Of all the jobs I’ve done over the years, I thought telling people I was a book designer was pretty straightforward, like saying I was a cab driver or a hair stylist. Everybody would know what that was. Turns out that’s not the case.

Some people say: Oh, you design the book cover.

Sometimes, I respond. But often someone else does the cover and I design the interior layout.

That’s when I see a shimmer of confusion cross their face: what is there to design? I imagine they’re thinking.

We’re all used to opening up our word processing program and starting to type. Someone has already made decisions about the page dimensions, margins, typeface & size, leading, paragraph indents [or not], spaces before or after paragraphs [or not], page numbers, running heads and footers, and a myriad of other design elements. That word-processed document could be printed out and bound, but what you would have is a bound manuscript, not a designed book.

A book designer starts afresh with all those decisions, taking into consideration the book’s purpose, content, intended audience, the various text & graphic elements to be accommodated on the page, their relative importance and relationship to one another, as well as issues related to the final product: how many copies will be printed? by what process? how will it be bound? will it have a full color interior? black & white? some combination of the two? how will it be distributed? how will reorders be handled?

Book design is one of those jobs that, when done well, is pretty much invisible. But when it’s done poorly, it causes the reader irritation, and confusion which usually reflects back on the book’s author.

My APH colleague Linda Coffin of HistoryCrafters gives a compelling example:

“…the design and production of a book are vitally important to the impact that book will have on its readers. There are many compelling, important and well-written stories that go unread simply because they look amateurish or even downright bad. Most people are unaware of how a good design can be a vital communication tool, telling its own story about the narrative and the narrator.

Too often design is treated as just window-dressing (“this isn’t about a pretty design, it’s about the story!”). Of course the story is the whole purpose of creating the book. But it will be even more effective and more compelling if it’s well-designed and well-produced. The two things simply must go hand-in-hand if we want to do justice to the story.

A recent project is a case in point. My client’s family was unhappy with his narrative, telling him that he hadn’t put enough emotion into it and that it was boring to read. But now I’ve redesigned the layout and given them a sample of the first chapter. The narrative flows in a clearly readable form. The photos are sharp and crisp and sitting next to the text they illustrate. The chapter and topic divisions now make sense. The headers and footers are correct and help guide you through the story. Guess what? Suddenly his family is thrilled. ‘Wow, Dad, this is great stuff,’ said the same son who had complained that there was no emotion in it. Same client, same material, same story, but much better design and production. All the difference in the world.”

And now, as books take on another incarnation as e-books [something I think of as a simply a metaphor, no more a book than a television show is a stage production], even more issues—design and technical—arise. But that’s a post for another day.

_____
Image by See-ming Lee ??? SML / SML under a Creative Commons license

1. Use styles.

Styles have been a feature of Microsoft Word for as long as I can remember. Yet I rarely encounter anyone who uses them. Honestly, they will make your life so much easier! Styles are a set of formatting commands that apply to different types of text in a document—level 1 heading, level 2 heading, body text, bullet text, etc. You apply a style to paragraphs [or characters], then define the formatting elements of the style. [Or vice versa], If you later decide, for example, that your level 1 heading should be Helvetica rather than Garamond, you simply change the style definition and all the paragraphs tagged with that style are changed at once. Styles from Word integrate with styles in InDesign.

2. Use colors to validate styles.

Make things easy on yourself and use color to quickly highlight any problem areas. Once you have set up styles, while you are still in the “construction” phase, apply a color to the style. [It doesn’t need to stay there – this is just part of your quality control process.] Often heading levels have subtle distinctions and it’s not always easy to spot them when they are all in black type. I do this when I get a manuscript and there are multiple heading levels with subtle distinctions. [And because my client doesn’t use styles, they are often inconsistent themselves in how they format the headings.] By tagging Heading 1 blue, Heading 2 green, Heading 3 violet, it’s much easier for my client to look at the manuscript – or just a table of contents extract – and say, no, this one should be heading 2 and that one should be heading 3.

3. Set up a project folder template.

All my book design projects have the same types of elements: text files, image files, layout files, review files, and administrative files. So I have set up a template folder that I can quickly copy and rename for a particular project, ready for me to fill with the particular files associated with that project.

4. Develop a file naming scheme—and use it consistently.

I use a prefix with my client’s initials, project number, project name, and then a suffix with the version number. Version 0 is always the initial design version; the 0 indicates that this is not a file to be carried forward as it often does not have current versions of the text or images.

