Back to the Future

Why are books - the physical object - important to anyone in this day and age? Back in my childhood, books were the repository of all knowledge. They were comparatively expensive and most people didn't have a lot of them. If you wanted had to write a school report on Cornwall, you went to the school library and looked up Cornwall in the encyclopedia, wrote down in your own words what the encyclopedia said, and that pretty much was all you were expected to do. Or, really, all you could do - unless you trekked downtown to the big main city library that had other books about Cornwall, and that took up a whole Saturday and yeah, right, I'm really going to do that. Once you had what the Encyclopedia said, why would you bother? I was one of those goody-two-shoes A students so I would sometimes look up Cornwall in two different encyclopedias in the school library (we had three sets)  to see if one had more information than the other, but in my world that was stepping pretty far into academia and my social standing was in jeopardy.

Today, of course, if you want information on Cornwall you type it into Google and in .15 seconds you get 73,300,000 hits. We are inundated with information, and it is always there - the Internet is our own giant library - so why do we need to own any book at all?

Well, there's serendipity. On the Internet you get what you ask for, and only what you ask for. There is little chance that, browsing through the library stacks on the subject of Cornwall, you should run across a book on Cheshire, become fascinated with a photo of half-timbered houses on the cover, and soon find yourself leaving the library (or bookstore) with "The History of English Architecture" or "Life in An Elizabethan Town", and subsequently learn about all kinds of things you never thought you were interested in. You could do that on the Internet, but it turns out we don't. To get those 73 million hits down to something manageable we search by such fearsomely narrow descriptions ("Cornwall tin mines death 1732") that we dip into the information pool just long enough to fetch out the bit we need, and move on. So we can wind up with a lot more information than we used to have about some very narrow topics.

I took a workshop a couple of weeks ago, on social media and how the Internet is changing our brains. The older people in the workshop tended to reminisce about the good old days, before the Internet, when we were all literate and pure, and the younger people were rather preening themselves with the knowledge that according to the experts, as a result of their Internet exposure their brains would be changed forever. We were told that because people only spend a few seconds deciding whether or not to click on a particular link that is brought up by their Google search, that means people have some sort of Internet-induced ADHD. We were invited to remember how much time we usually spend dipping into a book before deciding whether to buy it, and to compare it to those few seconds those modern, brain-altered people spend making their decision.

I disagree. I think they're comparing apples and pomegranates.  The SERP is not the same thing as a book. The SERP is like when you go into a bookstore and you ask "Where can I find books about Cornwall?" and they direct you to a section of the shelves, filled with fifty or sixty or a hundred books under the broad heading of "travel" or "Europe" depending on how many books your bookstore has in stock and how broadly they've grouped them. The Internet's SERP has 73.3 million books in it - if that were your experience in a bookstore, how long would you spend on each book? Exactly.

Now, say you're in your bookstore faced with only 30 books in the "Travel - Europe" section. What do you do? You pull out this one and that one depending on the title, and maybe the colour of the cover - what you can see from the spine. That's the equivalent of the few seconds deciding whether to click on a link. Then you glance at the cover.  If it doesn't turn you off (and you can be turned off by the colour of the illustration or even the typeface) you may look at the back cover or dip into the text. That's the equivalent of the few seconds you give each link on your Internet search, once you've clicked on it,  before you hit the "Back" arrow and take a look at the next link.

When you decide that a website you've reached from the link has the information you want, you spend just as much time on it as you would in the bookstore deciding whether to buy your book. And if you really like that website, you bookmark it or even follow it so new updates come directly to you.

That kind of time investment is maybe even more than you give the hard-copy book you bought in the store. So my conclusion is: are our brains being changed forever as the futurists (and future-fearers) claim? No. It's the same comfy old brain. We're using it in familiar ways. Not to worry.

By the way, today there's an interesting blog post on our decision-making via book cover. If you're designing a book cover, remember it's not all about what you think are pretty colours. It's marketing. It's about what your audience will choose to pluck from the shelves, or click on.

Dustjacket or Eyesore? You Be The Judge.

Let's talk dustjackets - and what's under them.

Dustjackets were originally strips of plain paper, wrapped around a newly-bound book to keep it clean until the bookseller had a chance to sell it. But a paper wrapping meant nobody knew what book was underneath, so dustjackets started to be printed with the title. Well - as long as you're running a printing press anyway you might as well put something more interesting on your strip of paper, so dustjackets began to sport brightly-coloured illustrations and bold lettering, and they became works of advertising art on their own.

