Maybe someone should start a blog comparing the crap type in printed books with the crap type in ebooks, so that the publishers realize how little consumers will really be losing when they make the switch. I love real books, but if a time comes that I have to choose between a $10 eBook download and a $15 trade paperback typeset by someone who barely speaks english printed on paper I wouldn’t wipe my ass with, the book loses.

Imo, the cover is terrible, too. At least compared to the UK version…

You’re absolutely right, this isn’t anywhere near an atypical example; and it is physically painful to watch…

It looks like another case of "one from column A, one from column B" design. Rather than hire decent designers, they just trow together any damn thing from a recipe book and have it printed. There are plenty of capable designers out there but the bean-counters can shave a buck by not hiring any of them. It is also common practice for cover designers to never see the interior and vice versa.

ChrisL

Interesting that you pointed out that the cover design bears no relationship to the contents. I've been puzzled by this as it relates to movies the past decade or so -- now that trailers and posters seem to be made by folks who have no relationship or even contact with the people making the actual movie, it's quite jarring to have a really strong poster design for a particular title, and then have that identity totally thrown away during the title sequence, and then have the title sequence identity totally thrown away during the film.

Wow, the UK cover is so vastly superior. I hope someone in the US publishing office prints out those two covers somewhere and asks "why the hell are we using this cookie cutter design on a bestselling book?"

Very Very Dire. Too right.

The UK cover ‘design’ is horrible, too—design-wise much worse than the US cover—though at least it draws the eye, which I suppose is the ultimate goal of any book cover.

Well, I think design-wise, the UK cover is better, though the type is difficult to read. The UK cover is more emotive, unique, and eye-catching, as well as I think conceptually representing the subject of the book better. The sheet music on the US cover looks like a generic stock photo they found in 20 seconds looking for the keyword "music", and the overall tone seems almost...depressing.

I'm curious, other than the legibility of the light, reversed type (which is certainly no minor thing when you're talking about a book cover, I agree), is there anything else about the US cover you think is better?

almost...depressing

I would go straight there. It is a depressing horrible cover. The UK one while being a sort of visual riot - does look fun.

Maybe the designer of the US cover mainly listens to music like shoegaze or drone metal.

Mediocre book design is becoming commodotized. I have recently seen a number of books by a reputable academic press: they were all designed by a company in India, using TNR and TNR bold as the main design elements. The pages weren't ugly, but they were definitely underwhelming.

I just recently heard, that book covers often are designed long before the rest of the book is layed out, since the covers are used by the publishers to promote their book to bookshops for pre-order. So the idea that cover design and layout of the book were done by two different designers who had no idea how the respective other part would look, –while not being an excuse for bad design– might not be so impossible...

In the old days, designers actually read the books to know what they were dealing with.

ChrisL

“ E n d l e s s l y   S t i m u l a t i n g.  ”

I'm not going to judge **** relations this Sunday morning because I've sinned many times in the name of expedient productivity. But the letter spacing between the period and the closing quotation mark makes me think the designer doesn't wipe after a poo either.

(I saw in the preview that **** was censored by the system. It's a word for relations between humans and beasts. Admins please remove this explanation if censored word is cleared/edited.)

My inner curmudgeon asks: Are books these days designed by people who don't read? There seems to be an increasing disconnect between making things and actually using them. Like Christmas decorations made in China.

That cover is truly appalling. It seems like object was nothing more than "find a stock photo with blurry music notes with the blurry bit where the title would go". In a book store, I'd pick it up just to see how bad the rest of the book is.

-=®=-

And the title page seems to have no relation to either the (depressing) cover or the (crowded) interior text. I wonder if three "designers" were involved ...

Most trade publishers have completely separate departments to design the cover and the interior of the book. It's one reason I like to design illustrated books - I control every aspect of the book's design from typography to head and tail bands.

Here's an illuminating story - I was hired to design the interior only of a trade cookbook. I asked to see the cover so I could try to match the type. They told me it wasn't necessary for them to match, so I did a sample design on my own. Then they came back to me and said yes, why not try to match the cover. They sent me the cover design. It was hideous, but I was able to patch together something passable using the fonts they'd used (fonts I would never have chosen on my own). When I got the final book, they had changed the cover completely. The new cover was equally awful and I had done an interior I didn't like to match an ugly cover that never got used.