Regardless of what filenames my clients may have given the image files, I add a prefix so they present in the order in which they will be placed in the book. So my client’s original image [obtained from the U.S. Library of Congress] was named 1s01828u.tif. I added the prefix 006- to indicate it’s the 6th image to be placed in the book. [Because there will be over 100 images, I use leading zeros so they display in order.] As I work through the image enhancement process, I add the suffixes –E [enhanced] and –bw [converted to grayscale]. After enhancing and converting I save it in its ready-to-place .png format. So the new file name is 006-1s01828u-E-bw.png.

5. Use colors to navigate more quickly to the current file.

In the midst of a project it is easy to mistakenly open the wrong file. Use your operating system’s ability to apply color to files and folders so you have a path to follow to make sure you select the current version of the file.

6. Set up headers/footers and slugs.

After two or three rounds of revisions involving two or three or more reviewers, it’s almost inevitable that someone is going to open or print out the wrong file version. Use headers or footers in Word or a slug placed in the gutter in InDesign with text variables that update automatically to show the file name, page number, and latest save date. Emphasize the difference between versions by applying a different color to each new version.

7. Use checklists.

The books I work on usually involved a lot of photos and it’s easy to lose track of which photos are ready to place, which still need work, which are unusable, etc. But with a checklist, I can work through the photos systematically with a minimum of fuss because I can see where I left off and what is yet to be done.

There are many other types of checklists that I use on various projects and there most certainly are checklists I haven’t yet thought about yet.

One of my mantras is “think once, execute many times.” By spending a little time up front to develop systems, procedures, and forms, a lot of the confusion and frustration caused by administrative mix-ups is eliminated and we are free to concentrate on the more interesting and rewarding work we love as book designers.

I’d love to hear about your tips for managing a complex workload. Please leave a note in the comments section.

Examples used are from a recent project with Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective, and her upcoming book Finding The
Civil War in Your Family Album.

In part 1 of this post, I used Twyla Tharp’s book The Creative Habit as a model for looking at a book through designer eyes, identifying and articulating the various graphic elements that combine to create the reader’s experience of the content.

Despite identifying eight different elements to consider, we never even began talking about type, even though “what font should I use?” is often the first question non-designers ask. So in this post we’ll look at some of the typographic elements used in the book.

The main variables involving type in a book are typeface, size [including leading], color, and case. [Weights and styles—bold, extra bold, semibold italic, etc—are a subset of typeface that can add finer divisions of content hierarchy but, if used promiscuously, will simply confuse the reader.]

Typophiles might have immediately identified the typefaces used in this book as Bodoini and Franklin Gothic. I like to work my way through identifont.com because it forces me to look at the tiniest element of a font’s design and thus imprints it more permanently on my brain.

In my previous post I pointed out the color choices the designer* made—black, red, and shades of gray. In addition there is also white, or paper, reversed out of a black or gray box.

And type can be set in various cases: normal, all caps, small caps, no caps.

So looking at pages 2-7, here are some of the main paragraph and character styles I see there:

• Chapter number: Bodoni 12, black, normal [upper & lower] case

• Chapter title: Bodoni 56 black and gray, all lower case

I would call the gray a character style, applied to a few words in the Chapter Title.

The position of both of these type elements changes from chapter to chapter. This is a book about creativity after all seen through the lens of a choreographer, who uses movement and position in space as expressive elements. Some chapter titles are set larger [chapter 10] and some smaller [chapter 5]. Had he made only one chapter a different type size, we might think that was a mistake; by doing more than one, it signals a deliberate design choice.

• Lead-in paragraph: Also Bodoni, gray, variable type size and leading, taking up at least 3/4 of the vertical distance but again not completely consistent or predictable. A red character style is applied to the first few words.

• Body text: Bodoni 12/18 black justified paragraphs with hyphenation. Another red 16/18 character style [e.g., p 7] used for emphasis.

• Running head Tharp: Bodoni 8 red normal case on right page only

• Running head chapter: Franklin 7 or 8 [different fonts will have different cap heights] black set all lowercase

If you keep reading, you will see that there are more paragraph and character styles used throughout the body text. I have a number of future posts planned around the topic of styles, but for now, consider it a conceptual exercise, giving every different use of type variables—typeface, color, size, case—a distinct name, defining its characteristics, and specifying its usage rules.

