words / myth / ampers & virgule

The printing and publishing scene in Japan

2009-07-03T04:16:00.002-04:00

I had dinner last night with an Internet acquaintance who is knowledgeable about the printing industry here in Japan, with its reputation for high quality and high prices. I though I’d share some items from our dinner conversation.

A few weeks ago, we decided to have some flyers printed in the US and shipped to Japan rather than pay three times as much to have them printed here. Yes, Japan also has companies specializing in cheap color sheets, but the conference organizers did not know how to access any of them, because most business here is still based on personal introductions.
Japanese printers are required by law to print their names in books they print (perhaps on other goods, too—I didn’t ask). Therefore, they take an active interest in the quality of the work and will turn down jobs they feel would represent them poorly. Alternatively, they will advise or assist customers with design and other technical aspects to make the job right. Errors are still the customer’s responsibility, as in the US, but the relationship is less hands-off than in the US, where printers typically refrain from criticizing the files submitted by customers (well, they criticize them amongst themselves, but they don’t generally complain to their customers).
Digital printing, particularly print-on-demand (POD), is not used for books here. The technology is available, but nobody is set up to do books with it. As a consequence, digital book orders go to the US for fulfillment. My accquaintance needs advance reading copies (ARCs) of a textbook he has written; and he’ll be ordering them from an American book manufacturer for export to Japan. He has seen samples from one American POD company and decided not to go with POD, as the quality would not pass muster with the school buyers he wants to approach. He was glad to learn that he could get short-run, high-quality digital printing in the US.
The maximum textbook allowance for any college course (total for all required texts) is about $45. A big, full-color biology text with mylar overlays, CD, and the works might run about $30. The same book in the US would fetch up to $150. Most textbooks in Japan are under $10. The schools tell the publishers what they’re willing to pay, and the publishers like it or lump it. What the publishers do in return is book all orders for the following school year in November and print the exact number of books ordered. You snooze, you lose.

Disasiated

2009-07-03T03:55:00.002-04:00

It is our lot in life that as we age we become the people we mocked in our youth, a process the more painful for our awareness of it. The circumstances of my life were such that I did not do any significant travel outside the United States until the last few years, and now I find myself the stuff of cartoons—an out-of-shape, overweight, monoglot American in a flowered shirt and baggy shorts, staying in expensive American chain hotels, occasionally thinking, y’know, a tour bus doesn’t sound like all that bad an idea.

When we traveled in Europe a few months ago, I had a general sense of familiarity with Germanic and Romance languages. Not only did virtually everyone we encountered in Europe speak passable English (or better) but also we were able to read street signs and menus and pick up a few words—enough to get by comfortably. Now, though, we are in Asia. After planes and trains, with transit points in Seoul and Tokyo, we are in Nagoya. English instruction is not strong in Japan (nor is Japanese instruction strong in the US, so this should be understood as a judgment-free description, not a complaint). Staff in the hotel where we are staying do pretty well. Dealing with shop clerks or asking directions on the street, though, involves much pantomime and a great deal more smiling and bowing than actual information exchange. I cannot read street signs or menus. We have a phrase book, but we really have not progressed beyond good afternoon and thank you. I suddenly have the linguistic sophistication of a six-month-old. I find myself pointing a lot.

Despite the title...

2009-06-24T05:12:00.002-04:00

Worthy advice to writers of all ages. (The link may not age well, so read this now. If the link breaks, let me know and I’ll try to track down the updated URL.)

I make buggy whips, and business is fine

2009-06-23T10:40:00.000-04:00

Thanks for asking.

There has been much in the press lately about how e-books are coming of age with the Kindle. Oh, there will be shakeouts and Kindle may or may not be the default reader of choice when all is said and done, but that’s not the question. The question is about the viability of books on paper and whether the craftspeople who make them have obsolete skills. As one of those craftspeople, I’m interested.

So here’s what I think. I think the book buying public consists of two groups, in the main.

One group—possibly the larger group—is interested in the words and unconcerned with the format. Before Gutenberg, they gathered in the town square to hear what the crier had to say or they waited for Sunday to hear what their pastor had to say or they gathered in a theater or a tavern for the storytelling. After Gutenberg they bought books and newspapers. Today, a lot of the same people get their news and stories from television, radio, the Web. The books they read are likely to be mass market paperbacks, the sort of books you see in grocery and discount stores. They are delighted with the idea of carrying around a lightweight device that can provide enormous quantities of words at the right price, and when the price drops below what they’re paying now, they’ll gladly buy a Kindle or some other reader.

