Nice old-fashioned quirks in Book Design

Joshua Langman · December 19, 2011

Signatures bound with uncut pages, requiring the use of a "book knife" (?) — I feel like there's another term for the specific tool you use to cut them apart, but can't think of it right now. Anyone want to chime in?

Nick Shinn · December 19, 2011

Paper knife.

Dick Wynne · December 21, 2011

A blind-blocked recess on the cover where a printed design or photo etc can be affixed, somewhat protected from scuffing.

Dick Wynne · December 21, 2011

Widow / orphan control, to the extent of shortening the pages of a spread by 1 (which I do quite often), even 2 (which I haven't yet but wouldn't rule it out) lines, where necessary. (In fact, any W/O control at all would be nice in many modern trade books, it is fast becoming 'quaint').

Joshua Langman · December 21, 2011

Hm. Personally, I never do widow/orphan control for normal prose as I think it already looks … not so much quaint as inconsistent. I think pages lengths bobbing up and down is uglier than single-line paragraphs. I do control in poetry, though, and to avoid very obvious blemishes like a subhead at the bottom of a page with one line after it, or a two-line page at the end of a chapter.

jacobsievers · December 22, 2011

A half title and a bastard title.

Dick Wynne · December 23, 2011

"A half title and a bastard title."

Aren't these one and the same thing?

I do like the theatrical sense of anticipation created by, say, dark coloured endpapers --> half-title --> title page on first encountering a book. I gather the half-title originated as a way to identify and protect the book in the bindery, is this right?

Joshua Langman · December 23, 2011

This is how the title page itself originated.

pjay · December 24, 2011

Occasionally you get a superfluity of title pages - I had a book recently with 4 or 5 successive title pages - 'enough already'.

Except for the artisan presses, and aside from electronic books, the niceties of book production seem to have pretty much gone by the board. It's apparent that pennies are pinched in the matter of editing and proofreading: a number of books are going straight to press from the author's computer without further ado. Mistakes in grammar, word usage, etc., even turn up in books with respected authors and publishers.

Alas.

jacobsievers · January 5, 2012

Half-way through Theodore Low de Vinne's Treatise on Titlepages. Amusing: lots of bygone niceties/quirks/straightup-insanity to choose from.

Té Rowan · January 6, 2012

@Nick – Paper knife, eh? Well, I’m glad I only need one for envelopes now.

Bert Vanderveen · January 6, 2012

@Dick Wynne: To compensate for the added thickness of multiple tip ins you would use strips of paper, bound with the full pages, to provide for some room. This way a tip in on every single full page is feasible.

My fave o-f quirk: lots of ribbon markers in lots of colours.

hrant · February 13, 2012

You want old-fashioned? Buckles! :-)
http://tinyurl.com/78kou3w

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

Not exactly. First proper spacing between sentences was
killed by monospaced fonts (a mechanical compromise
in typewriters) which have spacing so loose that the single
space after a period gets lost, so you put two spaces. Then
desktop publishing killed (or demoted 99%) monospaced
fonts, but some people stayed dead inside and they still
use two spaces.

hhp

Nick Shinn · February 13, 2012

The kerning-killed-double-spacing theory:

Without kerning, many words that begin sentences (in mixed case, of course) have a large gap between the capital and the lowercase letter immediately after. The culprits are most notably T, V, W and Y followed by a vowel. Double spacing avoided the effect of said capitals appearing to be evenly isolated between the end of the previous sentence and the rest of their word.

Typewriters had nothing to do with it, as the practice was widespread before their invention.

The demise of double spacing began with Linotype’s two letter logotypes for the problem capital-vowel combinations.

hrant · February 13, 2012

> the practice was widespread before their invention.

Reference?
Note BTW that in metal composition you don't "double"
a space after a period - you just choose a spacing sort of
a functional width.

hhp

Nick Shinn · February 13, 2012

Some threads on double spacing:
https://typography.guru/forums/topic/13466-forwarding
http://www.typophile.com/node/63549
https://typography.guru/forums/topic/66108-forwarding

hrant · February 13, 2012

Could you point to a specific post?

hhp

Nick Shinn · February 13, 2012

Some Dickens, from the original 1853 publication. (Typewriters introduced in the 1870s.)

Perhaps more so than the kerning issue, the variation in justification accounts for extra sentence spacing—otherwise sentence spacing in a tight line would be way less than word spacing in an open line, which gives the wrong hierarchical impression of how text is organized into paragraph/sentence/words.

hrant · February 13, 2012

That's clearly a justification trick.
Anything more convincing?

hhp

Don McCahill · February 14, 2012

How many do you have to see to believe it? This is a link to a facsimile edition of Pride and Prejudice, showing the same feature. (Use the look inside to look at interior pages).

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0486440915/104-0622893-061...

Riccardo Sartori · February 14, 2012

That's clearly a justification trick.

It may well be. And at the same time it could as well be the origin of the "double space after the period" habit used with typewriter.

hrant · February 14, 2012

> How many do you have to see to believe it?

I can't nail down a number* but how about we
start with just one (that's not full-justified).

* I think it does require a few independent
precedents to qualify as a trend/influence.

hhp

Nick Shinn · February 14, 2012

how about we start with just one (that's not full-justified).

See the second line of the Bleak House image above.

hrant · February 14, 2012

OK, I see that. That's even way more than the equivalent
of two spaces, plus "De" isn't loose at all. I wonder what
they were thinking, since something like the "Ve" (middle
of 8th line) seems too "innocent" to trigger an across-the-
board massive-space-after-periods strategy. I wonder if
in this particular case the profusion of quotes (which are
very loose there) was the main trigger instead.

FWIW I'm willing to change my view, but I have a feeling
the solid logic of the typewriter version might be being
rejected by typesetters because they feel embarrassed?

hhp

Té Rowan · February 14, 2012

All paragraphs indented, including the first, is still the norm in some places.

Was it ever common to set poems and poetry within frames? Coloured frames?

Nice old-fashioned quirks in Book Design

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