Ludwig Becker is a fine big book, with excellently printed plates. I find nothing to criticise in the production, but I notice an apparent anxiety on the part of the designer (not to be found in The Queen of the Nagas) to avoid large areas of unprinted white. Thus the half-title is reversed out of a full-page solid, and the facing captions to the plates are printed on a light biscuit tint approximating to (but not quite matching?) the type area of the next pages. I could not see the point of this.

The text in Bembo looks well, but it shows how careful one must be in choosing a typeface if there are a lot of words in bold to be incorporated in the roman matter. With Bembo, the contrast is great, the passages in bold are like screams on a quiet night. A typographical oddity is that the section titles of the book are in sixty-point as far as the ‘Notes’, but then – presumably because of the longer wording in some cases – are cut down to thirty-six point. A little editorial flexibility might have allowed the designer to employ a common size.

I seem to be nagging, but this is an impressive book, not least because of the overwhelming. combination of a grey Grandee paper for the text with a white paper for the plates, and for the use of a well-chosen russet-brown ink throughout, and also on the dustjacket. The colour harmony of the book is very pleasing. Two and a half picas.

Australia the Greatest Island (Ure Smith) has been high in the bestseller lists, which is not surprising. Reg Morrison’s low-level aerial photographs of the coastline are breathtaking, and may say they are breathtakingly printed by Toppan of Hong Kong. Even where double-spreads are split between one section and the next (as often happens in this 352-page, full-colour book), the colour matching and the alignment of images across the gutter are as close to perfection as I have ever seen.

Robert Raymond’s captions are not so well served by the stolid Century Schoolbook; the condensed italics used for headings looks a little cramped. It is a strange convention, is it not, that even in a straight photographic book such as this, the caption writer’s name has precedence over that of the photographer on the title page? In the catalogues of the world’s libraries this will appear to be Raymond’s, not Morrison’s book. Two picas.

When publishers print historical texts in sepia, with bordered pages, ornamental titling, and decorated initials, they sometimes seem as if they are trying to compensate for some perceived thinness in the material. Ure Smith’s The Diaries of Ethel Turner, compiled by Philippa Poole, typeset in New Zealand by Jacobson, and printed in Adelaide by Griffin Press, is a 288-page wallow in nostalgia. It is like a snapshot album into which one has strayed by mistake. The halftones are soupy, and the generally uneven printing, which would have been bad enough in black, emphasises the unsuitability of brown ink for sustained texts. This is by no means an amateurish production, indeed the publishers are skilful; it is just that the charm of the book is overwhelming. One pica.

Greenhouse Publications’ Advice to a Young Lady in the Colonies is an inviting looking book in a very narrow format – always a pleasing shape, if hard to keep open. It is another exercise in nostalgia, combining typeset notes and recipes with a handwritten simulation by John van Loon of an original nineteenth-century manuscript. The dark green of the jacket and endpapers combines well with the plum-coloured ink used throughout. Attractive as it seemed, the more I looked at this book, the more I felt that it is a mix of too many styles. Nevertheless, I admired the ingenuity of the publisher in making a nice-looking dish out of such modest ingredients. The frontispiece illustration, a modern drawing with a period flavour, is reversed left to right, as the mirror image of the artist’s signature reveals. Hedges & Bell were the printers and binders, and the type was set by Meredith Trade Lino in the fashionable Melior. One and a half picas.