Want some homework? In part 1, we identified different page types, among them exercise pages and creative biography pages. In addition to the colored background used to signal these pages, there is a shift in typography as well. Look at the exercises beginning on page 29 and identify the paragraph and character styles used throughout this section. Do the same thing for the black box or creative autobiography pages beginning on 45 and continuing on 54.

Meanwhile, keep your eyes open—and read like a designer!

—————————–

*Julian Peploe designed both the book and the cover for The Creative Habit.

—————————–

Related posts you might like:

reading a book like a designer-part 1

the creative habit by twyla tharp

what is “book thinking”?

Of course, we book designers read books like regular people. But, when we are in “design mode”, we look at a book in a different way. We’re not so much interested in specific content as we are in identifying how many different elements of content there are and how those elements relate to one another.

In a previous post on The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp, I pointed out some of the elements that were used in an interesting way. Let’s expand a bit on that here, using her book as a point of reference.

page size and format

This is a decision the book designer makes early on. It then constrains other design options and often has a big impact on printing and binding costs. A common size for trade paperback books is 6×9 inches; Tharp’s is 7×9. I do not presume to speak to the underlying reasoning of the book designer*, but I am immediately drawn to books that are different, particularly books about art and creativity that trend toward more square, less rectangular. This is very often a subconscious reaction.

binding

This is a paperback book, often referred to as “perfect bound”. It lies relatively flat when opened, something paperbacks often do not do. This is due in part, no doubt, to the wider page size as well as to the particular binding method itself, sometimes referred to as “fan binding”.

color

This is a two-color printing job: black and red. Black is also used as a screen or tint [less than 100% ink coverage], giving the designer a range of gray values to work with. Notice that on some pages the ink “bleeds”. That means it extends all the way to the edge of the paper; you’ll notice it when you look at the paper edges with the book closed.

Using bleeds might increase production costs. The designer sets up for the bleed to extend beyond the trim edges—usually by 1/8“ all around—and that may require a larger sheet of paper or running the job on a larger printing press or digital output device.

[For a faux bleed treatment, take a look at pages from Wisdom. Sorry, no preview pages available, but it’s easy to spot in a bookstore: 12×12 with the fabulous Clint Eastwood on the cover.]

margins & columns

Relatively narrow and equal inside and out: 0.75”, same for the bottom and 0.50“ for the top. This yields a fairly long line length when set in one column, and that becomes one of the variables in the choice of type size and leading. [Are you beginning to see how everything is related?]

page types

How many different types of pages are there? Looking through Chapter One, this is how I would identify them:

• chapter opening spread – two pages starting on a verso [left] page
• chapter intro – one page starting on a verso
• chapter text
• chapter text with graphics
• pp 20-21, 26-27 – what do you think? are these distinct types of pages, or just another graphic? your call.
• exercise pages – one or more, can start on recto [right] or verso
• black box pages or ”creative biography“ pages – see page 45

What about the front matter? Title page, publication information page, etc? And the back matter? How many different types of pages would you identify here?

graphic elements

What graphic elements are used throughout the book? Photos? illustrations? What graphics came from outside sources? Where and how are they acknowledged? Are there instances where the type itself becomes a graphic element? What is this conveying to the reader?

page numbers, headers and footers

How are page numbers handled? Where are they placed? Are there pages without page numbers? Which ones? Why? Is information repeated as a header or footer? What information? On which pages?

cover

Deconstructing cover design is a subject for another series of posts [and probably calls for someone with far more expertise in that aspect of design than I have], but for now, just consider how the cover relates to the interior design in terms of the elements listed above. [Fun fact: in traditional publishing, cover design is often done separately from the interior design, with no interaction between the two designers. Tharp’s book had the same designer* for both.]

For extra credit, try to identify all the different elements that go into the design of the cover. [Hint: a lot of them are on the back—and don’t forget the spine.]

There are a number of resources on the web that can take you inside the mind of the cover designer. Here’s one to get you started—George Foster. I like his website for the before and after analysis he provides.

The more you can break these elements apart and articulate each one, the more tools you have at your disposal for developing an effective book design. And we haven’t even begun to talk about what font to use, have we?

If you want to work ahead into what I’ll be covering in the next post—type choices—identify the type faces used in Tharp’s book. Maybe you’re a crackerjack font identifier; I like to go to identifont.com and work through their questions. You’ll start to learn the nuances of type face design. [If you don’t have the book, there are preview pages on amazon.com]

Til next time–happy reading!

