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Some past postings from Programme Updates Page contents
Shape
and size Have you ever thought about the number of decisions needed in order to produce a book? Pick one up. It looks simple enough, doesn't it? OK, suppose you were doing it. As we're talking about production, imagine that the text is finished and ready to go (though that's another story...) There are several places you might start, but two key decisions are the spine-height and the page proportions. For instance, if you're planning a picture book, you'll probably want it as large as possible because, in general, big images are more impressive and interesting than small ones. Look at the double-page war photos in our 1997 volume of Seven Pillars illustrations. You can see some of those photos elsewhere - but a fraction of the size. In our edition the detail is far more striking. Pictures can have a big effect on format. When Lawrence produced the subscribers' Seven Pillars, Kennington's Arab portraits dictated the relative height and width of the page. The Fleece Press edition of The Golden Reign is printed in landscape format with double-column text. That made it possible to print landscape-format photographs of boats full-page, without readers having to turn the book on its side. Large size, though good for illustrations, can also be a disadvantage. The National Portrait Gallery's 1988 T.E. Lawrence catalogue is in a large format often used for art books. However, it's a rare format for a biography. As a result, when it was published it wouldn't fit on the 'biography' shelves in bookshops, though that was where it should have been. Booksellers had to put it somewhere else - often with art books or on a bottom shelf some way from biography. I remembered that a few years later, when I was responsible for Eurotunnel, The Illustrated Journey. Like the NPG volume, it was heavily illustrated (it was also designed by the same design house). Before we started I asked a friend at Hatchards in Piccadilly for the maximum spine-height that would fit their standard shelves. That was the height we worked to. So we came, in 1997, to the Oxford Seven Pillars. How were we going to do that? From the start, we intended to reproduce a selection of the war photographs. We therefore wanted a large format. As it happened, we had planned since the late 1980s to publish the Lawrence-Shaw correspondence in the same format as the Whittington Press Letters to E.T. Leeds. (Whittington, by the way, chose that format because it was the largest sheet-size that would fit on their press.) Why not use the same format for Seven Pillars? The books would look handsome on the shelf together. In this case, of course, booksellers' shelves weren't a limiting parameter. Hardly any bookshops stock fine-press books, and fine-press books are often large. So our 1997 Seven Pillars is taller and, to my taste, more elegant than Jonathan Cape's handsome quarto edition of the subscribers' abridgement. In 1935 Wren Howard, Cape's partner and book-designer, was constrained (as Lawrence had been) by the proportions of the Seven Pillars portraits. For a beautiful Wren-Howard edition, look at Cape's 1927 Trade edition of Revolt in the Desert. It stands comparison with many fine-press books. In our case, Lawrence had the last laugh. After the size and proportions were decided and the first volume published, we were offered the chance to reproduce the original Seven Pillars portraits in colour. Of course, their proportions were wrong. Fortunately, they have (relatively) plain backgrounds. To reproduce the full-page 'bleed' that Lawrence liked so much, our graphics house had to adjust the margins. With Seven Pillars published, our thoughts returned to the Letters series. As mentioned above, the original plan had been to use the same page-format as Letters to E.T. Leeds. However, I wanted a more traditional type panel than Whittington had used. Experimenting with trial pages, I came to feel that the page-width, though excellent for illustrations and our 1997 Seven Pillars, was too wide for correspondence. The blank lines between letters tended to dominate the page, while the format itself seemed somehow too imposing for private letters. The page needed to be narrower. Leaving the spine height to match the Leeds edition, I reduced the page-width to proportions close to a golden rectangle. The intrinsic elegance of that shape seemed more appropriate for these editions, while the narrower type-panel reduced the visual impact of blank lines. Another size decision was necessary for the Library and Trade editions of the Oxford Seven Pillars. This time, we needed a standard bookshop format with a big enough page to set this long text in readable type. It had to be a book you could easily pick up. We decided that the page size - the same as the Authorised Biography - was the largest we could use. We could have used either format for The Forest Giant, but the shorter page would help to keep the parallel French and English texts in step without too many unsightly gaps in one or the other. In the end, the deciding factor was some suitable book-wove paper, found for us by a paper merchant. It was the right quantity, but the sheets were just too small for the taller format. So, that's one decision out of the way. But there are more....