As Claas said, the cover is considered (in trade publishing) a marketing tool, and subject to much more scrutiny than the interior of the book. It is often done way in advance and can change a lot. Trade book interiors are basically churned out. That said, there is no excuse for bad typography. I just read a book set entirely in Rotis. It was pretty painful.

I prefer the UK version as well - at least it's trying to say something.

I just read a book set entirely in Rotis. It was pretty painful.

My boss recently asked me to help him design a 200+ page book set completely in 10/14 Helvetica Neue overlaid on images. I haven’t been back to the office in a while…

On the margin, I just watched this 100 minute video on book and book cover design featuring Glaser, Kidd, and Eggers...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpVQRKyD_yM&eurl=http://blog.92y.org/inde...

I agree, the UK's splash kitch version is in contrast to the US's moody broody version. But if both designs are so horrid, why then is the book a best seller?

Computers - faster, cheaper and more reliable
Mac OS - "best ever"
InDesign - makes quality typography easy
Photoshop - missing a glyph palette but apart from that rock solid
fonts - more features, more styles, more weights, more characters
Graphic design graduates - more than ever

So how does this square with the falling standards of book typography?

"why then is the book a best seller?"

Because so many books are badly designed that nobody pays a hoot of attention to cover design anymore. They buy books on what reviewers have said or what their friends have said or what Oprah has said.

ChrisL

One book?

So how does this square with the falling standards of book typography?

It doesn’t and that’s the part that seems to piss so many people off. I think the poor design of mass-market books is particularly glaring because at a time when so much effort and money are poured into designing really complicated stuff—often just to make it seem simple!—something as simple as books is often ignored. Why aren’t the interiors of mass market books treated with the same simple, elegant design systems that publishers manage to put into every cheap collection of classics, or series of crap video game tie-in sci-fi stories? Wouldn’t it cost less?

I think most people are basically inured to ugliness. Why is so much contemporary architecture tasteless and hideous? I'm not talking about Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid, but your basic home, office complex, mall. We have the technology surely to make them look halfway decent. Look at warehouses or industrial buildings constructed early last century, they have interesting surface detail - you almost never see that nowadays. Or take your average chain restaurant - boring furniture and generic lighting. And let's not even talk about the menu design.

I think in general people don't really care how things look, and as long as ugly books continue to sell the publishers won't care much either.

David I like your new icon. It's a bit more gussied up now - but in quite a pleasant way. It reminds me of a satsuma wrapper. Or a furoshiki.

as ugly books continue to sell

The thing is publishers will say the reason they are ugly is that books don't sell enough so they have to cheap/careless to turn a profit etc etc. I am sure you are far more familiar with that line of reasoning and the details. When an entity is used to doing something a certain way, they will defend doing it that way if they have high or low profits. Either can be used as an excuse. Which is what is is.

"The book is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, and made the New York Times Bestseller list"

I absolute agree it does not look good. The thing is, sometimes some stuff get printed...Probably the author did not realized, but saved a few bucks and designed it himself?

The cover doesn't emphasize the word Music, but the title page does...

The New York Times Bestseller List is a horrible litmus test for literary merit. Simply because a lot of people buy a particular book bears little indication of it's quality. Once in a while, truly good literature ends up on the list, but usually it's Dan Brown or James Patterson. That being said, it's little wonder why the typography is lackluster, if not terrible.

The books on the NY Times list are always from major corporate publishers—Harper-Collins, Houghton-Mifflin, etc. Conversely from Britain, i.e., where for a long while, publishers were regarded the standard-bearers of a literary tradition steeped in timeless mastery of the written language, US publishers seem to consider themselves not unlike any other manufacturer of consumer products. The care and artistry once put into producing books (ironically enough, at a time when the process was far more labour-intensive, and required far greater skill) are now but vestiges, on occasion loosely mimicked in contemporary design, ultimately mocking the technological advances which, by all accounts, should in turn have advanced the craft.

