Here from Four Keys Book Arts is a nice video about making a medieval (blank in this case) book. The link comes via Shelf Awareness and Open Culture, which has an account of the work plus links to more detailed videos from the same source.
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There’s no narration just an intermittent annoyingly medievalesque sound track, which mostly keeps its peace. They seem compelled to reach for the recorders whenever a needle comes into play!
In the beginning was the bit of type. And the bit of type measured . . . whatever it measured. Your local type founder might make a pica type that measured 4.20mm, whereas the one in the next city made a pica type that measured 4.25mm — not of course that you’d have had access to any standard measuring system like millimeters to enable you to discover this difference. They were obviously pretty much the same, indistinguishable by eye, and would fulfill the same function: pica was the type size considered suitable for picas — which were ecclesiastical directories of movable feasts — and nobody needed to fuss about exact matching. The wor[l]d was intensely local.
All the various sizes of type had names, many of which may be found at the post Pica. None of these type sizes was based on any standard, and none of them measured the same as another with the same label — except perhaps in cases of accident. It was a bit like clothes being Small/Medium/Large, rather than Size 8 — though no doubt Size 8 is itself liable to variation from manufacturer to manufacturer (and from UK to USA). As a seventeenth-century printer you’d get your type from one source, and every order for agate would result in type which was the “right” size and would fit with the old agate you had lying around, because it was cast from the same matrices at the same foundry every time. By the middle of the eighteenth century the printing industry had developed to an extent sufficient to allow for thoughts which extended further than the city walls, and the idea of some sort of common measurement became relevant: if you bought a font from some Italian source, it would probably cause problems of fit if you tried to combine it with the type (nominally of the same size) which you already had. Now this might be OK on a national basis, but units of basic measurement were different in different countries, let alone different sections of different countries. The French system was based upon the pouce, the French inch. Using similar calculations the Anglo-Saxon world followed suit about a hundred years later, but of course there are small differences between the pouce, the Imperial inch and the US inch*, so there are differences between a Didot point and an American point (which is also used in Britain). Wikipedia suggests that the difference between Didot and Point may have had something to do with the need to accommodate accents, but this sounds more to me like a coincidental benefit rather than causal.
In my youth we used to have to say that a point was approximately 1/72 of an inch, as indeed it was. The computer has unified the world however, and now 1 point equals exactly 1/72″ — because Apple has so decreed. To quote my 2015 post on Measurement “About 1783 François-Ambroise Didot introduced his system based upon Pierre Simon Fournier’s earlier version. Didot based his system on the pouce, the French royal inch. One Didot point measures 0.3759715104mm, usually rounded off to 0.0376mm. A Cicero is the French equivalent of our pica, 12 Didot points. An American point measures 0.35136666 mm. The difference is explained by the fact that the official standard approved by the Type Founders Association of the United States in 1886 was the Johnson pica, equal to exactly 0.166 inch. Maybe they chose this standard for sentimental reasons, since its ancestry went back to the press which Benjamin Franklin had bought from Fournier while he was in France. Such minuscule differences don’t seem to have caused any difficulties: the direct communication between French and British or American printers was minimal — at least until the offset and now digital eras. The British industry followed the Americans, making the formal decision in 1903. No doubt this would be because Monotype and Linotype machines originated in USA.”
Since letterpress went the way of all flesh, all this point talk has become increasingly pointless. It’s still used in the business as a handy, well-established jargon, which we all relish as having a sort of olde-worldly charm, and I dare say that in Europe the same situation applies with the didot. It’s now a bit like the pica/agate days — 12 point really only makes meaningful sense in relation to 11 point; not many people are getting out their loupes and measuring.
* In the British Commonwealth the inch was defined in terms of the “Imperial Standard Yard”. The United States adopted the conversion factor 1 metre = 39.37 inches by an act in 1866. In 1930, the British Standards Institution adopted an inch of exactly 25.4 mm. The American Standards Association followed suit in 1933. The “International Yard” was eventually defined by treaty in 1959. The international yard equals 0.9144 meters, which means the inch is now universally 2.54mm which would make the point’s size 0.352777mm — as shown in line 5 of the table.
I had one of these when I was a child. I remember it with a wooden dabber, just like the rubber stampers you used to encounter in ancient banks and offices. It came with a little ink pad, tweezers, strings of rubber letters which you had to tear apart into individual letters — preparatory to losing them all! — and then pick up with the tweezers and insert into grooves on the face of the dabber. Load it up with ink on your ink pad, then carefully press it against a piece of paper, and a few words at a time you were in a position to print an entire book. Ha, Ha. I have to confess I was better at losing the bits than I was at printing anything and rather quickly lost interest.
