Nice old-fashioned quirks in Book Design

[Member Dou…]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

Hi all,

I'm starting a thread about bygone quirks in book design.

When I say quirks I mean things like endpapers, a note on the typeface at the back of the book, vignettes for each chapter opener, the first word of the next page at the bottom of the current page etc etc.

Can anyone think of some others?

[Member The…]

... a note on the typeface at the back of the book ...

That's a "Colophon": When did people start to name their typeface in the colophon? and thread reference therein.

[Member ken…]

Okay, I’ll grant you that last one (the stray word at the bottom); but what makes the others “bygone”?

Endpapers, colophons, and vignettes aren’t extinct.

[Member Dou…]

Ok, ok… 'bygone's' the wrong word; traditional is perhaps a better term.

Anyway, whilst badly phrased (sorry), hopefully you get the jist?

I guess another one I can think of is the use of a pilcrow rather than a paragraph space.

[Member Pub…]

The headbands and footbands at the top and bottom of the spine of a casebound book. They are a vestige of the threads used when books were hand-sewn. Like the sleeve buttons on men's suit jackets, they are a decorative artifact of something that used to be functional.

[Member Dou…]

Brilliant, yes, I'll add head bands (and ribbons) to the list.

Any typographic ideas?

[Member dtw…]

I think there's a lot less use than there used to be, of decorated rules or fleurons to separate sections, or just to fill up a small white gap at the end of a page.

(As an aside: one of the academic journals I work on, used to start every article with a drop cap in a six-line decorated border, and have a decorated rule separating run-on book reviews. Up until 2004. I'm kinda sad that it doesn't do that any more...)

[Member jab…]

There's some interesting stuff mentioned in the final programme of a conference that took place in September.

The majority of the papers delivered on Thursday 29 September can be watched on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/rvpeee#grid/user/5A6D4C45B2BF2F4D

Book Design from the Middle Ages to the Future: Traditions & Evolutions
The objective of this international congress is to explore traditions and innovations in book design and typography from the manuscript era to the age of the electronic book. The congress explicitly wants to focus on these elements of book design that have faded out, have survived or that evolved over a long period of time...

[Member Nic…]

Extra spacing between sentences, killed by kerning.
However, I wouldn’t call that a quirk, as it served a purpose.

**

Reference symbols have been largely replaced by numbers.
Again, I wouldn’t call them a quirk—they were a practical way for printers to make reference calls by means of characters doing double duty—without recourse to a special sort of superior figures or packing a smaller size figure.

Similarly:

Roman figures in italic text.
Old-style figures in all small caps.

**

I would say that “dumb” quotes and faux italic/bold have become (not so nice) old-fashioned quirks, relics of the early days of DTP.
Perhaps they will acquire a quaint cachet in time.

**

A new quirk is how “smart” layout apps abbreviate numbers incorrectly, with a single left quote mark.

[Member Jos…]

Various degrees of oldness and extinctness:

Running heads that were bigger than the main text. Never see that anymore.

Also, signature numbers printed at the bottom of the first page of a signature.

Use of dot leaders rather than solid rules for blanks (in tables, etc.)

Triangulated headings and chapter ends.

Text set solid.

Turnover lines brought up or down, and set flush right with one left parenthesis or bracket (still see this sometimes)

"Block quotes" with quote marks down the whole lefthand side

Italics for all names

To-morrow, rôle, co-operate or coöperate, etc.

The word at the bottom of the page is called a catchword: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catchword

[Member dtw…]

Good ones.
Extra space inside punctuation marks such as quotes, exclamation and question marks.
Very widely spaced dot leaders in TOCs.

[Member Fro…]

Em dashes instead of ellipsis.

[Member opr…]

Pilcrows in place of paragraph breaks, daggers, roman numerals in appendices. Em space between a dropcap and the first line. Letter-spaced words with intact ligatures in fraktur.

[Member eli…]

End-of-chapter line lengths that are centered and decrease in length down in a triangle shape. Is there a name for that?

[Member Jos…]

That's what I meant by "triangulated chapter endings." Not sure if there's a better term.

Also, and still from wildly different periods:

Double-em dashes for interruptions: "But I think——"

And for anonymity: Mr. K—— (still see this sometimes)

Periods after headings

Double space between sentences

Cent sign, "per" sign

Pointing printer's fingers ("index")

&c.

Roman caps with italic lc

Tables where the vertical rules stop to let the horizontal ones through, or vice versa

Of course, if you're in England, lots of current American punctuation looks like a charming old fashioned idiosyncrasy: Mr. (instead of British Mr), 1,000 (instead of British 1 000 or 1000), etc.

[Member alu…]

Color Plates/Tip Ins

[Member pja…]

One of my beefs is that, often, in a well-produced non-fiction book, where there's an index there will not be a typeface note.

[Member Dou…]

Hi,

Some great responses! Thanks everyone.

Two bits that intrigue me:

'Turnover lines brought up or down, and set flush right with one left parenthesis or bracket (still see this sometimes)' – I can't imagine what this looks like… can you explain?

'Color Plates/Tip Ins' – what are these?

[Member dtw…]

'turnover lines brought up or down...'
I used to see this in old dictionaries a lot, to save space. Something like this:

...where there's three-quarters of a line of empty space after the entry for "turnout...", while the entry for "turnpike..." only wraps to a second line by a short distance, so they turn it up (and right-align it) instead of down, and indicate it with a bracket.

'Color plates/tip ins': a separate signature of better-quality paper, specifically for taking color illustrations, all grouped together.

[Member ken…]

> 'Color plates/tip ins': a separate signature of better-quality paper, specifically for taking color illustrations, all grouped together.

Yes, that describes color plates — a separate signature of color printing gathered and bound together as a section in an otherwise one-color book (or sometimes two-color: I’ve done that before).

“Tip-in” usually refers to a color illustration/photo that has been printed by a separate process and then affixed onto a blank page set aside for the purpose in an otherwise one-color book.

Color plates are still common in certain genres. Tip-ins, however, require hand work and so are almost never seen these days.

[Member Jos…]

Turnover lines:

Yes, that's exactly what I meant. Never seen it in a dictionary, but you still see it (rarely) in poetry and plays. Here, from the very first edition of A Midſomer nights Dreame:

http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/media/facsimile/F1s/MNDF1s/MNDF1_0170...

On the upper right, "bryer" (briar) is turned over this way.

It's maybe more interesting to note, however, when they don't do it.

Ooh, this reminds me of another quirk: the long S.

[Member Té…]

Is it mis-sing or miss-ing?

[Member Dic…]

Coloured or gold tops (to the pages). I would like to tip in, on some projects, but cannot find sufficiently thin quality inkjet paper. Too many tip-ins and the book won't close well and/or the binding will get strained, I imagine. Unless you go to the trouble of dummy pages where the tip-ins will go, which you then razor out. Did they ever do this back in the day? And then what about the page nos? Some scope for error.

[Member Nic…]

Tissue paper to protect “plates”.

[Member Jam…]

> Tip-ins, however, require hand work and
> so are almost never seen these days.

An unusual example that comes to mind is the 1997 coffee-table book "From Myst to Riven" (about the making of those computers games). The central graphic on the cover was glued in place after the cover was printed, so they could offer your choice of 5 different cover images.