This has become the norm because the people in decision-making capacities at these publishing houses are MBAs, not literati (to say nothing of designers or typographers). Of concern to these people are movie-rights and marketing—the literary value (much less the design quality) of the books is almost negligible. i'm certain i'm not the only one here who's had the awkward experience of trying to convince a client to spend an extra hundred bucks or so on a typeface, or a few more hours to lay out a book correctly. i'm convinced that desktop-publishing has caused people to consider speed an ample substitute for quality (or that the two are equally interchangeable). Furthermore, nobody in design school ever seemed to care about traditional typography...everyone was attracted to the edgy, David Carson stuff. Don't get me wrong...i delight in breaking the rules as much as anyone—particularly when the project is gagging for it—but anymore, i notice that when people pick up a book that doesn't look like it was printed straight from Microsoft Word, they definitely take notice—usually, they say, "It looks old!" The problem with corporate, MBA types is that—in my experience—they can't tell the difference, even if it was in fact printed directly from Word. Though i'm tempted to digress—into what large-scale failures in education, or the modern propensity to study only the discipline in which one intends to make a living, willfully neglecting all other aspects of culture and knowledge, and how these relate to the current hideousness of printed —i'll spare you my further waxing philosophical.

The thing is though, that there are LOTS of beautifully designed books out there. Just not this one. But walk into any bookstore, especially in the Fiction department and you will see some remarkable designs. (Open the books and it's a crap shoot).

Yes, there are many well-designed books.
But the issue may be considered the Bringhurst Irony: that the main style guide of professional typography does not, for various reasons, connect with the major constituency it addresses, ordinary books--of which This is Your Brain on Music is assumed to be representative.

Commodification might not be such a bad thing, if it means better templates which default to fonts with the features (old style figures and small caps) that are good for book text.

I agree that this book is terrible in every aspect but its awfulness is completely standard. It doesn't matter whether it is Britain, the U.S. or Australia, book design is at a terrible low: a combination of economics, trash imitates trash, and a disconnect between design and function. With many paperbacks produced by simply photo-reducing the hardcover design and printing it on rougher paper, the result is often actually unreadable. At least in Nick's example the book can be read; certainly that is not always the case. People complain that the young don't read enough: we should try to make books that can be read. (Thank God for Knopf — the exception to the rule!)

The very same complaints could be made about the music industry. The trash-imitates-trash aesthetic rules there as well.

In the end it's stupid: you sell less, and because you destroy the consumer's confidence, everyone sells less in a downward spiral.

I think Patty gives good insight into the failed process. The business model of publishing is a bit of a wreck and the books themselves are not even a tertiary priority in many cases.

So many editors and designers now have no office, and the imprints are bought and sold multiple times during the development of any given book. It is often the case that managers don't keep up with who is on the payroll and what they are doing. People are taken on and off projects to manipulate the quarterly stock results in anticipation of another buy out. It is considered that simply having "product" in the ”pipeline" is enough on paper to make the company appear legit.

Maybe it is like cars in the '70s—quality will hit a low point and then slowly return to some smarter, faster more efficient model that doesn't match what was but is better than what is. I would be happy if there was some sense that a cover should relate to the interior, and that communication between the crafts people making a book was worth fostering.

«I’m curious, other than the legibility of the light, reversed type (which is certainly no minor thing when you’re talking about a book cover, I agree), is there anything else about the US cover you think is better?»

That was the main thing, as well as relevance. Generic thoug the US stock photo sheet music may be, it’s immediately relevant to the title of the book.

The UK cover doesn’t even have that. It’s got flowers (overused and completely irrelevant), pink-red-orange-yellowish splash patterns (look nice, but completely irrelevant), and a semi-hard-to-make-out human head (semi-relevant to the ‘brain’ part of the title, though not directly so).

I agree the UK cover gives off a much better immediate impression, and it’s much more likely to catch someone’s eye sitting on a book shelf (the book, not the eye); but if you look at the details, the design says next to nothing about the book, or at least its title. Dreary and shoddy though the US cover may be (okay, is), it at least gives an immediate link between design and book title, and doesn’t have any real design hara-kiris like the small-white-on-bright-orange text of the UK cover.

In truth, you can blame marketing for ugly book covers - they really can be "design by committee" but there is no excuse for poorly typeset book interiors. There are people for whom that is a profession (which seems to me incredibly boring) and they really should know their trade.

