I’m not very good at maintaining multiple blogs, so I’m retiring this one and will be shifting all of my bookish posts back to my main blog, BenCrowder.net. I’ll also be retiring the @booktype account on Twitter and tweeting about books back at @bencrowder instead.
Several of the books I had checked out from the local library were going to be due tomorrow, and I was awfully close to finishing two of them (well, I was halfway through, and they weren’t too long), so this evening I settled down for a delicious hour or so of reading. After coming to the final page on both books (Marc Romano’s Crossworld and Ammon Shea’s Reading the OED, both of which I’ve mentioned before, and both of which were quite good), I returned them to the library (which is blessedly only a block away from my apartment) and basked in the afterglow of reading on my walk.
I don’t quite know why it works this way, but when I read, my soul is filled. I put down a book and feel more alive, more human, more excited about life. And I’ve learned that when I’m down or depressed, reading is what gets me back up again. It’s amazing — rectangular blocks of paper have ended up being some of the most potent elixirs of life. Rejuvenation, that’s what it is. And I love it.
I am such a sucker for book sales. On my way back to work from lunch just now, I noticed a big sign above the entrance to the bookstore proclaiming the bargain book sale, which runs all this week. For a brief instant I told myself I already had plenty of books (922) and that I should just use the library instead.
And then I found myself walking into the bookstore and up the stairs to the sale. Figuring it was a lost cause, I vowed to spend only $20 or so. I should have known better. Fifteen minutes later I walked out of there with $70 worth of books, feeling vaguely guilty about spending so much (I’d tried to brace for it when I went to the register, telling myself it’d be $150 or some other outrageous number, so that whatever it did end up being would be light in comparison) but mostly feeling satisfied at gaining fourteen new friends. And to justify their purchase to my guilty conscience (which isn’t really that guilty), I’m going to tell you about them. :)
First off, there’s Wuthering Heights
I also bought Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life
You know, I’ve noticed that I’m a lot more willing to buy nonfiction and classics sight unseen; fiction, not so much. Anyway, I love watching my bookshelves grow. (I don’t particularly love watching my bank account shrink, but you’ve got to put first things first, right? ;))
And some more mini-reviews, this time with an emphasis on political/government books. (I can’t imagine why. ;))
Bush at War
Gideon’s Spies
The Revolution
The Real Lincoln
Brad Walrod is the typesetter who set the U.S. editions of the Harry Potter books. He runs High Text Graphics, Inc.
How did you get into typesetting?
I started in the field thirty years ago marking up display ads for yellow page directories and a few years later started working on books.
Have you always been with High Text?
High Text Graphics is the name of the company I started twenty years ago, first as a sole proprietorship and then as a corporation. Before that I worked for a couple of traditional typesetting shops.
Tell us about working on the Harry Potter books.
Because of the nature of the books (specifically, all the hoopla), this was the only project I’ve done for which I had to work onsite on the client’s computer. Security was tight and legal contracts had to be signed.
Because the text was keyed by a British author, the pre-processing had some specific challenges, not the least of which was converting British-style quotation marks to American-style ones. For each book I worked on, I tweaked my translation tables (search-and-replace settings) to automate more of the things that I performed manually in a previous title.
I had to be precise with each book’s cast off because even though I was doing it months before production started I learned early on that the number I initially provided would end up being included in press releases and on Web sites within a week.
Just out of curiosity, why did you choose Adobe Garamond for the HP books?
I didn’t choose any faces: The series designer (Becky Terhune) may have chosen Adobe Garamond, or that may have come from the art director (David Saylor). In any case, it’s a beautiful typeface and I was happy to use it.
What kinds of things are you working on now?
I work mostly on college textbooks and reference works such as encyclopedias; I like large projects that I can automate (to some extent) and work on for weeks at a time. I make good use of the various XTensions available for QuarkXPress and plug-ins for InDesign.
What have some of your favorite projects been?
