Print publishers are currently caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of a weakening economy and higher prices for essential costs such as paper, freight, and postage.

The soft economy pressures publishers to lower prices on books, but this is difficult to do with the cost of paper at an all-time high. Gas prices have caused freight charges to rise markedly. New federal regulations make it easier for the postal service to raise rates, and another increase takes effect today.

Many publishers will respond by lowering quality — using cheaper grades of paper and cutting costs wherever possible (although eventually I think they will be forced to raise prices nonetheless). But with the web as an always available instant provider of content that is almost free to users, can print publication compete for large numbers of consumers? Another approach would be to recognize print as an exclusive product for a literati class and accept smaller print runs and higher prices.

Difficult choices.

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Shown: Odysseus between Scyla and Charybdis, Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1794-1796.

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LINK: As costs soar, will prices follow?

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• uh, er, um, erm and eh
• Dumbest of the twenty worst?
• Soft shading in Photoshop
• Pro rata, pro ratad, prorate (editor’s dilemma)
• Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map
• Six-Word Memoirs: Life Stories Distilled

link love

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Different fonts are provided for four type sizes: caption, regular, subhead, and display. The caption fonts, for example, have large x-heights and heavier strokes in order to hold up at small sizes. The display fonts have elegantly modest x-heights and light stroke weights suitable for presentation at large sizes. The header for the image above is the medium display weight (to balance some of the dark fonts,including the caption fonts, which would not ordinarily be used at this large a size. The fonts also include a full range of diacritics and foreign-language characters.

Garamond Premier Pro was designed by Robert Slimbach on the model of the roman types of Claude Garamond and the italic types of Robert Granjon; it represent a reworking and expansion of the earlier Garamond Pro. It is available in OpenType from Adobe.

I sought to maintain the fidelity of the metal type as revealed in the specimen material—rather than taking a more subjective approach, such as attempting to reproduce artifacts of letterpress printing, or at the other extreme, modernizing form through heavy-handed stylization or drastic structural modification. I feel that by overtly imitating the appearance of an outdated technology, a digital type can appear antique, or even quaint, while excessive stylization can diminish the organic properties inherent in a hand-cut type. With Garamond Premier, I followed the details of line and form displayed in the original metal type as much as possible in order to reveal the ideal that I felt Garamond and Granjon were trying to achieve in their work. By preserving subtleties of shape, a level of fidelity is maintained that would normally be clouded by the noise-generating effects of letterpress printing on handmade papers. Throughout the design process, I repeatedly returned to the original proofs to ensure I was preserving details I felt were essential to the design. At the same time, I often felt it necessary to carefully adjust shapes and parameters in order to harmonize the varied work of these two individual designers within this single type family.
– Robert Slimbach

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In yesterday’s discussion of the map for my Persian ceramics book, I mentioned that I hadn’t settled on a map color scheme. Subsequently I decided to pick up the scheme from one of the objects in the book. Shown is a detail of that object, which I’m using as a section opener.

This is a beautiful fritware bowl with underglaze and overglaze foliate decoration. It dates from 1180-1250 and is thought to come from Rayy or Kashan in Iran. The abstract patterning is unusual on this kind of bowl.

In order to replicate the object’s color scheme, I simply adjusted the main hue/saturation slider in Photoshop until I approximated the reddish brown colors of the dark areas of the bowl. Because the type is not part of the underlying image, it was unaffected. Then I picked up the teal blue color from the bowl with the eyedropper tool. I had made the water areas of the map flat, so they were solid colors. I selected a portion of one and then chose select similar color from the selection menu and filled the selection with the new color.

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After a long interval in which nothing happened, suddenly I’m back working on my little book about Persian ceramics (the trim size, 9.5 x 10 in., is small by museum publishing standards; it would have seemed large back in my text-based literary publishing days). This book required a map. I originally intended to send it out to a professional map maker, but because the budget is tight, I ended up doing it myself.

The curator wanted to show a lot of information, including modern country names (but not boundaries), rivers, seas, a mountain, a regional designation (I think this is analogous to something between “the Bay Area” and “the Midwest”), and a lot of cities/kiln sites. He also wanted some “light topography.”

