Category: Reading

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.

An illustration project unfolds

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origami gecko

Art director–turned–illustrator Penelope Dullaghan, whose name I previously knew only from Illustration Friday, has a series of five posts up at Sessions.edu’s Notes on Design blog about The Unfolding of an Illustration Project.

So the way it starts is usually with your assignment. And you get this little sensation in the back of your brain that makes you think: “Boy, an illustration would be perfect for this!” (I agree, it would!) And so you set out to look for the perfect illustrator for the job.

. . .

Then you tell us about the project: timeline, your ideas, the client’s ideas, (or that you have NO ideas… we can help there, too), the budget, etc. And we’ll be pleasant on the phone and say yes, we’d love to work with you. (See, aren’t we nice?)

She gives a brief walkthrough of the process for a typical job. Too brief, in my opinion, but better than nothing, for an ignoramus like me.

I guess I’d like to see something like a series of checklists—“What you need to figure out before you contact an illustrator. How to help illustrators help you. How not to be the client from hell.” Optimized for short attention spans and messy desks.

I’ve got my own hunches and SWAGs, of course, but surely somebody has already rounded the corners off this wheel, no? Is it in the GAG guide? Because I sure don’t have one of those. Is it worth having? My impression of that book has always been that it’s for designers who work in Fantasy Land. Like, I’ve never met anyone who actually gets paid what GAG says is the going rate for stuff, and I’ve gotten absolutely blank looks whenever I’ve tried to refer to what they say is called trade custom. Does this perceived lack of relevance merely reflect the seedy circles I’ve been running in? Should I be sleeping with a copy under my pillow?

Photo: Origami Gecko by /kallu; some rights reserved.

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.

Ask the copy desk

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New York Times

Last week my friend James sent me a link to a New York Times piece from March 6, 2007: Talk to the Newsroom: Director of Copy Desks Merrill Perlman. I didn’t get to look at it until now, and wow, is it long—thirteen pages. Interesting, but long. And because it’s a series of Q&As, written over several days, somewhat a little bit repetitively repetitious. But for those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. I made it only halfway through, plus some skimming near the end, but I’ve also had only one cup of tea so far today; I’ll come back to it. In the meantime, however, I thought perhaps you’d like to know what the Times copy editors do all day.

People often look at me like I’m nuts when I say that some differences between newspaper and book style conventions (e.g., quotation marks vs. italics) are most likely the result of technological limitations in the wire service, so I was interested to see this:

As an aside, the advent of e-mail and Internet addresses has caused some confusion for material that is transmitted over wires, but not the Web. For example, many transmission protocols have called for the use of a symbol like @bt to signal the beginning of a transmission, and @et to signal the end. At the Times News Service, where I used to work, we were sometimes puzzled because stories we transmitted were cut off in the middle when they arrived at client newspapers. Turns out we had used one of those symbols in a story we transmitted—something akin to a story talking about the movie “E.T.” establishing an e-mail account “phonehome@et.com”—and the transmitter obeyed the @et. The Associated Press, which operates the means by which many other organizations transmit stories to one another, still has a list of “nontransmitting symbols” that need to be avoided in text lest they be mistaken for computer commands. Instead of “asktheeditors@nytimes.com,” for example, stories sent via The A.P. are supposed to use “asktheeditors(at)nytimes.com.” and someone—usually a copy editor—has to change (at) back to (@) before it appears in the local publication.

So there.

Go on, geek out.

Photo: new new york by sashamd; some rights reserved.

Get What You're Worth

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“Senior page monkey” Schizohedron has written an excellent post called Tips for Fair Workplace Compensation. It’s not specific to the design industry at all, but I suspect this is something a lot of (so-called) creative workers are especially bad at, as we like to think that our jobs are more fun than other people’s. Dude, your job may be what you like to do, but it’s still a job. Get paid for it.

There are so many good points in there that it’s hard for me to quote anything without just copying and pasting the whole thing, but I’ll limit myself to the rousing finale:

They employ you. They do not own you. They don’t govern the course of your career. Only you can decide when your work and your interests no longer follow the same track. Identifying and accepting this sort of discrepancy is not a mark of failure. I define a failure as someone who neglects to collect every cent of compensation and every hour of time off he or she has earned, who instead works weekends and Federal holidays because they think this will impress their bosses. Don’t work for your boss. Work for your professional development, for the satisfaction of meeting your goals, and for the means to enjoy a comfortable, well-rounded life. Work for yourself.

I am a failure. Continue reading “Get What You're Worth” →

Day 9 of 90

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Hey, remember when your computer had a leetle teeny screen, and all your software used to run slower, and you just couldn’t get as much work done as you do now?

Yeah, so try doing your multifaceted, exciting twenty-first-century job on a 12″ laptop that, despite being totally loaded when you bought it three years ago, is somewhat poky and sluggish when you try to run InDesign and Acrobat Pro and Photoshop and Bridge and Word and Eudora and BBEdit and Linotype Font Explorer and Firefox with at least four windows and sixteen tabs open. It does not make you feel very efficient, let me tell you.
Continue reading “Day 9 of 90” →

Choosing text type

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There’s a nice little article that’s been doing the linky rounds called 15 tips to choose a good text type, by Juan Pablo De Gregorio, a Chilean graphic designer and a typographer. (I saw it most recently at Coudal Partners, who got it from Andy Rutledge.)

I was already thinking about this, as the famed David Moldawer asked me about it a couple of months ago, but I’m not sure I can unravel the selection process very articulately. Most of Señor De Gregorio’s advice has to do with legibility, and that is, indeed, a very big concern. But then how do you choose among the hundreds of typefaces that are quite legible, inoffensive, and suitable for text? Continue reading “Choosing text type” →

Be the belle-vetica of the ball

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Or, perhaps, the Monotype Bell[e]?

The brilliant Erin of A Dress A Day has pointed out some aggressively textual textiles for sale on eBay (and, presumably, elsewhere).

Font Fabric

She’s made a circle skirt of this already, and is considering making a dress with numbered fabric for the trim. What else can you see being made out of this? Me, I’m thinking that the nasty side chair in my office desperately needs reupholstering. And then I might make some Scrabble™-style throw pillows. What other typefaces would you like to see made into fabric? Some of the Emigre patterns, perhaps? Got any rug ideas?

[Cross-posted at clusterflock]