A collection of John Bull type trays
Just My Type, Simon Garfield’s 2010 book about fonts, quotes the instructions for set No. 4, “Separate the India-rubber type carefully. The letters are merely pressed into the holder. When the word or sentence is complete see that the face of the type is level. To print, carefully ink type on the pad . . . Should pad dry, damp the surface with a little water.” The sets were made by The Charter Stamp Company (makers presumably of those office stampers), the first one coming out in 1922 (though British Letterpress in 100 Objects has located one which seems to have been made prior to the formation of Charter). They also relate more nefarious uses, for instance, “In October 1976, the Hammersmith & Shepherds Bush Gazette reported on a Social Security fraud where blank DHSS vouchers had been stolen and then been typewritten over then stamped with a John Bull set to allow criminals to take £28,000 they were not entitled to.” They claim that lots of people who became printers had their interest piqued by a John Bull Outfit. I suspect criminal fraud is however now more easily achieved.
This is letterpress printing at its most basic. You can see Stephen Fry playing with one of these Outfits early on in his Gutenberg film, which you can see here. His is a more modern set than mine was and the wooden stamper’s been replaced by a plastic one — his is No. 30. Go about 1 minute 35 seconds into the video to see him opening the box.
Nostalgia Central has a little post about the toy, introduced by a photo showing the wooden stamper. More of the history and prehistory of the John Bull kits appears at British Letterpress in 100 Objects.
“The Reading Room at Midtown Manhattan’s Bryant Park presented a panel of four debut authors. Pictured: (from left) Eddie Ndopu (Sipping Dom Pérignon Through a Straw: Success as a Disabled Achiever); host Kathy Curto (Not for Nothing: Glimpse into a Jersey Girlhood); Joshunda Sanders (Women of the Post); John, a bookseller at Kinokuniya Books; Javier Fuentes (Countries of Origin); and Christy Cashman (The Truth About Horses).”
Bryant Park, quite appropriately, it being behind the main New York Public Library building, (and I suspect above it too) has become a sort of summer book center. For at least a decade publishers have been providing books which fill bookcases on the northern side of the lawn. These, people can read at the tables and chairs provided beneath the trees, or at a pinch take away with them. Bryant Park, in the shape of “Reading Room” organizes this service as well as readings and other author events: presumably this is ultimately a City service. Here’s a listing of recent events. Their website also includes a daily schedule.
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In a less literary mode, in wintertime the park is transformed into a skating rink and a Christmas market. The following video does go on — the first couple of minutes will give you the flavor though.
Audiobooks are doing well. We occasionally get cries of anxiety from the mathematically incautious warning us that print book sales are doomed compared to booming audiobooks which show healthy percentage increases every year. The problem with this anxiety, which we went through a few years ago with ebooks, is that it is mathematically jejune. If product A, selling 10,000 units a month enjoys a 1% increase, it is now selling 10,100 units. If product B, selling 100 a month increases its sales by 100% it will now be selling 200. The number of additional copies sold is the same in both instances, but when presented as percentages which sounds better?
In some ways of course the more formats we can devise for the books we publish the better. Not everyone wants to buy their reading material in the cheapest, or even in the most “convenient” format. I await with bated breath instantaneous direct brain-to-brain transmission. And projected books for reading in bed seems like a no-brainer. The commentariat needs to remember that publishers like to sell books — they are not too fussed if these are paperbacks, hardbacks, ebooks, audiobooks or whatever, just so long as they sell.
One expects that the AI-generated voices (actually I think it may just be voice) narrating the 5,000 new audiobooks newly put out by Project Gutenberg do not “do the police in different voices” (disappointingly the only Dickens in the group is Edwin Drood, but easy availability is all.) TechCrunch relates the Project Gutenberg tale, and the list of titles may be found here. Click to tune in. You get to listen to them free of charge through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Books, or The Internet Archive.
The narrator-bot doesn’t sound as bad as you might have expected; it sounds attractively human, though the tone is even, so even. I have to confess that Paradise Lost works quite well, though I have failed to devote the advertised full three hours to it (can this be true — surely it’d take longer). Our male, American-sounding narrator takes it at a fair clip which no doubt glosses over a few misreadings and mispronunciations. For instance our machine-man is confused by contractions, reading “th’ Etrurian” as if he were a football player, T. H. Etrurian. Still, you can’t beat the price.