Shown is a screenshot reduced in size, so it’s slightly crude. This is a work in progress, and I haven’t decided on the final color scheme yet.

I don’t kid myself that I can produce a map of the same quality as a professional (although this compares favorably to the maps I was given as aids to positioning elements). But I do have certain principles that I hope keeps my maps from sucking too badly:

• Information must be legible
  It is remarkable how many maps break this seemingly obvious rule. This meant I had to keep my background map rather light and make the overlay text as dark and large as possible.
• Map elements should be clearly distinguished by typography
  While country names are among the largest geographic elements, in this map they function just as modern reference points, and the main information is historical. I set the country names in small caps in a nonassertive color and the city names (really the main map information) in black in the typeface’s bold caption font.
• All type should be horizontal
  This isn’t always possible, I guess, but I will go to great lengths to achieve it. The model maps I was given had type running this way and that, following the directions of rivers and mountains for example. I think this is migraine-inducing.
• Map typefaces should be compatible with the book text
  Maps sometimes are produced seemingly without any reference to the context in which they will be placed. This map uses the same type family that I use in the text of the book (Garamond Premier Pro).

At some point in making a map like this you will be tempted to fudge some elements to make the map look better. Cities that are too close together, for example, present problems when you are pushing the size and weight of the type for legibility. As I mentioned, this is a work in progress,. But I have done my best to be fairly accurate in positioning the cities. Tageo.com is a helpful database of geographic coordinate information.

I suppose you could view maps on a sort of spectrum. At one end you have satelite photography, which captures geographic relationships with absolute fidelity but offers no filtering or organizing of information. At the other end you have something like Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 New York subway map, which presents information pertinent to the map user with scant regard for actual geography. For each map, the maker must determine what information the map is attempting to present and then find the appropriate point on that spectrum to achieve the desired result.

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• Design is best from small teams
• An interview with type designer Jos Buivenga
• Teaching Typography in Buenos Aires
• Resist Redesign
• Cyan, The Color of Timeless Marketing
• More on creative commons and copyright
• Small Press Spotlight: C. M. Mayo
• Are you your bookshelf?
• Even though you know they’re heartless bastards they still manage to astonish with their mean-spiritedness
• John Denver karaoke sparks Thai killing spree
• Commas, turning up everywhere
• Young me / Now me

Link love

• Who’s linking in

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Overblown prose often springs up exactly where you would expect to find it. But shouldn’t this extraordinary opening by Peter Hartlaub to his review of Grand Theft Auto IV in the San Francisco Chronicle get some sort of award?

Cultural revolution often comes from seemingly imperfect people and unpopular places.

The most influential athlete was labeled a draft dodger. The man who helped bring rock ‘n’ roll to the mainstream grew a huge gut, wore sequined jumpsuits and then died in the bathroom. One of this country’s greatest defenders of free speech was dismissed as just a pornographer. But Muhammad Ali, Elvis and even Larry Flynt are remembered for their contributions - just as one day, the makers of Grand Theft Auto will be known as more than peddlers of video game sex and violence.

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Shown: Spirit of 1976, by Thomas Christensen

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I guess they thought she said “Lincoln-Douglass.”

What a debate that must have been!

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via Wonkette

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Okay, ready? What we have here are the first pages of results from flickrCC for a few publishing-related activities. Which set of images do you immediately respond to? Don’t look at each thumbnail, just get a quick impression. And absolutely no thinking allowed.

Editor

Publisher

Author

Translator

Marketing [Specialist]

Graphic Designer

Okay, I admit it, I just like images.

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Then just select “view as html” and save.

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The map below shows this distribution of various arrangements of objects and verbs, and adjectives and nouns.

We can zoom in on the map to see how English relates to other European languages in this respect.

The next  map shows the kind of distinctions or lack of distinctions made in words for green and blue and other colors.

The final example charts rhythm types. I didn’t realize how predominant the trochaic type — represented by the red circles — is. (This is the strong-weak-strong-weak pattern: DUM-dee DUM-dee DUM-dee.)