The other group buys books because they like the look and feel and smell of a book. They experience a book visually and viscerally as well as intellectually. An e-book, at least as we currently understand where the technology is going, does not provide a satisfactory experience for this group.

This difference in the way these two groups appreciate books represents a real and fundamental psychological difference between what we shorthand as left-brain and right-brain activities. And as long as there are people who want to keep both sides of their brains activated when they read, I’ll still be able to earn a chunk of my living designing books. Editing is necessary regardless of medium. So that’s not going away anytime soon, either.

Business is good.

The big switcheroo

2009-06-12T17:05:00.002-04:00

Musings as I’m listening to the running commentary on the switch from analog to digital television…

Emergency!
It seems there are people living in low-income communities who have not managed to make the switch yet. I understand that. People who have chaotic lives or limited skill sets often end up living in low-income areas. So those are the areas where you would expect this problem to arise. And I even understand the comments from social workers who non-judgmentally observe that many families in these areas have their televisions on for many hours each day and are going to have their lifestyle severely disrupted until they can get their converter boxes.

What I don’t understand is the idea that if someone is temporarily without television service they will not be able to hear important emergency broadcasts. There are two problems with this assertion. In the first place, anybody—anybody—can afford a radio. In the second place, when there is severe weather, digital television signals are disrupted anyway. So there is no earthly reason for anyone to rely on television for those announcements.

Less is more
Our television is in the basement, which is in serious need of remodeling before it becomes a comfortable place to sit and watch television. I’ve gotten out of the habit of watching, and I have to admit, as people told me for years, my life has improved as a result. But I’m not preaching that you or anyone else should stop watching. I’m just suggesting that it is really not—not—a necessity of modern life.

The switch to digital television means that signal breakup will become a regular occurrence for many people, and that may lead them to turn off the set in frustration. Maybe they’ll do something else in their spare time. Read a book, perhaps?

Buggy whips
Nobody ever argued that getting around by automobile was an improvement on traveling by horse and buggy in the sense of being more pleasant or better for the environment.

In our time, we now have three examples of the same transition, and all have to do with digital communication:

First we’ve experienced the massive adoption of cell phones. That’s all well and good. The convenience of cell phones is wonderful. But we’ve traded down on the quality of voice communication. When was the last time you had a call between two landlines on which the other person’s voice dropped out or the call was dropped and you had to redial two or three times before giving up? And family calls that were once shared by picking up another extension are now private conversations with one household member who then has to pass the phone around or summarize the call after it’s over. That changes social relationships in a subtle way.
Out with CRT displays, in with LCD displays. The switch to LCD monitors is saving a tremendous amount of energy, house by house and office by office. The difference is noticeable on electric bills. New hotel rooms can be designed two feet shorter because of flat televisions. Great. But for computer users there’s a subtle loss. An LCD monitor has a fixed native resolution, unlike the analog CRT. Changing the resolution to accommodate a visual problem doesn’t really work (although there are other strategies). And some users are not happy with the image quality, particularly in situations where color matching is critical.
And now we have broadcast digital television. When the signal drops because of cloudy weather or wind causing a tree to sway, the program is gone. With analog television, a weak signal was still a signal. With digital television, it’s there or it’s not. There’s no such thing as poor but intelligible reception.

In all of these cases, we gave something up when we abandoned the older technology. There’s no going back. You can still buy a handmade buggy whip. But to the best of my knowledge you cannot buy a CRT monitor or television made with a mouth-blown picture tube.

At least books will never be obsolete, he said, whistling past the graveyard.

Not dead yet . . .

2009-06-07T15:34:00.003-04:00

Just too busy to post. Hmmm. Deadlines as a sign of life. Whaddaya know?

I know this person . . .

2009-05-31T12:25:00.002-04:00

A snarky but very funny take on the vendor–client relationship. Not my clients, mind you. Mine are the salt of the earth. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t had close calls.

