeface used). <<

In many ways Everyman’s Library does make good books. The slightly flexible boards are nice, as is the ribbon bookmark. Nice, smooth, natural paper, albeit with some show-through. Nice page size (5” x 8.125”). The spine is stamped in two colors, but the type is breaing up. Overall, at 824 pages, it is very nice in the hand.

But it has typographic oddities. The text is set in Bembo (with that damned long-tail R). But the frontmatter is set in Baskerville, except for the two-color title page and the copyright page, which are set in Monotype Garamond.

That’s a lot of type mixing for a collection of 5 novels. I’m sure it gets in no reader’s way. It is not something I’d do in such a book, and I’m curious about why the mixing. I seem to recall that the Everyman’s edition of John Updike’s Rabbit novels gets the same type treatment.

For what it is worth: This venerable series, over 100 years old, is now published in the USA by Knopf.

powers

I think the aesthetic

Kaz Maslanka — Sat, 17 May 2008 11:15:36 -0700

I think the aesthetic problem here is that we have a tendency to believe all aesthetics is art. There are many kinds of asthetics and this is truly evident in this forum. The aesthetic pertaining to the golden ratio is one of mathematics and is conceptual even when displayed as visual (geometry) I believe it is not an aesthetic of visual art.

Cheers,
Kaz Maslanka
http://mathematicalpoetry.blogspot.com

I suppose that following my

jupiterboy — Sat, 17 May 2008 09:20:15 -0700

I suppose that following my point you might conclude that “global publishing standard” is just such a constraint. You can see that Anselm Kiefer makes books but isn’t very interested in publishing standards.

Sure I’m just playing semantic roulette but every art and craft is defined by the limitations that are accepted. The link to Notre Dame du Haut was intended as an illustration of the point.

“Now I’ll sound like a

dberlow — Sat, 17 May 2008 05:30:38 -0700

“Now I’ll sound like a real moron and venture that often any system of limiting or constraining expression can benefit art because it allows the artist to focus on fewer variables, or at least a system.”

I think this is a good point to be made for children, students, and rats in a maze, but professional adults, dealing with a global publishing standard, perhaps not.

Cheers!

Eluard, I’m not a believer

William Berkson — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:29:16 -0700

Eluard, I’m not a believer in the stories about the Pythagoreans. I just read them one place, which I noted, and haven’t studied the history, so I defer to your knowledge on this. Popper’s essay was written in the 50s or early 60s, and evidently this 1999 book represents a lot of new work on the history.

From what I know Popper’s idea that the Pre-Socractics were the origin of the critical tradition—culminating in Socrates—does seem sound.

Perhaps it’s easy to be so

Jongseong — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:02:18 -0700

Perhaps it’s easy to be so entranced by the role of the golden ratio in the proportions of a chambered nautilus shell or sunflower patterns that you elevate the golden ratio into an all-around aesthetic ideal. The Pythagorean brotherhood made some great discoveries about numbers in nature, but fell into this trap of mysticism that rational number proportions contained the key to everything. What irony that phi itself is irrational. The Pythagoreans knew about phi as well as the diagonal of the square, but had trouble with the notion that they couldn’t be expressed as proportions of integers because they had built themselves a mental prison of picturing the universe to be built up of only integers and proportions of integers.

Returning to the golden ratio in book typography, I think it’s neat and symbolic, but I doubt that it’s necessarily an objectively superior ratio to all other ratios in terms of aesthetics. It’s difficult to make universal, cross-cultural, objective statements about aesthetical standards anyway.

As long as we’re talking about the golden ratio, Pentagramme by František Štorm is an interesting experiment in faithfully following the proportions of a pentagram in typeface design. The golden ratio plays an important role in the construction of the pentagram, as each intersection of the edge results in a golden ratio.

William — I seem to be the

Eluard — Fri, 16 May 2008 18:39:36 -0700

William — I seem to be the sceptic here to your believer. Much of what is said about the Pythagorean brotherhood is historical nonsense, and the stories told about the discovery of squareroot 2 are later fabrications (some 800 years later in many cases) that have no claim to historical veracity. For the scholarly accurate story on this have a look at The Mathematics of Plato’s Academy, by David Fowler. I think it will shock you how little is really known. The earliest attested books on Incommensurable magnitudes are by Democritus (all now lost) and he lived not long after the probable date of Pythagoras’s death. So if the Pythagoreans tried to keep it a secret they did a miserable job.

I perfectly agree with you however that the discovery of irrational magnitudes was a watershed moment in the intellectual life of Greece. I think it was the defining discovery of Plato’s mathematical philosophy. The discovery is too little appreciated today.

Books designed on the trim size of the Golden ration are, I think, badly designed books: it is the triumph of theory over aesthetic judgement.

He are DEVO

jupiterboy — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:54:27 -0700

He are DEVO

The Greeks later

James Puckett — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:27:47 -0700

The Greeks later learned—maybe for the first time in history—how to disagree without drowning each other. That was also a great advance in the history of humanity.

Now if only someone would teach George Bush…

>Phi is not harmonious Yes,

William Berkson — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:23:45 -0700

>Phi is not harmonious

Yes, ’phi’ came later. The first recognition of ’irrational numbers, such as phi, also came later.

When it was discovered that the diagonal of the square was incommensurable with the side it was a refutation of the original Pythagorean program, which was based on the idea that everything was based on integers. “Incommensurable” means that there is no unit such that it divides both the side and the diagonal of the square evenly, with no remainder. This surprising discovery, also known as the discovery of ’irrational’ numbers, was one of the greatest discoveries in mathematics. The Pythagoreans allegedly thanked person who first proved the incommensurability of the diagonal of the square by drowning him in the Aegean sea, and subsequently keeping the incommensurability as a ’great secret’ of the brotherhood. I guess the secret subsequently got out.

The Greeks later learned—maybe for the first time in history—how to disagree without drowning each other. That was also a great advance in the history of humanity.

Popper tells the story in his book “Conjectures and Refutations”.

The dire state of book typography

Nick Shinn — Sat, 3 May 2008 09:19:57 -0700

There was recent mention of the Bringhurst “bible” and its focus on book typography.
I looked at the book I’m presently reading. A somewhat anecdotal approach for generalization, but a pretty typical example of what’s out there.
The book is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, and made the New York Times Bestseller list, so there is absolutely no excuse for the cheap and shoddy typographic design, which, according to Mr Bringhurst, dishonors the text.

It severely pains me to read the damn godless thing, which is frustrating, as it’s quite interesting, and I would like to finish it.

Here are a few of the issues.
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1. The cover. A bit dreary, but nothing terribly wrong, apart from a bit of sheep shagging. The question that must be asked though, is why this bears absolutely no relationship to the design of either the title page or the main text. Isn’t there something horribly wrong with this institutionalized norm?
.

2. The very first page. Right off the bat, faux small caps!
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3. The title page.
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4. Main text. Where are the margins? There’s nowhere to put my thumbs! It’s incredibly dysfunctional to be holding the book at the top as one reads the bottom of the page, causing shadows, and making one’s arms ache.
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5. Tabular lining figures. This is a book with a lot of numbers in the text, so wouldn’t that be a tip-off to the publisher that it might end up looking like a technical manual? Didn’t they notice? There’s nothing inherently wrong with the Century style of face for text—except that surely, in this day and age of InDesign and all the marvellously-featured fonts that Adobe bundles with it, a book publisher would use a typeface that has old-style figures, or at the very least, proportional figures? Finally, a small thing; it would have been better to not break lines between the numbers and “Hz”. And wouldn’t ff ligatures be nice?!