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- Contents Category: Publishing
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- Article Title: Bookshapes - August 1979
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A letterpress book, one of the last of the tribe! I picked it up with pleasure. A clean design (title-page a bit subdued, perhaps?); very consistent and even printing, with the pages beautifully backed up; the creamy Burnie MF a pleasant change from the whiter than white offset papers that we live with nowadays; the halftones (printed by offset) unexciting but passable. Pleasure turned to disappointment when I looked closer. The type (10pt Linotype Baskerville) must have been set from a worn old fount, for in most slugs there are fine hairlines of ink between the characters, and there are some characters in the magazine –notably a lowercase ‘e’ – that are out of alignment at their every appearance. Good presswork almost makes up for all this, but the Baskerville fount, which I am sure must have set many an OUP book in its day, is due for retirement. The book has coloured endpapers, to which I am partial, but printed color is no substitute for using a colored stock, as there are sometimes hints of streakiness. 2 picas.
Letters of Norman Lindsay, edited by R.G. Howarth and A. W. Barker. Angus & Robertson. Photoset in India; printed in Hong Kong.
This production seems to express its publishers’ dilemma: how to give a book of words the atmosphere (and also the price, $60) of a book of art. The temptation is understandable, but I think it was a mistake to yield to it. The book is embarrassingly grandiose. It is a big format (283 x 210 mm, only a shade smaller than A4); all of the text is set within a ruled border, of which one soon tires; some of the pages are tinted buff, but apparently only for variety; and the names of addressees and the dates of letters are set in a flowing script typeface in 36 pt, a world away from Lindsay’s own handwriting, which was neat, quick, and unpretentious. Of Lindsay’s correspondents there are many well-printed illustrations, some of them new and unfamiliar. The black and white jacket is effective – Lindsay in old age with two of his ship models – but the photograph does not appear to be acknowledged. Was it the work of Quinton Davis? Some real effort has gone into this book, but I find it distracting and unsatisfying. 1½ picas.
The Green City, by Roger Johnson. Macmillan. Cover by Guy Mirabella. Typeset by Modgraphic; printed in Hong Kong.
This landscape book (184 x 216mm) on the subject of urban planning is one of the most inviting things I have seen in 1979. The handsomely proportioned text in Bembo is well complemented by numerous drawings by the author, some in black and others flooded with washes of colour. The captions are in the author’s handwriting, which lends a spontaneous, informal atmosphere to the book that I found highly pleasing. Mirabella’s design for the limp cover – a cityscape within the outline of a tree, against a green ground – is harmonious and apt. I would give this book 3 picas but for a woeful slip on the title-page, where the publisher’s imprint, a capital M, is absolutely reeling out of square. A pity! 2½ picas.
Outback Airman, by Harry Purvis with Joan Priest; Bush Surgeon, by Pat Pavy; Bush Bishop, by Howell Witt. Rigby. All typeset in Australia and printed in Hong Kong.
These Rigby titles have a recognisable identity: bright, ‘selling’ jackets; ultra-bold title-pages and heavy chapter titles; microscopic imprint details; a plain approach throughout to design and typography, and to the disposal of the usual sixteen pages of halftones. This makes them sound graceless and interchangeable, and to an extent they are; but they are strongly marketoriented and professional. Some publishers are concerned with the book as an artistic object, and some with the book as product. Rigby’s are publishers of product. To me there is nothing very pleasing about any of these three books, but undeniably, they work. I give them each 1 pica.
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