Posts Tagged ‘publishing’
“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all”*…
Ah, but “good”?… Past a certain level of quality, our definitions of “good”– that’s to say, the books that entertain and enlighten– vary for each of us. How to choose? Literature-Map is here to help…
The Literature-Map is part of Gnod, the Global Network of Discovery.
It is based on Gnooks, Gnod’s literature recommendation system. The more people like an author and another author, the closer together these two authors will move on the Literature-Map.
If you found a typo or a duplicate, please report it here.
Is an author missing on the map? Please vote for them here.
Want to jump to a random place on the map? Click here
Help in finding your next book: “The Literature-Map.”
* Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
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As we turn the page, we might recall that this date in 1935 was a big one for the book business:
Allen Lane, Chairman of the London publisher The Bodley Head, was returning home after traveling with author Agatha Christie and her husband. At the train station, he browsed the kiosks looking for something to read on his way home. All he could find were magazines or low-quality paperback stories that he had no interest in reading. Then the thought occurred to him that people, like himself, might be more inclined to read good quality books [literature in paperback was then mainly poor quality lurid fiction] if they were more affordable. And since he was in the position to help build up lagging sales for his company, he ventured into printing previously hard-back books into a paperback format. The first was released on this day in 1935…
– source
Penguin Books featured no photos and were priced about a fifteenth the price of a hardcover book. The traditional book trade initially resisted; but the purchase of 63,000 books by Woolworths paid for the project outright, confirmed its worth, and allowed Lane to establish Penguin as a separate business in 1936. Indeed, by March 1936, ten months after the company’s launch, one million Penguin books had been printed.
[More here]
“Human society, the world, and the whole of mankind is to be found in the alphabet”*…
… and so we endeavor to teach the alphabet to young children. Hunter Dukes on an amusing– and revealing– example from the 18th century…
It’s as easy as ABC! It’s as easy as pie! In an abecedarium titled The Tragical Death of a Apple-Pye, both idioms come true, as children learn an alphabet whose letters greedily gorge on pastry.
The edition featured here was published by John Evans, a major contender in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century children’s literature. His formula was simple: undercut the competition, including John Newbery’s firm, by selling unprecedentedly affordable books. He captured an emerging market: children’s books for hard up families who had managed, against the odds, to acquire literacy. And while his competitors targeted a middle-class audience, Evans “stayed true to the street literature tradition in which he had been brought up”, writes literary historian Jonathan Cooper, who gives 1793–1796 as the likely date for Apple-Pye. It was printed on a press at No. 41 Long Lane, West Smithfield, and sold for a halfpenny, like Evans’ other sixteen-page chapbooks — a tiny format, roughly measuring 3.5 inches tall by 2.25 inches wide.
The book is really three texts in one. First comes an ABC list in which the “life and death” of an apple pie plays out across the alphabet. “Apple Pye, Bit it, Cut it, Dealt it, Eat it . . . Took it, View’d it, Wanted it, X, Y, Z, and &, they all wish’d for a piece in hand.” With so many letters vying for a slice, they decide together on an equitable solution: “They all agreed to stand in order / Round the Apple Pye’s fine border / Take turn as they in hornbook stand, / From great A, down to &”.
Next we encounter “A Curious Discourse That Passed Between the Twenty Five Letters at Dinner-Time”. The abecedarian order repeats, but now the letters speak. “Says A, give me a good large slice. . . . Says I, I love the juice the best.” Finally, Evans includes some self-promotion — “if my little readers are pleased with what they have found in this book, they have nothing to do but to run to Mr. Evans’s” — and a woodcut picture of “the old woman who made the Apple Pye”, which transitions abruptly into Christian pedagogy: “Grace before meat”, “Grace after meat”, “The Lord’s Prayer”. Like in other eighteenth-century children’s books, such as The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread, learning here is figured as a kind of gustatory consumption: children eat up the alphabet lesson, while its glyphic personifications wolf down their slices. (The link between sweets and syllabaries is more ancient still: Horace recorded teachers bribing pupils with letter-shaped biscuits to encourage their alphabetical uptake.)