All the tea in China

2009-05-29T06:59:00.002-04:00

You can’t make this stuff up department
The Marketplace Morning Report radio program this morning included a story about product placement on the Chinese version of the Ugly Betty television sitcom. The products featured? Dove soap. Okay. And Lipton tea. Lipton tea?!?!? As a consumer product in China?!?!? What am I missing?

Past Performance is No Guarantee of Future Results

2009-05-22T14:48:00.002-04:00

Fact-checking department
…or why gardeners keep diaries. Two years ago, pretty much my entire yard was in full bloom on May 1. Last year, everything again bloomed in unison, but a week earlier. Surely we’re approaching the End Times, right? Next thing you know, Long Island Sound will have swallowed New Haven.

Not so fast. This year, spring has slowed to a more moderate pace. The Andromeda was blooming when we left for Europe on April 15. The magnolia, the Bradford pear, the quince, and the weeping cherry went from start to finish before we returned on May 8. But the Wisteria was only starting to bloom on that date and is still on the upswing. The Azaleas didn’t start until some days later and are in full bloom now. The Rhododendrons just began to open Wednesday, May 20.

We had a much snowier winter this year than in recent memory, which likely has something to do with the more leisurely pace of spring.

But now it is Memorial Day weekend and time to get some work done around the yard. That’s a constant from year to year, no matter the weather, no matter what date the holiday falls on, and no matter the rise in ocean levels.

Nature (or what passes for nature in the artifice that is the home garden) beckons. Paying work will have to wait a couple of days.

B is for business bromide

2009-05-16T10:39:00.003-04:00

B is for banal.
O is for overused.
R is for ridiculous.
I is for inspiration-free.
N is for non-original.
G is for going to retch if I ever see or hear another.

I sat through a commencement speech at a business school last night. Names are withheld to protect innocent and guilty alike. Enough said.

Whatchamacallit

2009-05-11T12:22:00.002-04:00

Things have names department
On a mailing list this morning, someone asked what to call the typographic device that sometimes appears between sections of text. As I explained in response, embedded in this question are really three questions:

Q. What is the functional significance of a break in text?

A. From a discussion of this point on another list, some rhetoricians refer to it as a hiatus, although I don’t know that there is any standard term. In fiction, it may also be called a scene break. From the point of view of an editor, the question is whether the break in flow is enough different from a paragraph break to warrant its use. Was this intentional on the author’s part or is it an artifact of bad typing or misuse of Word?

Q. What is the name of a break in text?

A. I’ve always called it a text break. (I’ve been involved with typesetting in one way or another since about 1960 and don’t recall where I learned this term.) I’m not aware of any other name for it, and if I ever was, I’ve forgotten it. From the point of view of an editor marking up text, it’s a text break, and you can safely call it that. Design is irrelevant.

Q. What is the design element used to represent a break in text?

A. The book designer (typographer) may specify a simple space, such as a one-line space between paragraphs, generally followed by an unindented paragraph. Other choices are a space followed by a drop cap paragraph, something unobtrusive such as a single large bullet or a row of three asterisks, or any sort of ornament (dingbat in compositor’s argot) such as fleurons, tailpieces, and so forth. The designer should be sensitive to the look and feel of the overall book: if the chapter openings are modest, it would be silly to have elaborate and decorative text breaks. From the editor’s standpoint, though, once the design choice is made and approved, the only concern is the proofreader’s interest in seeing that they are implemented as planned.

Not invented here

2009-05-09T11:41:00.002-04:00

We do some things spectacularly well in the United States. And we do some things incredibly badly. Two of the latter are lunch and mass transit.

Street food
You can go out of your way in the United States to have a great lunch. And if you are in midtown Manhattan at lunchtime, you can probably get a good sandwich within a block or two or something hot and tasty from a street vendor. But outside of Manhattan, if you are where you are and it’s lunchtime, your choices are generally limited. If you’re driving, there are the fast food chains. If you are flying, there are the airport concourse MBA-ified sandwich-and-salad stands. If you are on a train or walking…no, wait, you’re in the U.S., so it’s absurd to think you’re on a train or walking.