Berkshire Publishing’s Libraries We Love and China Gold are two recent favorites.
What’s your process? How do you usually tackle a project?
I generally convert formatted Word files to coded text files (think: XPress Tags or InDesign Tags). Then I write a translation table containing GREP search-and-replace strings to “massage” the text so that it can be imported in a way that necessitates as little manual formatting as possible.
This means that each paragraph has a style callout; discretionary hyphens have been added in front of words separated by dashes (hyphens, en and em dashes); and all extra spaces, tabs, and returns have been eliminated. This allows me to concentrate on the layout once the text has been imported into XPress or InDesign.
It’s not uncommon for me to use libraries for artwork so that I can drag the art from the library onto the page without having to constantly deal with dialogs. If there are fixed relationships related to the art, such as the distance between a a photo frame and its caption, I often use the free AutoFit plug-in for InDesign to set up those relationships; this allows me to cut down on the time it takes to get all the pieces aligned and consistent when experimenting with the layout.
More often than not, I provide a client with lo-res PDFs for proofing and once the job is completed I send press-quality PDFs directly to the printer.
What do you think about the current state of the publishing industry?
I’m cautiously optimistic. I believe that textbooks will always be needed, and I sense that my clients, at least, still care about the look and usability of their titles. I’m concerned that some of the mega-corporations are trying to squeeze every bit of profitability out of their vendors and I just won’t work for those types of clients.
And I don’t want to see the titles I work on need to be simplified to the point that they’ll work as e-books, although I’m interested to see if e-books advance to the point that they can support both good design and increased functionality.
Favorite books/authors?
I’m a bit of a science fiction geek, and when I want to read something with big ideas I often reach for a Greg Bear novel. For whimsy, you can’t beat Spider Robinson’s stuff. Light mysteries from Sue Grafton are also a favorite.
A new, rising star in the book world, The Book Cover Archive is a palette of almost 900 book covers arrayed in sumptuous goodness:
You may commence drooling.
The 2009 Tournament of Books is nigh at hand, with a nice selection of sixteen contenders.
No author asks to have his work pitted against the work of another, but that is what all awards do, in effect. The Nobel Prize is an Olympiad of words. The Man Booker is the Premier League Championship of Letters. Everyone knows that, behind the scenes, the National Book Award is both arbitrary and brutal, sort of like Keeping Up With the Kardashians meets Ultimate Fighting. The Tournament of Books is every bit as arbitrary, but we have simply lifted the curtain so the reader can actually see the caged octagon in which the books meet, barefoot and snarling.
Cool.
Nice piece from the Guardian on Malcolm Lyon’s new translation of the Arabian Nights
“Behold, there stood before him an honourable woman in a mantilla of Mosul [footnote] silk, broidered with gold and bordered with brocade; her walking shoes were also purfled with gold and her hair floated in long plaits. She raised her face veil [footnote] and, showing two black eyes fringed with jetty lashes, whose glances were soft and languishing and whose perfect beauty was ever blandishing, she accosted the Porter and said in the suavest tones and choicest language, ‘Take up thy crate and follow me.’”
And now of Lyons’:
“A woman came up to him wrapped in a silken Mosuli shawl with a floating ribbon and wearing embroidered shoes fringed with gold thread. When she raised her veil, beneath it could be seen dark eyes, which, with their eyelashes and eyelids, shot soft glances, perfect in their quality. She turned to the porter and said in a sweet, clear voice: ‘Take your basket and follow me.’”
Nice. But why is it out of print already? ~sigh~
Anyway, I love collections of old stories like that — Andrew Lang’s fairy books, Hans Christian Andersen’s work, and of course the Brothers Grimm. Any recommendations for other collections of old folk/fairy tales?
I want to write reviews of some of the books I’m reading but haven’t finished many of them yet, so here are some mini-reviews based on the first few chapters. Consider them teaser trailers. :)
Amusing Ourselves to Death,
Crossworld,
Reading the OED,
A Gentle Madness,