Evans’ edition was published in the late eighteenth century — reworking a primer by Richard Marshall from the 1760s — but The Tragical Death of a Apple Pye is perhaps an even older story, first published, according to some scholars, in 1671. For a modern reader, it preserves English paleography as it existed in an earlier state: across the sections, U and V are used interchangeably, like I and J, and “&” is the ultimate letter, after Z. In an attempt to offset the ampersand’s semiotic difference, teachers well into the nineteenth century instructed students to pronounce the final letters of the alphabet as “x, y, z, and per se &”, hiving off the ampersand with the Latin by itself…
“Peckish Alphabetics: The Tragical Death of a Apple-Pye,” from @hunterdukes.bsky.social in @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
More on (and many more illustrations, including the image at the top, from) TTDoaAP here, via “The Gentle Author.”
* Victor Hugo
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As we learn our letters, we might send instuctive birthday greetings to a woman still hoeing this row: Denise Fleming; she was born on this date in 1950. An award-winning illustrator and creator of children’s books, she has written dozens of volumes for the very young, among which was her contribution to the tradition of which Evans was a part…
“Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power”*…
Coleman McCormick on a framework that can help us understand change in systems– and build resiliance…
A forest is a complex ecosystem made up of thousands of organisms living, evolving, interacting with each other, and changing over time.
At the top of the hierarchy are the leaves, changing annually, growing, dying, and shedding in a year-long seasonal cycle. Next there are branches, fewer in number and slower in growth. Then the whole tree itself, changing over decades. The tree sits in a stand of dozens, and the stand in a forest of thousands of individual trees. The forest within a biome, the biome in a region with a particular climate.
You get the idea.
All natural ecosystems evolve in layers like this that connect to each other, but move at different speeds. You can imagine other systems with similar structures: your body is made up of proteins, DNA strands, organelles, cells, membranes, organs, a skeleton, and eventually, your whole body. Cells are being generated but also dying off at almost the same rate. Slower layers like the nervous system take a long time to heal (if ever) when subjected to injury.
Seeing complex systems this way — as layered collections of variable-speed elements — is a useful framework for understanding why we have a hard time changing them.
Stewart Brand [and here and here] noticed this recurring pattern in the anatomy of systems, which he called pace layering.
The concept builds on an observation made by architect Frank Duffy, who noticed a hierarchy in the components of buildings. In his book How Buildings Learn, Brand expanded this observation into a model he termed “shearing layers,” which describes how different parts of a structure change at varying speeds. Site → Structure → Skin → Services → Space plan → Stuff. Each must survive or adapt on different timelines. When architecture fails to account for the different rates at which users need to modify these layers, it results in rigid, non-functional design. Buildings where Services or the Space Plan are overly inflexible are difficult to adapt to users’ changing needs.
In his later book The Clock of the Long Now, Brand expanded the concept of shearing layers to a civilizational scale:
At the bottom, nature moves along on its own eons-level time scale. In the middle, governance and culture shift with generations. Infrastructure and commerce in the range of years. And on the surface, fashionable trends flare up and die out with sometimes daily regularity, like the turbulent wave tops in a stormy ocean. Each layer serves a function:
Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power...
… Seeing the world through this lens — not only of scale, but also of time — has distant reach to so many other domains. It’s a fundamental characteristic of how systems work and adapt to change.
The fast flurry of activity at the top of a pace layered system creates a testbed for new ideas. In the forest, each individual tree can try out different evolutionary adaptations. New survival strategies are tested in numbers not possible if entire ecosystems had to move together. If one tree tests a new trait that turns out not to work, only a single organism is at risk, not the whole forest.
Because upper layers move faster they can also rebound faster. A forest fire or a passing herd of elk causes some damage, but only at the surface level upper crust of our strata. The bark and branches and leaves may get eaten or burn off, but in a few weeks they bounce back.
Pace layering builds resiliency into complex systems. The fast layers shield the slower ones from shocks, while selectively transmitting changes down through the layers, allowing slower ones to incorporate those adaptations. But some changes propagate too fast.