All very logical, but with that change your bookshelf filled with quiet browns, maroons, and tans turned into a dizzying array of bold graphics and bright colours.

Which gave me headaches and a decorating problem.

I've got - well, I don't know - at least a thousand books. No, make that 2,000 ... make it more. I've got bookcases packed against every spare bit of wall space, and when I ran out of wall space I put two back-to-back, one across one end, and bingo - a 3-sided bookcase island. Trouble is, each bookcase was a major source of eyestrain, as all the brightly-coloured dustjackets competed with one another.

So one day, I took them off.

And what to my wond'ring eyes did appear:

This intricate 7" x 9-1/2" gold foil stamp was buried under the bright green garden-printed dustjacket of the "Reader's Digest Encyclopaedia of Garden Plants and Flowers" for 20 years before I re-discovered it.

The colour of the cloth cover isn't clear here - it's a medium brown, nothing too bright. And the spine just has the title, stamped in the same dull gold. So to summarize: I had the choice of a gaudy multi-colour printed shiny plastic-covered dustjacket, or this elegant oasis of quiet beauty.

I'm sure you already know where I'm going with this. I took off all the dustjackets that could come off. And my shelves became restful and pleasing to the eye. Even my modern hardcovers had, for the most part, plain cloth spines with foil-stamped titles, some of them quite beautifully done.

Of course, some publishers are still my enemies. There's no point in taking off the bright dustjackets on your Harry Potters, for example, because the book underneath is exactly the same. So those books go on the shelves that aren't readily seen - the bottom shelf, or the ones in the hallway.

I threw the dustjackets away - at least the modern ones. I know book dealers who would cringe at that, because used books sell better when they have the original dustjackets, but I do not care. I bought these books for me and their resale value - if any - doesn't worry me.

Well, it's a start.

Just got a big fat envelope from the Alcuin Society. If you’re into books you should know these guys. They put on the only commercial book design awards I’ve ever heard of - the Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada. If you’re a member, each year they’ll send you the catalogue of the prizewinning entries, with input from the judges. If you’re studying book design you’ll do well to study that catalogue, and to go see the prize-winning books, which are exhibited in Canada and in some international shows.  And no, they’re not paying me to say this. They don’t even know I’m saying it.

My big fat envelope contained the latest edition of the Society’s newsletter: “Amphora”, which I would go on to talk about except I don’t want to turn this post into a fave rave and besides, I have other things on my mind.

I thought for Post #2 I’d go with my definition of a book. Definitions are slippery – you think you’ve got them wrestled to the ground and then exceptions pop up and start the argument all over. So I’ll just say what I think.

What I call a book is one of those things you find on the shelves in library. More properly called a codex, the basic form hasn’t substantially changed in the past 2,000 years. I see them as a protective information storage and retrieval system designed to handle text printed on paper.  It’s important, so I’ll break that down:

Protective: the covers protect the textblock. The beginning and end pages of the textblock are sacrificial (and therefore usually blank), and are intended to protect the actual text. The pages ideally have wide margins which protect the words from accidental destruction by handling, sunlight, mice, dogs, etc.

Information storage and retrieval: the information is contained in words which must stay in order but need to be accessed out of order.  So the words are printed in order on pages that are usually numbered for easy reference. And if you’re really intent on providing easy information retrieval you might include an index, table of contents, cross-references, etc.

Why the definition? Because when you look at a book – whether you want to print one or bind one or repair one – you need to keep all this in mind.  When a book has problems it’s often because the person who made it lost track of its purpose.

It’s nice if the covers are pretty. It’s great if they provide information or help sell the book. But if your idea for a cover is something that wrecks the textblock, I’d say you need to go back and rethink.

Maybe a cover made with chicken wire is incredibly artistic and clever in light of the book’s content – but is “I want this book to shred itself under the customer’s very eyes” really what you’re thinking?

Maybe it’s way cheaper to cover a heavy book with lightweight paper but when the covers accidentally rip off before the customer pays for it – is that really a saving?

Repairs. There are many schools of thought, ranging from the ludicrously over-protective to the cavalier, but that’s for another day. I want to go read my “Amphora”.