—————————–

*Julian Peploe designed both the book and the cover for The Creative Habit.

—————————–

Related posts you might like:

reading a book like a designer – part 2

the creative habit by twyla tharp

—————————–

Book design and production is a complicated process with a lot of moving parts: text and graphics, multiple people, as well as a fair share of technology gremlins. Some glitches are bound to arise, but many are predictable and thus can be avoided—or at least the effect of them ameliorated—by some advanced planning. Here are five common stumbling blocks:

1. Beginning design without a final manuscript

While it’s a good idea to begin thinking about the design of the book at an early stage in the development of a manuscript, changes in the manuscript along the way can blow what seemed to be a great design out of the water.

One of my watchwords is to “design for the extremes.” Here is an example: I had what I thought was a great chapter opening design because all of the chapter headings I had seen were very short – two or three words – so it fit on one line.

When I received the final manuscript, I noticed that chapter titles toward the end were much longer and, wouldn’t fit in the current design. Not only did the chapter title section need to be resized; many other elements on the page had to be recalculated and rebalaced.

This may, in fact, be a better design. My point here, though, is that we had to backtrack and redo steps in the process we thought were complete: using up time and costing money.

2. Waiting until design and layout are complete before selecting a printer/binder

Your printer can provide valuable information that can help you save time and money. And different printers have different capabilities, affecting the page size that can be printed economically. Even among print-on-demand printers such as blurb and lulu, specifications can vary ever so slightly. For example: both blurb and lulu offer a 10×8 landscape format, but lulu does not offer a dustjacket option in the size and format. And, the trim size is slightly different between the two. Not knowing this ahead of time could mean you have to resize your pages.

3. Not having a system for handling physical and digital images

It is very easy to get confused about which photos go where in a manuscript, which ones have been scanned or retouched, which caption and credit goes with which photo, etc. It’s also very easy to misplace digital files unless you establish a clear naming convention and folder system and create a worksheet to keep track of all the images.

4. Not having a clear review and revision process

This is the area that seems to be the most troublesome for personal histories and others involved in producing privately published books. At what point do you show the book to the client? How is it presented? [While online proofing can be expedient as an intermediate step, I believe that final reviews and revisions should be handled on physical paper.] What are they expected to look for and respond to? How many review cycles are included in your initial estimate? And how will you handle excessive review cycles where the client continues to change the manuscript and/or images?

It may seem excessive, but the more specifically you spell out the review steps, responsibilities and deadlines, the smoother things seem to go.

5. Not having a clear sign-off process

Nothing focuses people like having to sign their name on the dotted line. The first thing they want to know is: what am I agreeing to?

Presenting a review copy to your client along with a sign-off form that focuses them on what they should be looking at is a good way to manage the review and revision process and to ensure that nothing is overlooked.

There are a number of places in the book design and production process where a written sign-off is appropriate. Signing off on printing specifications indicates that you are ready to solicit bids from printers. Signing off on the printers proposal indicates the commitment to use that particular printer/binder and specifies how and when payments will be made. Signing off on the page design indicates approval to proceed to page layout. And signing off on the review proof indicates approval to send the files to the printer. There is usually a final sign-off of the printer’s proof as well

In each case, you will want to develop a form that indicates to the client what to look for and what their signature means. The gist of it is that, by signing, the client agrees to proceed to the next step with the understanding that backtracking will likely to incur additional costs and delay the project’s completion.

Some related posts that might be of interest:

what is workflow? and who cares anyway?
Thinking about [profitable] book design & production

Warning: these books are [mostly] devoid of plot with not much character development, just page after page of visual scrumptuousness.

So here they are, ordered from the top of the pile to the bottom:

The 1000 Journals Project: Over ten years ago, someguy [that’s the name he goes by] distributed 1000 blank journals around San Francisco, leaving them in airports, coffee shops, libraries and other public spaces with instructions to fill a page however you wanted and then pass it on or leave it for the next person to find. Over time, many of these journals made their way back to someguy; in other cases, participants sent him a digital page image. This book is a fascinating compilation of some of these incredibly intimate and creative pages, made even more interesting by the juxtaposition of pages from many different journals. Find out more at www.1000journals.com.