In the parts of Europe I’ve been to, you would have to go quite a bit out of your way to have a bad lunch on the street. I suppose you could get fish and chips in England that’s merely ordinary, but almost everywhere you have choices of real food freshly and often imaginatively made, of good, fresh ingredients, many of them local, at affordable prices. The least interesting choices were American fast-food chains, which survive, I suppose, on their novelty value to populations bored with fabulous local food and on their familiarity to tourists immune to fabulous local food.

In nearly every town there are local market gardeners selling their own produce at stalls and markets. We have mostly lost the idea of buying produce from market gardeners in the U.S. Local farmers’ markets, in the places where we’ve brought them back, are tentative, partially subsidized in many cases, iffy things populated mostly by urban refugees who have learned organic gardening from books and patronized by well-off foodies who equate expensive with tasty. In Europe, the markets are part of the historic fabric of society, places where families have brought produce for generations and ordinary people shop on their way home from work. Yes, there are supermarkets. Yes, people have refrigerators. But fresh food tastes better than shipped-in food.

The difference is apparent from the air. The European landscape consists of population centers surrounded by farmland and forests. The American landscape consists of continuous sprawl in the main population corridors and vast expanses of farmland in areas with virtually no local population. It’s only the eccentric treehugger who thinks it sensible to eat locally in the U.S. We’ve paved all the good agricultural land near cities, because our money-based society deems the “highest use” of land to be that which brings the most dollars in a real estate market, not that which provides the best quality of life for the population.

Getting there
Similarly, private profit and socialized cost has driven the design of our transportation system. Trains don’t work, for the most part, because American politicians believe that trains don’t work. We need to send our local, regional, and national politicians and planners on an all-expense-paid junket to Europe. Let them go where they will and do what they want, with only a single rule: no automobiles allowed. Make them travel around by train rather than motorcade. After a day they’ll know that trains can indeed work. After a week, they’ll figure out how to make them work in the U.S. Maybe then we’ll begin moving in the right direction and by the right means.

I suppose…
I should relate all this to books and editing somehow, in furtherance of the plan of this blog. Okay, try this: The same ignorance, hubris, and narcissism that makes Americans think we know best and the rest of the world lags behind also gets in the way of authors who think they know best and don’t need the help of professionals to make their books the best they can be. A stretch? Maybe. But I don’t think so.

Rome ruins vacation

2009-05-09T11:30:00.002-04:00

What others have said is true: travel is broadening. You can read about every place we’ve traveled to on Wikipedia or in books, magazines, and newspaper travel sections. You can see all these places in movies and videos. Being there is different.

While the Roman ruins unearthed in England or Germany are treated with a certain respect and presented with a curatorial pride, those in Rome seem largely to be neglected and abused, more obstacles to progress and efficient travel—or rich sources of tourist dollars—than parts of a living heritage. The vastness of old stuff—very old stuff—in Rome is daunting. I can see how Italians might decide it is not possible to maintain all sites and that some can be left to crumble. But even the popular attractions for which tourists pay admission are poorly maintained, with weeds rooting in millennia-old brick walls, slowly dissolving the ancient mortar.

I question too the intellectual integrity of the sites. Archaeological standards and practices have evolved since the Napoleon-era excavations, but no guidebook, map, or (infrequent) descriptive sign made clear what is original, what is repaired, what is reconstructed, what is remodeled and repurposed. I had the sense that there was something not quite honest, something cynical about much of what we saw. Even at the Vatican Museum, the Sistine Chapel had a Barnumesque, this-way-to-the-egress (by way of the gift shop) air.

Perhaps my impression was colored by cultural differences. The Senate and the People of Rome, ever vigilant in the persons of opera buffa–costumed but well-armed police, seem mostly to be interested in standing around, as professional criminals extract what they can from American tourists. There are con artists, pickpockets, beggars, and thieves everywhere you turn, many of them well-dressed and well-spoken, some of them serving in their official capacity as ticket sellers. The economy of Rome seems dependent on American aid. Or on Americans’ personal aid. This kind of dependency breeds resentment and contempt, which may explain the generally unsmiling and surly service from people presumably in the hospitality business. Or perhaps it’s just visitor fatigue: When will all these stupid foreigners leave?