Not to sound unduly xenophobic, but it's going to be terrible when in a few years' time there are no stateside book design and comp jobs. And in a Twilight Zone–esque turn of irony, I won't even be able to enjoy my unemployment because all the books I could be reading are set so poorly.

There are people for whom that is a profession (which seems to me incredibly boring)

Ehhh ... it can be. But so can be branding cows, or whaling whales. Or designing graphics.

and they really should know their trade.

The little pride I've left (after >20 yrs in typesetting) comes from creating nearly invisible work -- "invisible" in the sense of people not noticing it's "bad", as opposed to the original example.

I find myself in the book stores more and more rejecting books based on their looks. Next thing, I'll probably scoff'em when there aren't any "Th" ligatures in them. When it's all so easy!

In truth, you can blame marketing for ugly book covers

GRRR marketing!!!! What is it with those people?

... and they really should know their trade

B b but, Trades people are so expensive, and no one has, as yet, been physically injured by a lousy book design (paper cuts aside) , and little or no property damage results from bad typography, so where's the incentive to hire someone who knows or cares about the trade? The connection between a badly designed book and poor sales hasn't been clearly demonstrated... Or, maybe it has but not in a way that an MBA or marketing professional can understand.

I think it was in the 30's when designers like Raymond Lowry convincingly demonstrated that well designed, attractive products sold better than poorly designed, ugly ones. Big news in tough economic times, I guess. One would think that this is self-evident and having been proven over and over again in the market place, that that would be the end of it: (Very easy and self evident) lesson learned; "Hey! Let's not make ugly crap."... But, it's not been learned. People don't receive much, if any training in design appreciation, aesthetics or what ever you want to call it. They don't have the understanding or confidence to comment one way or the other about a design. Design is still dismissed as styling and an unnecessary frill - which tended to be what industrial design amounted to before designers like Lowry.

So, here we are in tough economic times. Tougher than most for the book publishing industry. Like in the movies, when the going get's tough, you can count on folks to do all the wrong things much more vigorously than they they would otherwise.

-=®=-

> I just recently heard, that book covers often are designed long before the rest of the book is layed out, since the covers are used by the publishers to promote their book to bookshops for pre-order.

Yep, that's true. I usually have to design covers long before I even start with the inside of the book (or seen any text even).
Luckily I usually get the chance to change the design of the cover a little bit, once I have the inside layed out, so that the inside and outside of the book match better together.

I sometimes think we who design things can be hyper-sensitive to design. I hope I never don't read a book because it has a lousy jacket design or lousy text typography. I read books because I want to know what is in them or to be entertained by them, not in order to appreciate or condemn their design. I am not a typographer 24/7/365. If I want author X's take on event Y, this is the only way I'm going to get it (in printed form).

But Nick's questions are good ones, and colleagues in the book racket have addressed most of the causes of this design dis-connect above; so I need not belabor them. But, as a staff design & production manager, I have to admit some complicity in this. At times I have to get a book jacket designed for publicity use before the author is even finished writing. I may end up sending the jacket design to a designer who is not suited to design the text, but I don't know that on that date. & then design for the jacket may not have many "adaptable" elements a text designer can pick up on.

This is not an ideal situation, I agree. But I also agree that the incidence of damage from bad book design is much lower than from, say, bad can opener design. I hope that until I go blind I shall never give up reading, regardless of the lousy design work I may have to plow through.

Now bad printing, that really irks me. Bad printing can sabotage a good design. But I doubt I'd not read a book that was badly printed, either. Right now I'm reading the Penguin paper edition of Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians." Mediocre design, terrible printing, but I'm still reading.

As to Nick's other comment about "ordinary books": evidence is that designers of "ordinary books" do not read Bringhurst, nor Rich Hendel's "On Book Design." Missing ligatures, false smalls, lining figs, bad margins: they all attest to this.

Do not look to any publication's list of best books for any hope of finding well-designed books. Only rarely do reviewers have any awareness of book design. Even for those who may feel we are living in an era when more attention is paid to design, I think it is too much to expect book reviewers to chat about design.

That's the view from here, today. From a guy who has spent 40 years trying to make books look good—and at times succeeding, I think.

powers

I hope I never don’t read a book because it has a lousy jacket design or lousy text typography.

No, but I have read (or at least picked up in the store) books that have really nice jacket designs.