A few years ago I wrote a random scattershot entitled Books performed. I’m not sure whether full-cast readings of audiobooks has become a thing or not, but there’s the way to do the police in different voices! I suspect it’s not become a big business: if one of the problems of audiobook publishing is paying the reader, then paying a full cast of readers must be almost prohibitive. I suppose we will figure out how to get AI to generate different voices for us, but that’ll obviously require quite a bit of editorial intervention to mark up the various dramatis personae. This no doubt means it’ll not happen, ‘cos why spend more when you can profit on less? Nevertheless, Audible returns a lot of results for a search for Audible Drama — including The Charles Dickens BBC Radio Collection, which does include Our Mutual Friend. Audible also makes Our Mutual Friendavailable complete and unabridged on its own, with however a single reader. Quite a commitment for our reader Meera Syal! (I bet the BBC versions are edited down and started life as “radio plays”.)
Still Audible Drama looks like a very loose category— results include —
— labelling Persuasion as an Audible Original is to say the least original. Read the small type and you’ll discover that there is actually a cast; Ms Pugh is just the narrator. Despite there being quite a lot of these “performances” of the classics, it does seem that a number of their “Original Dramas” are actually original, and performed by a cast of readers. One, The Starling Project by Jeffrey Deaver, was referenced in the post, “Books preformed”, linked to above. Whether these multi-reader versions are commanding a higher price than single reader texts is a little difficult to establish since Amazon, marketing kings in every way, advertise all the Audible books at the attractive price of $0 — which is your price if you subscribe at $14.95 per month. (This also seems quite a commitment.)
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* This, possibly the most striking sentence in English literature, comes from Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. “You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the police in different voices” Mrs Higden tells us in Chapter 16 of Book the First as we observe Mr Sloppy turning the mangle.
BookRiot brings us an estimate of the cost of setting up a new bookstore made by Arvyn Cerézo. In brief the answer is “a lot”. (Link via Today in Books.)
Mr Cerézo does give specific numbers for the various cost elements which make up the bookstore economy, and these scare the pants off me — but the entrepreneurial urge is shamefully lacking in my make-up. The problem with bookselling always seemed to me that your margins are determined by your suppliers. You buy at a discount off a price at which to all intents and purposes you have to sell the book. Just try getting $2.50 more for that Stephen King book than all the other stores in town. Publishers have always felt an obligation to “support” bookstores, so discounts are fixed at a level which is believed to promote survival without much risk of prosperity. Some have tried to solve this problem by selling higher-margin goods as well, stationery, used-books, chotchkies. Still, selling books is a great way to spend your life. Tragically the characteristics called for for this life-style choice are not closely aligned with those required for business success.
Nevertheless, despite my nervousness, bookstores do appear to be doing well these days. New stores are constantly opening, Barnes & Noble seems to have stabilized, even to be mildly prospering, Bookshop.com is thriving. Book sales are up over 2019 — the pandemic bump messed up statistics. Obviously self-publishing has brought a large new audience into the game. Mild optimism doesn’t seem out of place. How much have you got?
“Would you say that a(n actual) banana duct-taped to a wall may be protected by copyright? And would you consider a claim that the author of said duct-taped banana copied the work of another artist who had also duct-taped a (plastic) banana to a green cardboard an infringement of the copyright owned by said artist?” Well, the answer (in the USA at least) appears for the moment to be yes to both questions.
Could we face a copyright lawsuit over the unauthorized adaptation of duct-tape executed by all those who will refer to it as duck-tape?
Maybe we’ve gotten to a point where we have to accept that copyright is a right that needs to be narrowed down. Maybe movies, and photos, and works of representational art are actually fundamentally different from novels and plays, and poems and monographs, and diaries and instruction manuals, and so on and so on. It’s hard to believe that there’s really any commonality between a banana duct-taped to a wall and The Waste Land, and to have the same law protecting both surely can’t be sensible. The only way of readers experiencing a written work is through the making of a copy, apart that is from hearing the author recite it for you. The making of a copy doesn’t really come into it when it comes to looking at a picture, hearing a symphony, going to see a film (though of course all these things can ultimately be copied — but is that enough to justify their being protected by copyright law?)
At the OUP blog Eleanora Rosati has an interesting discussion of the situation — which of course is different in USA, Britain, and Europe. There’s little doubt that copyright law stands in need of revision. Computers have utterly changed the environment since the last revision.