In practice, I myself would next think about typography and page-layout. However, when you look at a book published by someone else, the binding (or dust jacket) contributes hugely to your first impression. In trade publishing, the outside appearance of a book can have a big effect on sales. Dust jackets help books stand out from the rest. Their design should appeal to people interested in the content. For mainstream publishers, the design of the jacket (or the cover of a paperback) is a form of commercial packaging. The physical characteristics of the binding underneath are likely to be determined by economics. For a fine-press edition, the priorities are different. The book isn't likely to be sold by trade retailers, so the only role of a dust jacket is initial protection. Many fine-press books don't have a dust jacket, or use a temporary glassine wrapper (in time, glassine becomes brittle and discolours). Thinking about this, what do I want from a fine-press binding?
A high-quality goatskin or quarter-goatskin binding can meet all these criteria. I'll come back to that kind of binding another day. The bigger challenge is how to bind the standard copies (often referred to by fine-press publishers as the 'ordinaries'). A good full-cloth binding will meet criteria 1-3. However, one full-cloth binding looks much like another. It isn't so long since trade editions were routinely bound in full cloth. In most people's minds, a plain full-cloth binding still says "trade edition". So it's difficult, with full cloth, to meet criteria 4 and 5. That is probably why so many fine-press books are issued in quarter-cloth: a cloth spine with some kind of decorative paper on the sides. There's a wide choice of patterned and textured papers, so quarter-cloth bindings can be interesting, attractive and appropriate to the book. For example, the Indian craft paper we chose for the sides of the quarter-cloth Forest Giant is the colour of wood. Its rough surface contains visible fibres. The spine is in green cloth. The central theme of the book is the life-cycle of a tree. We first published the Oxford Seven Pillars seventy-five years after it was written. When we began to think about binding, we looked at de-luxe bindings of the book's true period - the 1920s. One such book on our shelves was a large-paper edition of writing by Rupert De La Mare. It was quarter-bound in a traditional style: a cream canvas spine with a leather spine-label and grey paper-covered sides. We sent it to Book Production Consultants and asked them to try to match these materials. The hardest to find was paper for the sides. Modern grey papers tend to be a uniform lifeless colour. The paper used for the De La Mare volume was more interesting. In the end, BPC found an Italian paper that seemed at least to echo it - but the search took time. A drawback of paper-covered sides is that few of the papers liked by fine-press designers are as durable as a binding cloth. Papers developed for covering trade hardbacks are stronger - though usually plain with a textured surface, and therefore not particularly attractive. In general, while decorative paper sides appeal to collectors, they are less popular with libraries. When we designed the T.E. Lawrence Letters series, we knew from the outset that many copies would go to libraries. Scholarly editions of correspondence save academic researchers time and money. So, for the benefit of libraries, we opted for a full-cloth binding. But what kind of cloth? Traditional glazed cloths, like the cloth used for Jonathan Cape's Seven Pillars (1935) and Letters (1938) are no longer made. There is modern material called library buckram, but it doesn't look the same. It tends to be manufactured in solid lifeless colours with what looks like a plastified finish. Traditional unglazed cloth is still made, but is relatively frail. In time, as all collectors know, it frays at the extremities. This led us to Cialux, a modern Italian book cloth that looks much like the traditional material - but is synthetic and far more durable. We chose it as a library-friendly covering for all the Letters series volumes. But of course - and even in a golden rectangle - the result cannot look tremendously exciting. To improve it, we added a blind-stamped frame on the front cover, sometimes with a central ornament. Such decoration was common between the wars - though it is now rare in trade editions because of the cost. We also gilded the top edge of the pages and used head and tail bands. The result is passable, but we've never been entirely happy with it. Some time ago, we decided to issue future volumes in the series in quarter-cloth. That isn't an option for the Lawrence-Shaw volumes, at least for existing subscribers. The four volumes need