It looks like Mr Rand had something to say on respect of this design bureaucracy

The politics of design

Héctor

The inside layout of Your Brain on Music does look good at first glance, in the sense that it is contemporary.
And there has been attention paid to typographic details--the running heads are set in Helvetica 35, tracked out slightly, providing a nice contrast with the main text. The book is well written, well edited, and well printed.

If the leading had been reduced, and horizontal scaling of 95% applied, to increase the bottom and outside margins, for more comfort in holding the book during reading, it would perhaps have looked "old". So that is the penalty we pay, for living in an era when mere functionality appears to be behind the times.

>>> No, but I have read (or at least picked up in the store) books that have really nice jacket designs.

Then those were successful jackets. They accomplished the first goal of a book jacket: to get someone to pick up the book. The second goal may be to actually convey some meaningful info about the book, by both visuals and text. Those you read accomplished the third goal: to get someone to read the book. Actually, maybe the third goal is to get someone to buy the book. Getting someone to read the thing may be immaterial.

One other thing about book jackets and covers, apart from the design of the billboard (I mean the front of the jacket). The type for flaps and for the descriptive copy and blurbs on the back is often atrocious. These parts of the jackets should be put together by typographers, working in cohort with the graphic designers who did the fronts. Type on jacket and cover backs is full of false italics, poorly placed blurb attributions, and generally poor, unimaginative typography. & there seems no attention paid to flap copy. Drop it in, set it FL/RR with no attention to the rag, and punch out for the day. The narrow measure of the flap seems to be too much of a challenge for many designers.

powers

I do both book covers and interiors, and I always finish the interior before I ever start on the cover. I guess it's just an old habit of mine.

> I do both book covers and interiors, and I always finish the interior before I ever start on the cover. I guess it’s just an old habit of mine.

That is ideal. However, most publishers want to use the cover in his promotional material even before the book is finished. I guess you're lucky, then. :)

I wish I could design the cover after the interior as well. I designed the cover for the book I'm doing the interior for right now something like 5 weeks ago. Really annoying.

I usually have to get the cover well under way before the interior, as the catalog deadline usually comes up first. The cover can change, but ideally it doesn't.

The example is extra-ugly-disfunctional!
However, if i compare my impressions over 5-10 years in the field of "mainstream" fictional literature and not only, i think it's getting better (not worse), at least here in germany. Better margins, better typefaces in use, better textsetting (by the use of better software).

Interesting Poms. Could you post a pic of a typical German work of fiction, by any chance?

When I was creative director at a small publisher, it was not unusual to need the cover as much as six months before the interior was set to go to design. Hell, sometimes the title wasn't even finalized before we needed tight comps for sales conference. (Catalog date was the deadline for finalizing titles, and it was not uncommon to have to rework a cover or two the night before.) Manuscript wasn't often available, so any brief came from an outline or a marketing blurb. I usually had the luxury of sitting down with the editorial director and the acquiring editor for an in-depth conversation about the book -- much better than talking to marketing alone.

Covers are always caught in a tug-of-war between Editorial and Marketing. It has to be accurate enough to adequately reflect the editorial tone and content; it has to be sexy enough to satisfy marketing. These are often two competing concerns. Left entirely to Editorial, a book cover would reflect and describe the content completely accurately, and be totally boring. Left entirely to Marketing, a book cover would be flashy, look like the best-selling competition (only different), consist primarily of the current colour-du-jour, be full of buzz words, and have very little to do with the topic.

For most of our titles, it was neither practical nor always the best course to have the same designer do both the interior and cover. Different skills and strengths are needed. Navigating the ins and outs of feedback from marketing and understanding the marketplace and trends for covers is a different skill set from managing complex hierarchies of textual structure, illustrations, charts, tables, etc., and responding to editorial needs and input. Not a lot of designers can do both equally well.

I felt it was my job to try to keep the outside and inside harmonious through my direction, to the extent that I could under the other inevitable constraints and challenges. The title page was one place I often stepped in directly to design a transition from outside to inside. Also, back cover and flaps were another area where a little coordination could help bridge the gap.

-- K.

Kent,
Nicely said and informative anecdote! I can even feel your pain between the lines!

ChrisL

>No, but I have read (or at least picked up in the store) books that have really nice jacket designs.

