Category: books

Book restoration in the Adirondacks

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Walden binding by Jack Fitterer and Taff Mace

Bridget sent a link to a sweet article from Adirondack Life about Jack Fitterer, a book restorer and binder in upstate New York: Page Turners: The art and craft of bookbinding in Indian Lake.

The earliest volume they’ve mended is a 15th-century prayer book with minute channels chewed through the pages by generations of actual bookworms. “Wormholes get little patches of Japanese tissue,” explains Jack. Repairs like this are visible, and he says, “Everything doesn’t have to be pristinely restored. It’s possible to over-restore things. Our goal is to keep a book’s integrity but make it something a modern person can touch and even read.”

It’s a short article with few photos, unfortunately, but there is the promise of more goodies at the Fitterers’ site (“under construction”):

In the future, this page will present a series of reflections on Books and Bookbinding. Some of the topics will include “How does restoration affect the value of a book?”, “How should I best store and display my books?”, “What repairs can I do myself?”, “Should I use leather dressing on my books?”

Keep an eye on it.

These are the good old days

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lead

Hey! I actually read a Design Observer article all the way to the end! From Our Little Secret by Michael Bierut (whose name, is it just me?, always grates on my brain as a typo):

As a young designer in his first real job in 1980, I learned that this made typography a high-stakes game. It went like this. You’d get a manuscript from a client, say 20 pages of Courier (although no one called it Courier, or even thought of it that way). You’d have to calculate how many characters were in the manuscript the old fashioned way—no Microsoft Word, no word count tools—by counting characters per line, then total number of lines, then doing the math. Next you’d have to decide out what text typeface you wanted to use, what size and what measure. Finally, you’d refer to a copyfitting table to see how long the columns would run: more math. If it seemed like this figure would fit the layout, you’d mark up the manuscript and send it to a typesetter. It would be back, set in beautiful type the following morning, galley after crisp, clean galley of it. If it fit, good for you. If it ran long, guess what? You just lost $250, stupid.

. . . It was a system that rewarded deliberate planning, not creative experimentation. You found yourself repeatedly specifying certain fonts just because you knew how they would set: after a few years I could make a pretty accurate guess about how long a typewritten manuscript would run in Garamond #3 (12 on 13, flush left, ragged right on a 30 pica column measure) just by looking at it. So I set a lot of Garamond #3.

So, here’s my flippant comment: Not much has changed for those publishers that still send their books out to to be typeset. At the job I just left, this is still how they do castoff, this is still how most of the designers choose body type and estimate length, and this is probably still how the typesetter bills. (I don’t know how much they charged us to rerun a book that didn’t make castoff on the first try, but I’m sure it wasn’t free. I’d guess that it cost less than $250, but only because if it had cost that much, I’m sure someone would have scolded me at some point—I had a lot of do-overs for a stretch, there.)

Anybody seen Helvetica or going to see it tonight? (Me, I’m waiting for it to come to Netflix, as I do with every movie.) If so, please report on how many people in attendance were wearing appropriately typographic garments.

How and When to Wear a Tuxedo Wrapper

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A very fine resource got written up on the Craft: blog the other day, and I expected to see it all over the interdesignweb within hours. Since such ubiquitization does not yet seem to have occurred, I hereby draw your attention to the Indiana University Libraries’ photolicious Making a [Casebound] Book. This article is just one small part of the utterly nerdtastic Repair and Enclosure Treatments Manual, which is all about the care, feeding, and restoration of books.

This, FYI, is a tuxedo wrapper:

tuxedo wrapper

My favorite part of the manual, though, is this gem of an unanswered query, on the tuxedo wrapper intro page:

criteria:

The criteria for this enclosure are…

…OK, what ARE the criteria for this enclosure?

Clearly, the question to ask yourself is, Where will this book be going? Mrs. Post prescribes a Tuxedo for the following forms of social engagement:

1. At the theater.
2. At most dinners.
3. At informal parties.
4. Dining at home.
5. Dining in a restaurant.

Remember: “If ever in doubt what to wear, the best rule is to err on the side of informality. Thus, if you are not sure whether to put on your dress suit or your Tuxedo, wear the latter.”

Now you know.

Designery People, Take Note:

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Ampersand Duck has put up a pithy post about planning a printed publication, which is addressed to “aspiring artists and performers”—e.g., your friends and mine, who’re often asking if we can just help them design this little tiny promotional card or booklet or brochure, and then sticking us with an impossible deadline and budget, as well as worthless art and copy. And here is her story of why she was inspired to write the piece.

Sometimes you might get hit with poorly thought-out projects even at your day job, though of course I’ve never encountered such misfortunes myself.

I recommend that you write your own version of Ms. Duck’s how-to to address your own typical quick-and-dirty undertakings, and keep it handy to give to those talented friends when they inevitably ask you for help.

My last day!

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In the home stretch here, trying to wrap up as much as I can before I leave so that my teammate, H., who’s survived a surprising number of defections, isn’t stuck with a whole lot of stuff that I could have gotten out of the way for her.

I’ve been thinking I should summarize what I’ve learned during my short stint in Big Publishing—and I’ve learned a lot. But it’s hard to put the big-picture stuff into words that don’t sound like a complaint. I don’t have any complaints about working here; just observations. I would have been happy to stay for a couple of years, if something better hadn’t come along. That was, in fact, the plan. But something better came along!

So. Some of what I’ve learned . . .
Continue reading “My last day!” →

Memo to Editorial

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Just sent, re a book that I redesigned twice, and whose trim size changed midstream:

Dear [X]/[Y],

I’m not sure whose query this is on the design approval memo, but in answer to the question of whether the castoff (352) is “shorter now because of [larger]-size,” uh, yesish.

I managed to make the [smaller]-size design come in at 384 (castoff was a tight 400) by using Stone Print, a condensed typeface intended for use in magazines with narrow columns. The final design uses Plantin, an average-width typeface more suited to extended reading in book format. So we lost some pages to the trim change and gained a few for readability.

The result is that overall the book is shorter, but not so much shorter as it would be had I merely widened the original design to fit the new margins. Had I widened the original design, it would have become repellent—it’s difficult to continuously read text that is more than about 70 characters wide. Your eyes can’t easily jump from the end of one line to the beginning of the next; your brain can’t hold the sentences together as well. Besides that, it looks cheap and unprofessional. And it makes babies cry.

Bad typography is, in fact, the reason why most babies cry. Now you know.

I hope that answers your question.

Yr hmbl srvnt,
—
India Amos

I only didn’t cite sources because, well, my dog ate them.

And then a cockroach ate my dog.