to match. However, sets sold complete after publication of Vol. IV will be in quarter cloth, with the full-cloth option retained for libraries. We also changed our minds about dust jackets. In 1997 we deliberately printed very plain jackets for the quarter-cloth Seven Pillars, using pale paper which would mark very easily. We didn't want people to keep the jackets, because they concealed the binding! Alas, instead of taking them off, collectors added transparent protective covers.... At first, jackets seemed necessary for the Letters series. We expected to sell part of the edition through retailers, and the jacket would carry the blurb. In the event, we sell few copies through trade retailers. A thin card slip-case - as used by the Golden Cockerel Press - will serve our purpose better. The only jackets we will print in future are for the full-cloth copies of the two last Lawrence-Shaw volumes. Last but not least comes something that few general book-buyers look at: the mechanical structure of the binding. A sewn binding is still a more satisfactory structure than modern 'perfect' or notched bindings. The pages lie open more easily and the book can be re-bound. Volumes in the Letters series (and The Forest Giant) are printed in 8-page sections, to avoid steps on the fore-edge. That kind of attention to detail adds cost, but a connoisseur will recognise it instantly. Several customers have said they would like us to publish all our books, even standard editions, in rigid slipcases. The reason we do not is that a rigid slipcase would add at least £15 to subscription prices, and rather more to post-publication prices. However, when the Lawrence-Shaw set is complete we will order some slipcases from The Fine Bindery that will take the four volumes. These will be available to order, but we shall not know the size or the cost before the set is complete. As other volumes in the series are published we may offer similar slipcases to take, say, three consecutive volumes.
Ann Muir at work Many people have commented on the Ann Muir marbled endpapers in our full and quarter-goatskin editions. Each sheet is produced by hand, and no two sheets are identical. Ann has a website.
Designing
The Forest Giant Our Gigantesque | Forest Giant parallel text has the same page dimensions as the Library Edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, The Complete 1922 Text, but the page design is different. For the Seven Pillars we used a modern layout, in order to fit a very long text into a single volume you could easily read and hold. We will use the same design for part of the Letters series. This was a new departure, since previously we had used traditional fine-press page designs. However, in the case of Seven Pillars we had already produced a fine-press edition, back in 1997. For the Gigantesque, we went back to type-panel design principles we use in the Letters series. These were established in the Middle Ages, and have been widely imitated by fine-press printers. The exact geometric rules on which so many beautiful mediaeval books and manuscripts were based were lost for centuries, but were rediscovered in the twentieth century by Jan Tschichold, a celebrated typographer. The photograph below shows how, starting with the page dimensions of the Library Edition, we used his diagram to establish the type panel and margins for the Gigantesque|Forest Giant. (In the working drawing shown, the pencil lines have been inked over to make them more visible.)
Lawrence
on typesetting 'Monotype is the only really sensitive type-setting process: as it is the only one with infinitely adjustable spacing. I beg your pardon:- I mean Linotype. Mono is only a stage in the evolution of the press towards sensitive setting. The Seven Pillars had to be set mono, because the Lino people had thought only of speed, so far, and their type faces were degraded. Pike and I moaned to them loud and long. They denied our point - till six months after we had committed ourselves to mono; and then they brought out just the face in lino that we had wanted. I agree, of course, that hand-setting is today no more than an affectation. You can do beautiful work by hand, every bit as good as mono, and nearly as good as lino:- but the cost of it falls on flesh and blood. It ranks with boy chimney-sweeps.' (T.E. Lawrence to Bernard Shaw, 19 July 1928) This viewpoint (heretical to monotype purists!) is hardly surprising: Lawrence was an out-and-out technophile. Also, he had a valid point. Modern computer-typesetting software, as used to typeset Castle Hill Press books, has all the advantages of Linotype, and more. Had Lawrence lived in our generation, he would doubtless have typeset his own books on a computer at Clouds Hill - as we do at the White Cottage. |