As a writer, let me put in a word for the value of good interior design. Once the title and jacket design or the name of the author get you to pick up the book, then you look inside. If this is visually inviting and easily readable, you are more likely to sample it extensively. And then, if you like the content, buy the book.

I think it is something like wearing flattering, suitable clothes. It isn't going to make an ugly person beautiful, but it will help soften the blow, and will make the beautiful person glorious.

Here analogy to 'beauty' is what the writer wrote. Good interior design won't make a bad book good, but it will make a good book more inviting to read.

If the book is a non-fiction one where structuring information is important to usability of the book, like a cook book or text book, or--for different reasons--art book, then visual presentation actually becomes part of content quality.

WB: I forget where I read it, but in the average man the ratio from belly button to floor to overall height is near the golden ratio.

Le Corbusier and his Modulor?

Akma, Rudovsky is quoted in Bringhurst's essay 'The typographic mind'.

[SBL Greek is stalled in the middle of spacing and hinting revisions, and I won't have an opportunity to work on it again until later in the summer. Good news is that it looks like funding issues might be sorted out.]

Thanks, Eluard. The last sentences in your above post are misleading, as they seem to assert that the the golden ratio and fibonacci series are not important in nature. I see from the article that you meant to say that they are indeed important in nature. Sentences with double negatives are in general not a good idea, as they are confusing!

Funny, I have no difficulty at all parsing what I said — but perhaps that is authorial blindness creeping in!

It was authorial blindness — I now see the source of the confusion. Apologies.

As a mathematics major, I am wary of many claims surrounding the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence that pop up all the time in popular mathematical writing and indeed in popular culture, as there are too many exaggerated and fantastic claims. I've heard mathematicians ridicule the handling of the Fibonacci sequence in The Da Vinci Code (I can't comment on it as I haven't read the book, but it does strike me how specialists in almost every field from art history to astronomy seem to have gripes about how the book got it completely wrong).

The Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio are indeed very important and common in nature, but they only appear where they have a reason to appear. Too many people have tried to find examples of the golden ratio in nature and art without a sense of why they arise. And if you're looking for something as simple as an approximately 1.618:1 ratio, you're going to find it somehow. Oh look, the length of the leaves and the stem sections between the leaves have something close to the golden ratio! And if you take the height and width of the lowercase k glyph in that typeface, it's around 1.6!

I have a certain design book on my shelf that has an illustration of the golden ratio applied to a fish. There is a point where you wonder what percentage of any given object might conform, and start to suspect we are pushing it where evolution has a much looser hand.

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 wonder if Robert Rauschenberg’s idea of not working from ideas would qualify?

I’ve seen Asian designers asked what they think about Phi a few times. On the occasion that the response was more than just rolling of eyes, it was usually equivalent to “nonsense.”

And if you take the height and width of the lowercase k glyph in that typeface, it’s around 1.6!

I love it when they use examples that round to 1.6 as proof.

It would be nice to think that there is very tidy logic in nature or mathematics that binds all things together in a predictable way so that we are guaranteed both functional and aesthetic perfection if we as designers simply use the golden section or Fibonacci series. Scientists have never even worked out the Unified Fields theory so why would we assume that all things we do will just be perfect if we follow a certain pattern of ratios? That is not to say that there is something wrong with pursuing that path as a way of working, it just means that there is no guarantee that it is correct and no way to test it accurately. It certainly does not mean that that is the only way or even the best way to solve a visual problem. We love the romantic notion that the Chambered Nautilus contains the secret formula for aesthetic perfection but we can arrive at any sensible visual logic if we apply a different ratio consistently. There may well be an Uncertainty Principle for visual structure in typography as there was for Hiesenburg in Quantum physics.

ChrisL

>Asian designers asked what they think about Phi

Probably just jealous. The Greeks discovered Phi :)

I wouldn't be too a quick to ridicule the idea that numbers are a deep secret to nature and to aesthetics. The Pythagorean brotherhood started this idea, observing, among other things that harmonious sounds are related to integer ratios on the vibrating string. Half the length gives you an octave, one quarter a perfect fifth, etc. Our Western musical scales are influenced by these ideas. And then the heirs of the Pythagorean program created much of modern science.

