There is nothing more jarring to experienced book designers than a badly laid out book. Those tight margins; the restricted inter-line spacing (leading); or the unfortunate use of Calibri or some unsightly free typeface. Sigh ...
Timeless book design
Elegance of design – both of type itself and of the page – remains as pleasing to the eye as it did to the very first book printers half a millennium ago. Publishers know this, too, for badly designed books can be deeply unsatisfying to read: readers are less likely to purchase, finish and cherish their publications. There is a clear market imperative in really good design.
Surprisingly, aesthetically pleasing page design has changed barely at all. It was pretty much the same for printer/publishers such as Gutenberg (Germany, 1450s) or Caxton (England (1480s) as it is to discerning publishers and readers today. The cutting-edge fifteenth-century technology they used was very different, of course, with individual metal letterforms having to be placed manually and painstakingly, line by line, within wooden page-sized frames. Yet, the design principles were largely the same as they are today. Indeed, in recent decades page design theorists have analysed some of those very first printed books to reveal the secrets of their longevity and their elegance.
Technologies of text
Today, typesetters are blessed with some remarkable software. Over the last forty years even inexpensive word processors such as Microsoft’s ubiquitous Word are endowed with wide-ranging functionality, enabling amateur and professional writers, editors, self-publishers and typesetters alike unprecedented power to manipulate book-length texts. Indeed, I often show my Publishing students how easy it can be to work with text of half a million words or more.
My book production career has seen everything from golfball typewriter, WordPerfect 5.1 and Ventura Publisher in the 1980s, to bromide CRC and film imagesetters in the 1990s, through to Quark and now InDesign in the 2020s, and lots more besides.
Modern software is immensely powerful, and experienced fingers can make it sing: the holy grails of perfect consistency, of quality assurance, of wonderfully precise spacing and typography, and ultimately of high-quality inexpensive typesetting are all within tantalisingly easy reach. The speed and efficiency would seem incomprehensible to those who felt that Linotype was state-of-the-art just half a century ago.
Clumsy hands beware!
There is a caveat, however – and it is a large one – namely, that improper or careless use by inexperienced hands can so easily wreak havoc on manuscripts. An ill-conceived ‘search and replace’ can introduce a thousand errors in the blink of an eye; the ‘local formatting’ buttons of bold or italic can introduce a messiness and muddle of code that can be horrendous to fix; text can be ruined; and more errors introduced than corrected via on-screen editing in the wrong hands.
A subtle synthesis of ancient and modern
Like page design, editorial principles remain timeless, with the work of experienced editors and proofreaders being invaluable to the quality of the book and to the reputation of the publisher. In both spheres – editorial and typesetting – the true modern way is to synthesize the ancient and the modern, subtly, carefully and deferentially.
Modern tech is marvellous, as are the time-honoured principles of great design and editorial care. If typesetters use a synthesis of both, then truly beautiful, timeless books can result.
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