The Museum at Purgatory: Like he did in the Griffin and Sabine trilogy, Nick Bantock takes us into a fantasy world that feels real, telling us imaginative stories illustrated by whimsical images, and presented in a beautifully designed and printed book. Bet you can’t get past page 50 without an overwhelming urge to go to your studio and make stuff. [What are you waiting for? Go!]

Everyday Matters by Danny Gregory: This book is simultaneously instructional, inspirational and an intimate look at Gregory’s life as he uses art, specifically drawing, to find his way through a difficult time.

The Polaroid Book: [Taschen]: I love the look of Polaroids, the feel of them, the real object-ness of them. The downright messiness of them. And I love the kind of pictures that are taken with them— casual, intimate, often haunting.

Non Facturé [Rejected Photos]: I came across this gem during a blissful afternoon wandering through Powell’s Bookstore some years ago. From the introduction: “Non facturé [not charged] is the term used by French photo labs for images not suitable for printing because they are, for instance, over- or under-exposed, blurred, out of focus, or taken by accident…at times they have an unexpected, spontaneous quality which would be impossible to achieve on purpose. This book and CD-ROM set contain more than 100 such pictures, selected on their often mysterious beauty and graphic quality.”

1000 Artist Journal Pages: Personal Pages and Inspirations: This call to artists got responses from hundreds of artists from around the world who were willing to share pages from their visual diaries. “I felt like part of a global community,” said Dawn DeVries Sokol, the project’s curator. “Hundreds of artists were willing to share themselves through their pages…one thing I know after working on this project: we are all artists, artistes, künstlers, artistas, artisti or however you may pronounce it in your part of the world.” You’re bound to find something in here that makes you say: I can do that! [So go already!]

Artists’ Journals & Sketchbooks: If you are inspired to begin a visual journal but uncertain how to get started, this book will help. In addition to luscious page images, this book also contains some background about what these artists were thinking when they created the pages, tips for getting started, and some step by step techniques. [Now there’s no excuse. Go on, go. Make some art.]

True Colors: A Palette of Collaborative Art Journals [Somerset Studio]: Each of the 16 contributing artists started a journal in a designated color—white, red, hot pink & orange, violet & greet, metallics—and the journals circulated among the other artists, each adding her unique take on the color theme. [Now start making art with your friends.]

The Journey is the Destination: Dan Eldon created seventeen journals in his short life, the final ones in the midst of the violence of Somalia in the 1990s. This book was put together by his mother and sister to tell the story of this young man who “blazed through his short life like a meteor, leaving a trail…that awes with its intensity and beauty.”—USA Today. [Eldon made art in a war zone! We really have no excuse.]

Tricia Guild on Color: Tricia Guild’s books are luscious, from the design of the table of contents, to the font choices, to the rhythm of the images. I turn to her books again and again to deconstruction them in various ways for my own book design work. But for now, just take a stroll through the color spectrum. And give thanks for our ability to perceive color.

Okay, spend some time getting inspired. Then put the book down and go make something.

[I’m supposed to tell you that I am part of amazon.com’s associate program, which means I get a pittance if you buy one of these books through these links. Just so ya’ know.]

Over the years I have developed pages of material based on various strategic planning systems: year end summaries, goal setting, etc. They have always been written as a business document in Word, printed out on 8.5×11-inch sheets of paper and put in a file folder or slipped into page protectors in a three-ring binder. I realized this year that I was becoming more and more averse to going anywhere near this material. Rather than providing guidance and inspiration, it was soul-deadening. It wasn’t so much the content of the material, but the way it was presented.

So I decided to create a book out of the material, adapting some of the ideas in Lisa Sonoma Beam’s The Creative Entrepreneur, but using the medium of print-on-demand books.

Here, to the best of my recollection, I recount my rambling journey to create this book. Perhaps it will serve as a cautionary tale; perhaps as reassurance about your own process. It’s messy work, this creativity thing; particularly where it intersects technology. [I use the term create here rather than design deliberately. When I develop a book design for others, the constraints are usually set and I have no control over the content or sequence of text and images. They are givens. With my own books, everything is subject to alteration. “This is not necessarily a good thing,” she says ruefully.]

setting constraints

I love constraints; they eliminate so much from the universe of infinite possibilities. They begin to give a wee bit of definition to the problem I am trying to solve.