Yes but Slendro, Pelog, and Balafon scales do wonders for cleaning out your head when it has become perfectly aligned to the 12-tone deluge.

John Foulds’ Dynamic Triptycht is an interesting example where the orchestra creates a continuous descending tone in unison that is so arresting and oddly disruptive in that the sound feels like it is pulling you down.

> Half the length gives you an octave, one quarter a perfect fifth, etc.

And yet, if I'm not mistaken, an interval based on Phi is not harmonious or consonant at all. Go figure ;-)

I had to work on a book publishor in Porto (Portugal) as a part of my design graduation, and I really was amazed with how much they didn't care with the books they publish.
Yes, for them designing a cover is as simple as buying a some image on the internet.
And the best part of it... guess who had the final word on every project, the guys from the marketing department (that didn't even were graduated in marketing, they had courses in archeology or something like that).
I'm glad it just took 3 months, i was getting really tired of changing my designs because some guy in marketing didn't liked that color, image or typeface...

>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 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…

He are DEVO

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.

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.

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.

"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!

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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

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.

Fascinating. Thanks for your thoughts, Will and Patty!

I recently picked up the new Umberto Eco book after seeing him speak in Toronto. He was wonderfully witty and made reference to history and contemporary events in his own unique stream of consciousness.

I wanted this book and was pleased to find a copy locally. The person in the bookstore knew exactly where to find it and as she handed it to me I was already smiling at the use of Bodoni on the cover. One hopes for that perfect unison of author and design, which is so rare. I opened it tentatively, already aware of my slight disappointment at the imperfect use of too many sizes on the cover, and then a very unusual thing happened. The quality of the interior blew me away. 10 pt Bodoni Book (a very difficult and tiring font to read on extended text) has rarely looked better (with so few refinements). Perfect scale and leading (10 on 15 pt) and adequate margins (plenty on the outside and more on the inside) create true legibility here, and the timelessness and modernity which Bodoni lends perfectly reflect Eco's vision.

For me this piece of book design (while also imperfect and probably produced under typical commercial limitations) is the exact opposite of "This is your Brain on Music" which I also bought for its content, and which I must agree is a design failure of immense proportions.

So how does this square with the falling standards of book typography?

I just revisited this thread and noted Si's question.
Here's an article I wrote (in 2002) about the paradox of "better technology yet worse design":
http://www.shinntype.com/Writing/BottLine.pdf

I find it hard to study for exams when what I have are handouts photocopied from books with great content and terrible typography. It makes me want to type the whole thing and fix it.

It's saddening that the academe, in a way, does not care about typography at all. As long as it gets published, like most you guys said. They don't realize that to be able to present one's self clearly in writing, one must use language and typography at the same time. Unfortunately, it seems language is the only important factor in clarity, for them at least.

I'm actually planning on writing an article about falling typographic standards in the school, such as papers (I've seen people who used Comic Sans all the way). My professors even recommend long line lengths (small margins) and double-spacing. Eugh.

Right now, I'm reading Terry Pratchett's The Last Hero. The illustrations are good, but the type is set in Bodoni (or a relative). It is a pain.

Visual perception is nowhere near as amenable to scientific analysis as sound, but I would imagine that certain proportions are more noticeable and attractive, as in music. —Nick

I believe that is why certain systems like the type scale work together in a harmony that text that has been ninja-ed in photoshop just doesn't have.

so I guess a question, apart from the Golden Section as a visual interval, what other example of scale harmonies have people seen/worked with?

Just finished reading Kate DiCamillo's Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (2006) with my daughter. Great story (as always from that author) but really irksome typography. Some unbearable lack of kerning, esp. in the all-caps lines that lead into each chapter.

CER T AINL Y?

Look at that "BRYCE"!

This is otherwise a very nicely produced paperback - lovely illustrations, nice paper, etc.

The colophon says the type is "CentaurMT." Is this some strange, misguided attempt to evoke the unkernable days of Monotype machines, or did the book designer tragically have a switch off? In a book about a rabbit named "Edward Tulane," you're going to have a good number of "WA"s and "Tu"s - why would you neglect kerning?

And the question behind these questions is, I suppose: should I be worried that I've reached the point at which I get worked up over kerning in a children's book?

Looks like it was done in MS Word.

ChrisL