Seventy years ago, in response to the McCarthy-ite terror, the ALA and the APA issued their Freedom to Read Statement. It went thus: (Link via Publishers Weekly.)
The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack. Private groups and public authorities in various parts of the country are working to remove or limit access to reading materials, to censor content in schools, to label “controversial” views, to distribute lists of “objectionable” books or authors, and to purge libraries. These actions apparently rise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to counter threats to safety or national security, as well as to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals. We, as individuals devoted to reading and as librarians and publishers responsible for disseminating ideas, wish to assert the public interest in the preservation of the freedom to read.
Most attempts at suppression rest on a denial of the fundamental premise of democracy: that the ordinary individual, by exercising critical judgment, will select the good and reject the bad. We trust Americans to recognize propaganda and misinformation, and to make their own decisions about what they read and believe. We do not believe they are prepared to sacrifice their heritage of a free press in order to be “protected” against what others think may be bad for them. We believe they still favor free enterprise in ideas and expression.
These efforts at suppression are related to a larger pattern of pressures being brought against education, the press, art and images, films, broadcast media, and the Internet. The problem is not only one of actual censorship. The shadow of fear cast by these pressures leads, we suspect, to an even larger voluntary curtailment of expression by those who seek to avoid controversy or unwelcome scrutiny by government officials.
Such pressure toward conformity is perhaps natural to a time of accelerated change. And yet suppression is never more dangerous than in such a time of social tension. Freedom has given the United States the elasticity to endure strain. Freedom keeps open the path of novel and creative solutions, and enables change to come by choice. Every silencing of a heresy, every enforcement of an orthodoxy, diminishes the toughness and resilience of our society and leaves it the less able to deal with controversy and difference.
Now as always in our history, reading is among our greatest freedoms. The freedom to read and write is almost the only means for making generally available ideas or manners of expression that can initially command only a small audience. The written word is the natural medium for the new idea and the untried voice from which come the original contributions to social growth. It is essential to the extended discussion that serious thought requires, and to the accumulation of knowledge and ideas into organized collections.
We believe that free communication is essential to the preservation of a free society and a creative culture. We believe that these pressures toward conformity present the danger of limiting the range and variety of inquiry and expression on which our democracy and our culture depend. We believe that every American community must jealously guard the freedom to publish and to circulate, in order to preserve its own freedom to read. We believe that publishers and librarians have a profound responsibility to give validity to that freedom to read by making it possible for the readers to choose freely from a variety of offerings.
The freedom to read is guaranteed by the Constitution. Those with faith in free people will stand firm on these constitutional guarantees of essential rights and will exercise the responsibilities that accompany these rights.
We therefore affirm these propositions:
It is in the public interest for publishers and librarians to make available the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those that are unorthodox, unpopular, or considered dangerous by the majority. Creative thought is by definition new, and what is new is different. The bearer of every new thought is a rebel until that idea is refined and tested. Totalitarian systems attempt to maintain themselves in power by the ruthless suppression of any concept that challenges the established orthodoxy. The power of a democratic system to adapt to change is vastly strengthened by the freedom of its citizens to choose widely from among conflicting opinions offered freely to them. To stifle every nonconformist idea at birth would mark the end of the democratic process. Furthermore, only through the constant activity of weighing and selecting can the democratic mind attain the strength demanded by times like these. We need to know not only what we believe but why we believe it.
Publishers, librarians, and booksellers do not need to endorse every idea or presentation they make available. It would conflict with the public interest for them to establish their own political, moral, or aesthetic views as a standard for determining what should be published or circulated. Publishers and librarians serve the educational process by helping to make available knowledge and ideas required for the growth of the mind and the increase of learning. They do not foster education by imposing as mentors the patterns of their own thought. The people should have the freedom to read and consider a broader range of ideas than those that may be held by any single librarian or publisher or government or church. It is wrong that what one can read should be confined to what another thinks proper.
It is contrary to the public interest for publishers or librarians to bar access to writings on the basis of the personal history or political affiliations of the author. No art or literature can flourish if it is to be measured by the political views or private lives of its creators. No society of free people can flourish that draws up lists of writers to whom it will not listen, whatever they may have to say.
There is no place in our society for efforts to coerce the taste of others, to confine adults to the reading matter deemed suitable for adolescents, or to inhibit the efforts of writers to achieve artistic expression. To some, much of modern expression is shocking. But is not much of life itself shocking? We cut off literature at the source if we prevent writers from dealing with the stuff of life. Parents and teachers have a responsibility to prepare the young to meet the diversity of experiences in life to which they will be exposed, as they have a responsibility to help them learn to think critically for themselves. These are affirmative responsibilities, not to be discharged simply by preventing them from reading works for which they are not yet prepared. In these matters values differ, and values cannot be legislated; nor can machinery be devised that will suit the demands of one group without limiting the freedom of others.