• My 2011 Inspiration Book will be a 7×7 softcover from blurb. I like the square proportion and the small size will sit unobtrusively on my desk, subliminally reminding me of the path I am setting out on for the year. It’s also easy to toss in my bag and carry with me.
• Because I expect to be revising and reprinting this book many times in the coming year—it’s intended to be a living, working document, just like when it was in .doc format—cost is an issue. The 7×7 softcover is the least expensive option blurb has if I keep the page count to no more than 40 pages. [Actually, I get only 39 of those pages because blurb reserves the last page for its own logo, unless I pay an extra, per book fee. I usually do this for client books, but for this book I’ve chosen not to.]
• The images need to come from my personal collection or from flickr’s creative commons domain because I have allocated no budget to buy rights to new images.
• And while I don’t intend this book to become commercial, I want to leave myself the option of using the images in other ways that might be considered commercial, so my creative commons search is further restricted to images offered for commercial use.

laying out the dummy

Working in InDesign, I block out the fixed pages: 1 title page, 2 publication information page, 3 table of contents page. I like to use the final left hand page of a book for a strong image that encapsulates the sense of the entire book, but since that page is not available to me, I block out the spread on pages 38-39 for that purpose.

Then I place various chunks of text to see how they lay out on the remaining pages. I want to determine what text should be on a two-page spread and what should stand alone.

This led me to discover there are natural breaks that could serve as section dividers. Since I want these dividers to be two-page spreads, I needed to go back and adjust some of the text blocks.

gathering images & placing them in the layout

This is the work of what used to be called a photo editor. Since there isn’t a narrative in my written material, it is images [and color] that will drive the book. Rather than having literal meaning, they need to invoke a certain emotional or visceral response. The images themselves, their relationship to one another, and the sequence in which they are presented are crucial.

I spend two evenings searching for images from my own library, from flickr’s creative commons, and—just in case—creating an istockphoto lightbox. Then another two or three putting them together with the words to see how the sequence works. Sometimes I have great images, but their colors clashed. Or the image is perfect but its orientation or proportion won’t fit my page size the way I want. And sometimes an image that by itself I love just doesn’t seem to belong in this book.

At this point, everything is fluid. Because it’s all my text, and it’s more phrases and bullet points than narrative anyway, it can be separated and rearranged and recombined to suit the imagery. In some cases, I rewrite the material to make it work better.

adjusting and adapting the images

I finally wrestle the images and the text into a coherent conceptual and visual flow but now it’s color that is giving me grief. My solution is to first create a consistent underlying palette for the entire book – background color, text color, emphasis color. Then I desaturate all the images and tone them with one of the colors from the palette. Ahhh. It’s looking good.

back up and redo

Now I’m feeling rather satisfied, perhaps even letting a wee bit of pride show itself. But then two new thoughts occur to me:

1. while the images look great on my computer monitor, I didn’t pay attention to the resolution of the creative commons images; they may not be large enough to print well.
2. even more troubling, I realize that after I altered the color of the images, I may not have license to do so. Now I need to go back image by image and verify that the permissions include the right to “modify, adapt, or build upon.” This should have been articulated as one of my constraints from the beginning.

So, that’s where I am today. So, what have your experiences been creating and designing books? Books for clients, your own traditional books, even artists books. Do you have a process you follow every time, or do you find yourself wandering in the wilderness more than occasionally, circling and backtracking and having to tear down what you thought was permanent to start all over again? I’d love to hear from you.

Related posts you might like:

why making a book is hard—and fun!

Cover image by +fatman+ via flickr used under a Creative Commons License

As the book design and layout progressed, I created .pdf files as review copies for my colleague. Some of these were printed and trimmed to size for Miriam to see. And before the books were actually printed and bound, the printer sent another review copy to Miriam; this one on the exact paper stock that would be used for the final product.

Finally, the day arrived when the printed and bound books were delivered and a copy was placed in Miriam’s hands.

Until this point, all these review copies were merely electrons dancing on a computer monitor* or stacks of paper.

But the book…ah, the book is an object that exists in the world on its own. It has weight. It has dimension. It has texture and smells of fresh paper and ink [okay, in this case, toner]. It has glue and sizing and sparkling metallic ink embossed on the cover. It makes a sound as Miriam flips the pages.

And just as the transformation of written notes into a school paper makes the content seem so much more profound, coherent and well-reasoned, so too do the words of our manuscript and the photos and captions seem more substantial, of more consequence, when presented in a bound book.