Much of the data is technical and will be mainly of interest to linguists, although translators would be well served to give it a look. It seems to me that writers may wish to glance at this kind of information as well, not only to better understand the medium in which they work, but maybe also for insights in handling dialect and conveying regional flavor.

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• Getty Images Bought by Hellman & Friedman
• Online reading counts too
• Amsterdam, world book capital
• Ways to get your magazine article queries accepted
• Humans nearly went extinct 70,000 years ago
• Buy your own New York subway map for only$299
• Royals reduced to vanity publishing

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Here’s a simple quiz. Indentify these writers based on these brief, slightly edited excerpts from their Wikipedia entries. I have provided the author’s images above, in a random order. These writers are all men so that I don’t have to play around with the pronouns; I’ll do a female version later.

1
He developed had a close relationship with his mother. In order to appease his father, who insisted that he pursue a career, he obtained a volunteer position at a library. After exerting considerable effort, he obtained a sick leave which was to extend for several years until he was considered to have resigned. He did not move from his parents’ apartment until after both were dead.

2
Supposedly studying medicine in Paris, in reality he squandered money his family could ill afford. He returned home after a few months, when his mother was diagnosed with cancer. She finally passed into a coma and died; he refused to kneel with other members of the family praying at her bedside, and after her death he drank heavily

3
He was devoted to his father. The same year his father died he suffered a severe head wound: during treatment, he nearly died of septicemia. While recovering from the accident, he began tinkering with a new style of writing, for which he would become famous.

4
His parents were first cousins, members of a family that included brewery owners, bankers, and businessmen. Bullied and depressed as a schoolboy, he attempted suicide several times, some, he claimed, by Russian roulette.

5
Despite his fear of being perceived as both physically and mentally repulsive, he impressed others with his boyish, neat, and austere good looks, a quiet and cool demeanor, obvious intelligence and dry sense of humor. He suffered from migraines, insomnia, constipation, boils, and other ailments, all usually brought on by excessive stresses and strains. He attempted to counteract all of this by a regimen of naturopathic treatments, such as a vegetarian diet and the consumption of large quantities of unpasteurized milk.

6
He developed a staccato, nasal vocal delivery, which emphasized each syllable (even the silent ones). He enjoyed ridiculous and pedantic figures of speech; for example, he referred to himself using the royal we, and called the wind “that which blows” and the bicycle he rode everywhere “that which rolls.” He lived in a flat which the landlord had created through the unusual expedient of subdividing a larger flat by means of a horizontal rather than a vertical partition. Guests had to bend or crouch.

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Click here for the answers.

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(inspired by this quiz)

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In the beginning all was sunbeams and roses for this young Turkish couple. But then things started to go bad, and get worse, and finally they separated. A flurry of e-mail incriminations followed, and finally Ramazan in frustration complained to Emine, “You change the topic every time you run out of arguments.”

Unfortunately, Emine’s cellphone didn’t have available the dotless i character that was needed to properly read Ramazan’s s_‘k_‘s_‘nca(run out of arguments); instead, she read the word in his message as sikisince, forming the sentence “You change the topic every time they fuck you.”

And that’s the message Emine showed to her father, who immediately called Ramazan and accused him of calling his daughter a prostitute. When Ramazan hurried over to apologize, he met an entire family armed with sharpened knives. Ramazan was seriously wounded, but he struck back, killing Emine; later, he committed suicide in jail.

See, typography matters.

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via Gizmodo
(image borrowed from this page)

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Typeheads might want to try the Rather Difficult Type Game. I scored 32 out of 34 (didn’t notice which two I missed). Most of the questions can be figured out by elimination, but it kept asking me about typefaces like Affair and Yanone Kaffeesatz, about which I know nothing.

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• Judging books by their covers
• On Choosing Type
• History out, celebrities in
• 61% of historians rate the Bush presidency worst ever
• Backlash against ABC News
• Stinehour Press closing
• World Book and Copyright Day

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