It is not in the public interest to force a reader to accept the prejudgment of a label characterizing any expression or its author as subversive or dangerous. The ideal of labeling presupposes the existence of individuals or groups with wisdom to determine by authority what is good or bad for others. It presupposes that individuals must be directed in making up their minds about the ideas they examine. But Americans do not need others to do their thinking for them.
It is the responsibility of publishers and librarians, as guardians of the people’s freedom to read, to contest encroachments upon that freedom by individuals or groups seeking to impose their own standards or tastes upon the community at large; and by the government whenever it seeks to reduce or deny public access to public information. It is inevitable in the give and take of the democratic process that the political, the moral, or the aesthetic concepts of an individual or group will occasionally collide with those of another individual or group. In a free society individuals are free to determine for themselves what they wish to read, and each group is free to determine what it will recommend to its freely associated members. But no group has the right to take the law into its own hands, and to impose its own concept of politics or morality upon other members of a democratic society. Freedom is no freedom if it is accorded only to the accepted and the inoffensive. Further, democratic societies are more safe, free, and creative when the free flow of public information is not restricted by governmental prerogative or self-censorship.
It is the responsibility of publishers and librarians to give full meaning to the freedom to read by providing books that enrich the quality and diversity of thought and expression. By the exercise of this affirmative responsibility, they can demonstrate that the answer to a “bad” book is a good one, the answer to a “bad” idea is a good one. The freedom to read is of little consequence when the reader cannot obtain matter fit for that reader’s purpose. What is needed is not only the absence of restraint, but the positive provision of opportunity for the people to read the best that has been thought and said. Books are the major channel by which the intellectual inheritance is handed down, and the principal means of its testing and growth. The defense of the freedom to read requires of all publishers and librarians the utmost of their faculties, and deserves of all Americans the fullest of their support.
We state these propositions neither lightly nor as easy generalizations. We here stake out a lofty claim for the value of the written word. We do so because we believe that it is possessed of enormous variety and usefulness, worthy of cherishing and keeping free. We realize that the application of these propositions may mean the dissemination of ideas and manners of expression that are repugnant to many persons. We do not state these propositions in the comfortable belief that what people read is unimportant. We believe rather that what people read is deeply important; that ideas can be dangerous; but that the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Bullet points 4 and 5 are perhaps particularly relevant to today’s issues. A noble rallying cry concludes the Statement: “Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.”
Books should to one of these four ends conduce,
For wisdom, piety, delight or use.
Wisdom and piety were almost the mission statement of our ancient universities. That they also knew about delight and use at the university press is demonstrated here by Charles Batey, Printer to the University of Oxford from 1946 to 1958:
“The type should be legible, properly disposed on the page, and well inked: the paper should be opaque, of a right colour, kindly to the eye, and pleasant to the touch; and the leaves should be secured in a safe binding, suitably lettered with the book’s title. The whole should be of convenient weight, not burdensome; the book should open easily, and without alarms or crackles, and lie quite flat: and to all demands it should respond in a quiet gentlemanly way; and as we read on, it should withdraw itself from our consciousness, leaving us alone with the author.”
(Quoted in Peter Sutcliffe’s The Oxford University Press: An Informal History.)
On the other half of the book making business: Jason Epstein, in his 2001 Book Business, starts off with a paragraph I would love to have written myself, though I’d have omitted the very first word:
“Trade book publishing is by its nature a cottage industry, decentralized, improvisational, personal; best performed by small groups of like-minded people, devoted to their craft, jealous of their autonomy, sensitive to the needs of writers and to the diverse interests of readers. If money were their primary goal, these people would probably have chosen other careers. . . . But most book publishers and editors I have known prefer to think of themselves as I do, as devotees of a craft whose reward is the work itself and not its cash value.”
This sort of small-scaleishness is of course exemplified in the shape of the self-publisher. Thus far big-time authors appear (from the outside at least) not to have grabbed this facility for themselves. Of course it may be that they don’t need to bother, that their deals with their publishers divert more of the revenue toward them than a straight royalty deal might imply. I have no information to this effect: I merely speculate. Still, as long as tons of paper and ink are involved there remains a good set of reasons to “hire” a publisher.
Making Book 