Everywhere we went in Rome there was evidence of poverty—not grinding, abject poverty, but clearly a stratification of society (as is typical in American cities) that was not at all evident in Germany. At least in the Rhine Valley, Germany seemed virtually classless. The streets were safe and free from beggars, spruikers, and hustlers. Having read of the two-class system that separates those of German blood (citizens) from those, such as the descendants of Turkish gastarbeiters, of non-Aryan heritage (noncitizens), I expected to see evidence of serious social tension. I did not. There were political demonstrations (it was May Day), but there was no anger. It was only in Rome, rife with cynicism and negativity, that I sensed fear, anger, and social tension.

The editor in me says that you should be careful of stereotypes. The traveler in me says that you should be careful of overly friendly strangers no matter where you are but that you are more likely to encounter them in Rome than in other places we visited.

Time and place

2009-04-29T14:36:00.002-04:00

Before the sojourn in Stratford-upon-Avon, we spent some time in London and in Leicester. In London, I had a delightful tour guide for a day, a reader of this blog who volunteered to lead me to places I had not seen. The highlight of the day was the Greenwich Observatory, where it is not only possible—nay, obligatory—to stand with a foot in each hemisphere but also fun to explore the museum, which does a good job of capturing the history of mankind’s thinking about and measuring of time, particularly the importance of time measurement to navigation.

John Harrison’s chronometers are there, as are many ancient and modern artifacts. Time well spent, as it were.

Leicester is not featured in any guidebooks. We were there on business. Still, we were there. So we visited the ruins of the Roman baths. Next to the ruins is an unpretentious museum, the sort you might find in any American city, narrating the history of the place. Except that the history of a place like Leicester, with a continuous narration, illustrated by a rich assortment of artifacts archeological and paleontological, that begins in the late Stone Age and continues through the various civilizations that existed in the English Midlands over the millennia is a lot more impressive than the Indians-Columbus-Pilgrims-Slavery-Civil War-here-we-are story that most small American cities seem to settle for. An hour in the Jewry Wall Museum in Leicester provided a sense of a specific place over a long time, offering a nice symmetry to Greenwich’s specific time over all places.

More on the Gutenberg Museum

2009-04-29T14:23:00.002-04:00

I hope you’ll excuse the random order of these travel notes. Internet access has been catch-as-catch-can, and I’m just writing up recollections as they come to me.

One display in particular at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz perturbed me. I’m quite certain it is wrong. The display shows a form of locked-up type that purports to be a modern recreation of one of the pages of the 42-line Bible printed in Mainz. Next to it is a proof drawn from the form. Only the person who created this display has made a horrible mistake. As I explained nearly three years ago, a cursory inspection of the printed page of the real Gutenberg Bible (and the museum has a couple of spectacular specimens on display) shows that the end-of-line hyphens showing that a word is divided were added by hand, with quill and ink; they were not printed from cast type.

The person who composed the alleged recreation, though, made a hyphen mold, cast some hyphens, and set the page using hanging punctuation. I don’t think there is any evidence that Gutenberg did such a thing, and I hope the display is eventually corrected. But I’m not holding my breath.

Okay, I'm impressed

2009-04-29T04:10:00.002-04:00

Last week we were in Stratford-upon-Avon (well, it’s spelled that way officially, but the natives pronounce it Stratford-on-Avon), coincidentally on the day they were celebrating the asparagus harvest with some festivities downtown. Not blanched. Impressively thick by American standards but not nearly the size of the German asparagus. Before these festivities began, I was sitting on a bench, facing a pedestrian plaza, while my wife was browsing in a clothing store (yep, I’m one of those guys you see sitting on the bench at the mall). A chauffeured sedan with a coat of arms on the front bumper and flags on the fenders pulled up a couple of yards from where I sat. A distinguished-looking gentleman emerged from one door, and the chauffeur opened the opposite door for a well-dressed woman. Between the two of them, they had what looked to be about fifteen or twenty pounds of high-karat gold around their necks, including impressive, fist-sized medallions. I thought, hmm, this is England…coat of arms, flags, medallions…minor royalty, perhaps? So I nonchalantly strolled across the street to a couple of shopkeepers who were standing in front of their stores chatting. I begged their pardon and admitted to being just a stupid American, but who are those people? “Oh,” one replied, “that’s the mayoress and the mayor.”

Friendly folks, dressed up for the occasion of the asparagus festival, wearing the city’s official medallions, et al., and just there for the photo op, which included posing with a man dressed as a stalk of asparagus, something that a member of the Royal Family might have eschewed, I suppose.