Miriam’s book can take its respected and well-earned place on a shelf, as worthy of that spot as Gandhi’s Autobiography, May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, or Beryl Markum’s West with the Night. [I’m told that, for now at least, Miriam’s book rests on her table, when it is not in her hands.]

Toward the end of Miriam’s book is one of my favorite pictures: Miriam with her great-grandsons Michael and John in the driveway behind the children’s house. [The boys are about 5 and 2 1/2 at the time the picture was taken.] The caption in the book gives the children’s full names, the names of their parents and the street address of their house.

Now, imagine it’s the holiday season of 2085. Someone wandering around the house after dinner pulls Miriam’s book off a shelf where it has been resting snugly between Gandhi and Markum for as long as anyone can remember. She flips through the book and come across the picture of Miriam and the boys. She reads the caption. “Grandpa, look! This is you, isn’t it?” Michael takes the book, looks at the photo, touching it. “John, come here. Remember your green tricycle and how Grandmum would walk us down to the store on the corner to get a cookie?”

And these men, with children and grandchildren and perhaps even great-grandchildren of their own, begin to share memories of their great-grandmother, and their grandparents, and their parents.

Miriam’s book is passed from hand to hand. Fingers trace over the faces in the photos and discussions begin about who looks like whom. Miriam’s stories are read aloud and new stories are told by those now gathered. One of the young children, about the age of Michael when the picture was taken, spills a little gravy on the page. It’s immediately wiped off, but a trace will remain.

And so this book, this lovely and compact time capsule from one century to another, will enjoy a few years of attention again.

And then perhaps it will be placed back on a shelf, or boxed up in the attic, eventually given away to an antique book dealer. And someone may discover it anew, say in 2135. They will open the book and turn the pages, read the text and look at the photos. And they will get a sense of what it was like to be a woman named Miriam, living her particular life in her particular time and place.

Miriam’s book has a life and a destiny of its own—far beyond any Miriam or her children or grandchildren, might have envisioned.

That’s the power of the book-as-object.

*I have no quarrel with e-books; I think they are a fascinating new medium through which to present information via an electronic device. But such a collection of data is no more a book than this blog or the filmography feature on a Netflix DVD.

Other posts that may be of interest:

envisioning seven generations

photos and art and memory and books: this is personal history

the bookness of books

keith smith books

speaking of e-books

I was recently at a screening of The Art of Observation, a documentary on the life and work of Ted Grant, known at the father of Canadian photojournalism.  It was written, co-produced, and co-directed by Heather MacAndrew for Bravo Canada. Mr. Grant and Ms. MacAndrew graciously gave up a beautiful Sunday morning to be with 150 personal historians at the closing session of our annual conference in Victoria, B.C. and answer questions about their work and the film.

The film is rich on many levels, but I feature it here as an example of a beautifully done personal history: artistically presenting the intersection of an individual’s life and career with the powerful historic forces of his time and place. The production values are outstanding. [Yeah, yeah, I know. Most of us do not have the budget of a major national network behind us.] Nonetheless, there is a great deal we can learn by studying the lighting, the voice-overs, the editing. Good creative and technical decisions don’t cost money, but they do require a mastery of the craft.

But even more important than production quality [and I do think that is a very important part of the work we do as professional story tellers] is to see what a strong story Ms. MacAndrew has shaped. Yes, she is telling the story of the man who defined Canadian photojournalism and influenced the profession all over the world. And she is surely aware that this story will become part of an important historical record, catalogued into university and archive center collections. But she is also telling the story of an ordinary man. A son and a husband. A father and a grandfather. A teacher, a citizen, a neighbor.

This is the work we do as personal historians. We draw out and record a person’s life: looking for the distinctive gestures and vocal inflections, the small details, the meaningful objects, the story that wants to be told. And then we present it in the most artful way we can as a gift to the future.

If you are interested in photography, filmmaking, personal history, 20th century history, or Canadian history, I encourage you to get the film. [Lots of great bonus tracks as well.] Watch it more than once. Deconstruct it. Integrate it into your own personal history storytelling, regardless of the medium you work in. And do what you can to get Ted Grant: The Art of Observation into wider distribution.

This is why I consider e-books merely a metaphor. Books are composed of atoms – inky atoms and slurry atoms and textured atoms and smooth atoms. Lots and lots of atoms – not a byte amongst them.

Other posts you may like:

print production circa 1970

a brief history of book printing and binding