Some of the worst cases of system shock happen when change shakes to lower levels too rapidly. Look at the collapse of the Soviet Union. A rapid change in the governance layer caused wreaked havoc in the layers above: massive instability on a national scale, rippling through the whole system for decades. In this case, a totalitarian government imposed rigidity on commerce, infrastructure, and even fashion, and didn’t allow for the necessary shifting and experimentation required for the system to maintain resilience.
Drawing sharp lines between layers actually draws an inaccurate picture of how a thriving system works. A more accurate diagram would show smoother gradients across the transitions between layers.
Resilience comes from allowing this gradient — this slippage — at the junctions between layers. Each layer, above and below, must allow for give and take from its neighbors. Slow layers must permit some influence at the edges, and fast layers must slow down to maintain a workable interface with the slower. The layers need to be able to negotiate with one another. If the fast ignores the constraints of the slow, you get discontinuous instability. If the slow never bends to the fast, you get stifling stagnation…
[McCormick explores the applicability of this framework to governance and to corporate activity…]
… With age, my mind seems to sink to lower levels in the hierarchy. “Current things” are more likely to hit me and bounce off. We come around to new ideas more slowly. Above us are the teenagers, trying new technologies, listening to new music, pushing new memes, on a weekly or daily basis. We parents underneath can’t keep up.
But “keeping up” isn’t our role! Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast tries things, slow preserves what works. Resilient, sustainable systems balance this learning and remembering.
Not every meme or new song or fashion trend has staying power, but some do. The ones with notable resonance absorb and influence the culture below. Youth play the role of experimenters, continuously throwing new ideas at the wall — some good, many terrible. The elders carry the torch of tradition, and provide the stable platform of time-tested solutions on top of which the innovators can explore.
Pace layering is one of those ideas with such broad reach that once you learn about it, you see it everywhere…
The hidden architecture of resilient systems: “Pace Layers,” from @colemanm.
For Stewart’s own essay on Pace Layers, see here; and for more, here.
* Stewart Brand
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As we take the long view, we might send connective birthday greetings to Alexander MacMillan; he was born on this date in 1818. MacMillan was cofounder (in 1843) with his brother Daniel, of Macmillan Publishers, one of the “Big Five” English language publishers.
Though not himself a professional scientist, MacMillan did much to promote science in the Victorian times– especially when he established the journal Nature (in 1869), enabling communication between men of science. The journal had the support of many influential contributors, including Thomas Huxley. Yet, it remained a financial challenge for Macmillan. Other scientific quarterlies had short lives, but Macmillan tolerated losses for three decades, committed to the journal’s mission “to place before the general public the grand results of scientific work and scientific discovery; and to urge the claims of science to move to a more general recognition in education and in daily life.” That mission continues to the present day.
“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away”*…
As Christine Ro explains, this timeless wisdom may be about to invert: Revisiting typography…
A typical paperback book accounts for around 1kg of carbon dioxide, according to sustainability expert Mike Berners-Lee.
Perhaps that does not sound like much. But in the US alone, where 767 million paperback books were sold in 2023, this is equivalent to the electricity use of more than 150,000 homes for a year.
Forest loss, paper production and printing, and transport of books are generally the largest contributors to the carbon emissions of printed books.
So, using less wood fibre, and shipping lighter loads, are important ways to reduce the emissions of print books (as well as the costs of producing them).
One simple method is reducing the thickness of the paper. Some publishers are turning to subtly thinner paper. There are limits to this: the most lightweight paper may be less durable. And for certain types of books, including art books, there’s a preference for heavier paper.
Yet between these extremes, most readers are unlikely to notice the difference.
Nor would most readers notice the design tweaks that allow more text to fit onto each page – as long as designers ensure that the text remains easy to read.
The publisher HarperCollins has experimented with compact typefaces that require less ink and paper. This has resulted in savings of hundreds of millions of pages.
A leader in this field is Sustainable Typesetting, a project of the design and typesetting company 2K/DENMARK. One of the company’s focus areas is complex typesetting for long texts, including Bibles.
Andreas Stobberup, project lead at 2K/DENMARK, says that Sustainable Typesetting can achieve page count reductions of up to 50%, although he recommends less dramatic changes for novels.