That capped off a couple of days of going to the various properties maintained by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Anne Hathaway was Shakespeare’s wife, and at the farm where she was born we happened upon a group of American high school students just beginning a tour. So we joined them as the docent began his spiel. He asked the kids when America was discovered. Turned out he was looking for 1492 as the answer, whether it’s correct or not. His reason for asking was that the part of the house we were standing in was already a few decades old in 1492 and had been continuously occupied, mostly by Hathaways and their heirs, until the trust bought the farm in the latter part of the twentieth century.

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of As You Like It was a bonus.

I understand why we introduce Shakespeare in high school, but my memory of As You Like It in high school was struggling through the strange language and not getting the jokes. Seeing the show done right, when an adult, makes all the difference. Shakespeare remains a living part of our literary heritage. And the jokes still work. Maybe we should give high school students a coupon, redeemable twenty or thirty years later, to see a performance of the works we force them to read.

Mainly I do like Mainz

2009-04-29T04:06:00.002-04:00

Your peripatetic editor finds himself, for a few days, in the city where Gutenberg was born. This is not accidental.

The old city of Mainz is a pleasant place to walk around. Street food is mediocre by German standards; restaurant food can be very good. This is the height of asparagus season, and every chef in Germany is taking full advantage. There are a couple of varieties grown (one with the purplish tip seen in the US—similar to Martha Washington—and one with an unpigmented tip that is just a whitish green. In the market stalls and stores there is little green asparagus to be had, though. The bulk of what is grown and sold here is white asparagus. This is, I assume, the light-tipped variety that is blanched.

If you are a gardener, you understand blanching: keep the light off the developing vegetable to eliminate the bitter chlorophyll note. Celery is blanched by laying boards up against both sides of the row to shade the bottom of the stalk as it matures—or perhaps the dirt is mounded against it instead in some locales. The curd of cauliflower is kept snowy white by tying the outer leaves together to form a little light-tight tent over the developing head. Belgian endive is blanched by a somewhat more complicated technique. I don’t know that it’s still done this way commercially, but the traditional method is to dig the plants at a certain stage and bury them in layers of clean, damp sand so that they can head up in total darkness. But asparagus is different. A mature asparagus plant can be five feet in diameter, and the stalks can emerge from anywhere in that circle. My understanding is that the German growers mound about eight inches or so of soil over the entire row, so that the crown, instead of being just below the surface of the soil, is now much deeper. Then, when the harvester sees the tiniest tip emerged above the surface of the mounded soil, she plunges the knife at just the right angle to cut and lift the white stalk at perfect maturity. And everywhere we walk, someone is selling boxes and boxes and boxes of white asparagus in diameters up to an inch and a quarter or more (as well as whatever other size you might prefer).

(Spring is also rhubarb season, as gardeners and cooks know; and on the train from Köln—take the guided tour of the Dom—to Mainz we passed several fields of rhubarb of a hectare—2.5 acres—or more. By American standards, that’s a helluva lot of rhubarb.)

But I didn’t come to Mainz for the food. I came for Gutenberg. And I was disappointed. The Gutenberg Museum houses a magnificent collection of objects, to be sure. And there were some worthwhile and interesting displays (including quite a lot of Asian material printed from moveable type in the centuries before Gutenberg). But overall, the curatorial approach seems to miss the mark. There are stories to be told with the collection—the story of the development of the technology, the story of the rapid spread of the technology in a few decades after its invention, the story of the Renaissance—that are only alluded to in the most off-hand and random ways. To be sure, many of the descriptive placards were in German only, but the main exhibits were described in German and English. So I don’t think my lack of German was the main issue. I just felt the Museum Plantin-Moretus, in Antwerp—even though it made hardly any effort to present information in English—did a much better job of telling stories. The Mainz museum was more of a static catalog of artifacts, artifacts that were not even arranged according to any obvious system or criteria. And what emphasis there was was on printing presses; there was hardly anything said about the development of letterforms into typefaces through the mediation of the punchcutter. And the uninitiated visitor—apparently the intended audience—cannot piece together either the historical progression from monastic scribes to modern printing or the production progression from manuscript to finished book by walking through the museum exhibits.