While it’s common to simply increase the point size to make text easier to read, Mr Stobberup says that readability is actually determined by x-height. The x-height is the height of most lowercase letters in the Latin alphabet, and makes up nearly all of the printed marks on a page.
The x-height can be increased without enlarging all of the text. For many designers, increasing the x-height is key to increasing legibility…
Reducing point size is not always the optimal way to reduce the physical size of a book, Mr Stobberup emphasises.
Perhaps some lessons can be drawn from large print books, which are aimed at older readers or those with visual impairments.
They feature larger point sizes, which can lead to bigger books.
But other design features of large print books include more blocked letters and, if images are involved, more attention to the contrast between the foreground and the background.
“It’s a totally different typeface,” says Greg Stilson, head of global technology innovation for the American Printing House for the Blind.
Mr Stobberup concedes that incorporating such design in regular books “will not look as aesthetic”.
But he believes that most readers will not care about the typeface used for the bulk of the book. Meanwhile, more artistic fonts could be used on places like book covers.
And the savings might well justify the change – according to Mr Stobberup, a 20% reduction in pages would be equivalent to a roughly 20% reduction in carbon emissions.
However, the saving depends on many factors, including the size of the print run, the type of energy used for printing, the transport distances, and even the ink used.
Then there’s the word count: a textbook or Bible can achieve more drastic reductions in weight than a book of poetry.
Mr Stobberup is keenly aware of the financial pressures affecting the publishing industry.
“We need to make sustainability cheaper,” he says. “We simply need to show that we don’t think it’s a compromise. We think it’s a better product.”
David Miller is the president and publisher of Island Press, a small non-profit publisher of environment-themed nonfiction.
Printing costs have soared in the last few years, he says. The Covid-19 pandemic led to supply chain issues.
Meanwhile, paper manufacturers have been switching over to making cardboard due to the boom in the delivery businesses.
This has driven up the expense of producing books. In some cases Island Press has simply had to absorb the extra costs itself rather than passing them onto consumers, according to Mr Miller.
Initially he wasn’t sure about Sustainable Typesetting. But after seeing that a 19% reduction in pages could lead to at least a 10% cost savings, while readability actually improved, Mr Miller has become a fan.
Sustainable Typesetting has been applied to two Island Press books published so far. And he’s interested in going even further than a 19% trimming.
Mr Miller calls this a technology that is “only starting to poke its nose out behind the door” within different segments of the publishing industry.
“It’s a sort of revolution in thinking about what typography can be and how it can be put to use in a very productive way.”…
Using design to address climate change, one page at a time: “Publishers try skinnier books to save money and emissions,” from @BBC.
* Tom Waits
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As we conserve, we might note that today is the annual celebration of a set of books that are strong candidates for this sort of type redesign: it is Hobbit Day, a reference to its being the birthday of the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, two characters in J. R. R. Tolkien‘s popular set of books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In the books’ lore, Bilbo was born in the year of 2890 and Frodo in the year of 2968 in the Third Age (in Shire-Reckoning). Tolkien Week is the week containing Hobbit Day.
“Type design: an exacting, arcane craft that is underappreciated for its impact on how people communicate and receive communication”*…
Jeremy Nguyen considers the typeface.
Typography is two-dimensional architecture, based on experience and imagination, and guided by rules and readability. And this is the purpose of typography: The arrangement of design elements within a given structure should allow the reader to easily focus on the message, without slowing down the speed of his reading. – Herman Zapf
* Bruce Weber
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As we squint, we might recall that it was on this date in 1945 that farmer Lloyd Olsen of Fruita, Colorado, planning to eat supper with his mother-in-law, tried to behead a five-and-a-half-month-old Wyandotte chicken named Mike. The axe removed the bulk of the head, but missed the jugular vein, leaving one ear and most of the brain stem intact. The chicken was still able to balance on a perch and walk clumsily. He attempted to preen, peck for food, and crow, though with limited success; his “crowing” consisted of a gurgling sound made in his throat. When Mike did not die, Olsen decided to care for the bird.
Mike achieved national fame until his death in March 1947. In Fruita, an annual “Mike the Headless Chicken Day” is held in May.
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