Color me disappointed, but don’t color me blue yet. Mainz has other attractions. The oldest parts of the Dom are a thousand years old, and the Dom Museum does house some remarkable objects. But the most spectacular and sacred space (not a description you hear often from an atheist) is St. Stephan’s. This is a church that was bombed in World War Two and then restored over the ensuing decades, ending with a commission to Marc Chagall to create the stained glass windows. Chagall was getting on in years, but he completed the main windows that he agreed to do, and the collaborator with whom he had worked on his stained glass projects for many years, Charles Marq, did nearly all of the remaining windows in the church, in his own style but very much in keeping with the feeling and mood established by the Chagall windows. The experience of walking into such an old building and finding it filled with a cerulean glow of clearly modern windows is breathtaking. Now you can color me blue. But a peaceful, happy blue.

Annals of customer service: a shame for the neighbors

2009-04-20T07:13:00.002-04:00

United Airlines to Paris. Lufthansa to London. Shall we compare and contrast?

United Airlines
We took a short connecting flight from Hartford and left the country from Dulles, headed for Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Announcements on the ground and in flight were mostly in English, with some eventually repeated in French. A minority of the cabin crew sported flag pins indicating they could speak French if pressed. No other languages were available, apparently.

The food was about the worst the United States has to offer. The dinner entree was a nondescript chicken dish with rice, palatable but dull. It was accompanied by a bowl of iceberg lettuce and a container of gloppy ranch dressing, a roll that had been kept at the same cold temperature as the salad, rendering it inedible, brick-hard butter, some sort of plastic-wrapped brownie-like confection for dessert. The breakfast-time “snack” consisted of a sealed plastic pouch that held a container of flavored yogurt and a so-called pastry (held at the same cold temperature as the yogurt, of course) that was as inedible as the previous night’s dinner roll—and tasted even worse.

For the sake of the French nationals on board, I was embarrassed to be an American.

Lufthansa
From Charles de Gaulle, we proceeded by two short-hop flights to London on Lufthansa. Both of these flights were on full Boeing 737s, with flight times of about forty-five minutes each. Neither was at mealtime. Snacks only. Instead of soft drinks and peanuts or pretzels, as we would have been lucky to get in the United States, we were given freshly made sandwiches. One was an interesting, multi-grain, seeded bread, cream cheese, cucumber, lettuce, and tomato, all crisp. The other was a different interesting bread with a good German cheese, crisp lettuce, and a mayonnaise-based spread. Sandwiches, choice of beverages. (Just coffee? Would you like something else—water, perhaps? Still or sparkling? With ice?) All of this was done efficiently, without hurrying, and with a smile, by cabin crew fluent in a minimum of three languages.

Draw your own conclusions about the value of training, customer service, and customer communication.

Newsletter No. 1

2009-04-09T09:53:00.002-04:00

I was reminded the other day of the half-dozen or more times in my career that I have been involved in the creation of a newsletter (print or electronic) that never saw its first anniversary. Most, in fact, lasted but a single issue.

In all cases the newsletter was the brainchild of a marketing manager (or a business owner wearing the marketing manager hat for the moment), perhaps inspired by an article in a trade magazine about what a great idea it is to have a newsletter to keep your company’s name in front of customers and prospects. Well, yes, that’s true, if you can sustain the effort.

And in all cases my role was confined to editing and designing the publication, not managing the flow of new articles. That was the job of the marketing person. So I’m not the one who dropped the ball.

In the end, I don’t know that any of these efforts did damage. I don’t think they were tested fairly to see if they provided a benefit, though. If a company wants to know whether a newsletter brings in more business, they have to stick with it for at least a year or two. Some marketing managers have a short attention span and are ever on to the next thing. They want some new initiative to highlight in their quarterly report to the CEO. And if the CEO doesn’t ask, “Hey, how’s that newsletter going? I haven’t seen a new issue lately,” the newsletter is going to cease to exist.

Which is a shame. Because the first issue is the expensive one.

So if there isn’t going to be a No. 5, you probably shouldn’t go to the effort of a No. 1.

Just saying.

Copyright and the big lie

2009-04-05T09:27:00.003-04:00

The mainstream media are still trying to digest the proposed Google Books settlement. Of late, some of them have come to understand that one-sided news releases from Google’s lawyers might not be the full story.

There has been a gradual acknowledgment that Google is trying to rewrite copyright law to equate out-of-print with out-of-copyright. That is, just because a copyright owner chooses to take a book out of print does not mean the book is an orphan work. As long as the owner remains listed in the Copyright Office database with current contact information, it’s disingenuous to say the work has been abandoned.

But I have still not seen anyone with a large megaphone (unlike this little blog) address the central problem with all modern US copyright law, a problem created by Congress and the courts: The original purpose of copyright law is to encourage creation, not to provide annuities to corporations. Until we get back to that core principle, that it is the creator of a work that should benefit from copyright—not the corporation that strong-armed the rights away from that creator—people are going to remain confused about the correct moral course to navigate through these legal shoals.

What most people in the arts have in mind when they think about copyright is the right of the creator of a work to profit from it. What the publishers, entertainment conglomerates, and politicians have in mind when they think about copyright is the power of a corporation to coerce the creator to give up the right to profit in the long run in exchange for enough money to eat today, along with the resulting financial security for the corporation’s stockholders, who did nothing whatsoever to create the work in the first place.

So when we’re watching these debates in which people in expensive suits talk about their rights, they are talking about legal rights wrested from the grasp of the true possessors of the moral rights inherent in the act of creation.

European copyright law gets this. American copyright law doesn’t. Here, a corporation is a legal person with pretty much the same rights as a natural person—more rights in some instances.

I don’t know how much damage will transpire before politicians sit up and take notice. Time will tell.

Book designer speaks

2009-03-29T06:22:00.002-04:00

C.S. Richardson articulates the underlying conception of book typography as an invisible art on YouTube. Clip 1, Clip 2, Clip 3. He well summarizes much of what I often ramble about; if you are of a mind to design your own book, you could do worse than to listen to Richardson and take to heart what he says. He doesn’t know it, but he speaks for me.

A people person

2009-03-22T06:59:00.002-04:00

No, not me. A client. Two recent ones, in fact.

I encounter most of my clients at a distance. I’ve had projects that lasted several months and that involved long and complex discussions by email but few if any telephone conversations. This seems perfectly natural to me. It doesn’t work for everyone, though. I recently completed a small project for one local client and I’m in the midst of a large project for another, both of which could easily have been handled entirely by email. But both of these clients are people to whom personal, face-to-face contact is important—more important than the details of the work they’re paying for. They trust their own judgment of the person they make eye contact with and shake hands with more than they trust their judgment of the goods that person delivers. So they make up reasons to stop by. That’s fine with me; I enjoy meeting clients when there’s an opportunity to do so. And it’s an excuse to straighten up the living room.

But I tend to focus on the details of the work and sometimes forget that not everyone cares as much about those details as I do. One day I may be working with a client who admits to being a perfectionist; the next I may be dealing with one who, having shaken my hand, trusts me to produce good work and doesn’t care about the minutiae.

It’s all good.

Old whine, new bottle

2009-03-15T05:32:00.002-04:00

A few months ago, book marketing guru Brian Jud invited me to contribute a column on interior book design to his bi-weekly “Book Marketing Matters” e-zine. In response to a request from one of his readers, I decided to collect those very short pieces and post them on my website, for the convenience of anyone who wants a slow, fairly nerdy tutorial on the traditional craft of putting words on paper attractively and readably. You can even read ahead a little bit (Shh! Don’t tell Brian). This is an ongoing series, so check back from time to time.

A typographic river dark and wild

2009-03-10T07:51:00.002-04:00

The image below was a random artifact in an RSS feed from the Editor Mom blog. It looks the way it does because of the width of my message window. That is, don't blame Katharine.
What it illustrates is something to check for on your typeset pages. The typical river consists of white space that travels down a paragraph from line to line, opening up a channel. But you also need to watch out for the darker sort of river seen here. Did you see it? If you’re not accustomed to thinking in terms of the color of the page, it may not jump out at you. Look at the word mortgage, running down the center of the image.

Details matter.

I'm not hiring, but if I were...

2009-03-08T18:16:00.002-04:00

India says it all.

And if you’re lucky enough to get a job somewhere, don’t forget Miss Snark’s list.