A Type of Book

The Periodic Table of Typefaces, designed by Cam Wilde.

Have you ever paused, while working on your word processor, before the choice of fonts available to compose your text in? It happens to me all the time. Each typeface, I feel, communicates a different vibe. It must be selected carefully, because it has to concord with the content of the text, in order to underline its meaning. You’re writing something anonymous, efficient, short, modern, and probably meant to read on screen: pick Helvetica. Something classic, ornate, and refined, which will be printed on faux-yellowed paper:  Monotype Corsiva. Something long, literary, thrilling, and probably fictitious: Baskerville. Something innocent, fun, short, and a little childish: Comic Sans. Something plain, factual, long, and serious: Times New Roman. It’s important to choose the right typeface in order to convey the right message. You don’t want to print out your wedding invitations in Papyrus (which, by the way, is one of the fonts I hate the most, and still crops up in various places, despite its ugliness—it was even used for the title and subtitles of the film Avatar).

There are other questions that come to mind. Who designed these fonts? How do you design a font? How old are they? Which is the most common? Which fonts read better? Which font did Gutenberg use? In search of answers to questions like these, I recently developed an interest in typefaces: their design, their history, their uses. Luckily, there are lots of places to find answers. The first is a fine little book, published in 2010: Just my Type: A Book About Fonts, by Simon Garfield. This book is the perfect introduction to the world of typography. Its chapters go through the history and basics of type design, and are separated by smaller chapters on specific types, such as Albertus (used on the classic Faber and Faber covers) and Bodoni, an elegant font which was used on the cover of Vanity Fair for their special feature on Tiger Woods. The book evades the more serious technicalities of typography, but offers a fun overview of the subject. It is especially entertaining when dealing with the dark side of type design, such as the ongoing war between Helvetica, usually judged to be one of the most perfect typefaces ever created, and its clone, Arial (the rivalry is hilariously illustrated in this YouTube video). Another quirky bit of typographical trivia: a pangram is a phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet, and is therefore ideal to show all the letters of a given font; the most popular pangram currently in use by type designers is the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog (although, of course, it isn’t a perfect pangram because it repeats letters). 

Where Just My Type looses a few points (pun intended) is in its failure to properly celebrate the typefaces; instead, it dwells on everything that has to do with them. It’s a little too loud. Luckily, there are other books that offer a softer take on the subject. G. gave me one of them for my birthday: Letter Fountain. It’s a hefty volume, published by Taschen—a great publishing house for everything artistic—that is entirely devoted to the design of typefaces. It begins with an overview of the history of writing, printing, and the development of typography, then it organizes typefaces into their different families, and finally gives a large number of individual typefaces their own pages, complete with a brief history and description, an example of each letter and symbol, as well as an overview of its different variants (bold, italics, etc.) and sizes. Letter Fountain is a celebration of design and aesthetic pleasure: it’s a beautiful book that showcases the beauty of typefaces by letting them speak for themselves (which makes sense, considering that’s what they’re designed to do). It also includes cool features, like three ribbon bookmarks, a ruler and conversion chart for font-sizes, and an appendix that includes a glossary, four different indexes, and a timeline of a timeline of type founders. It’s impressive, and a little excessive. 

Naturally, typography, is inseparable from books. Without efficient, beautiful, and readable letters, there would be no books. I’ve always loved when there’s a little note on the type at the back of a book, detailing what font it’s set in, why, and what the history of the typeface is. For example, the volumes in the Everyman’s Library are set in Caslon, which, the triangular note on the last page tells us, “put a stop to the importation of Dutch types” when it was created in England in the 18th century, “and so changed the history of English typecutting.” Type design is serious stuff. More specifically, typefaces are also inseparable from cover design. A lot of book covers are made several times better or worse because of the font they use to spell out the title of the book and the author’s name. Sometimes, letters are the only thing used on a book cover. I’m thinking of the works of JD Salinger, who demanded that the covers of his books be entirely bare except for his name and the title of the book. That means Penguin had to get creative in their use of fonts when they republished Salinger’s work a few years ago for the UK market. They commissioned a type designer, Seb Lester, to do the job. The result is stunning:

So what’s the next step for the new typography fanatic in me? There are other books to get, even more hefty and complete than Letter Fountain, if you can believe it. For example, the ultimate reference in typeface remains the FontBook, aka “the big yellow book,” which calls itself “the most complete digital type reference in the world.” There’s also Giambattista Bodoni’s beautiful Manual of Typography, an 1818 Italian masterwork on typography, reprinted by Taschen in a luxurious two-volume set (pictures bellow). But before I spend that much money to look at pretty letters, I’ll begin by watching Helvetica, a 2007 film about the proliferation of one of the world’s most common typefaces. It’s probably going to change the way I see the world; that’s how important type is. 

Long & Short: The Return of the Novella

The original, 1937 cover for Of Mice and Men

I write “return” with a degree of critical care. Did the novella ever leave? If yes, why had it gone? Or maybe it was never really big at all, and therefore isn’t making a return so much as a début. All of this is unclear to me. But what has become definitely apparent is that there’s been a recent surge in interest for novellas. The form is infamously tricky to define, of course. A novella is supposed to be book-length, because it can be published on its own, but not quite novel-length. But then, does the novella exist at all? Maybe it’s just a long short story, or else a short novel. In terms of content and form — this has nothing to do with length — I have certainly found this true on some occasions. Some novellas, like Ethel Wilson’s “Tuesday and Wednesday” and “Lily’s Story,” which are collected in her Equations of Love, feel like short stories that have been inflated. In terms of emotional resonance and narrative breadth, they remain, well, a little short. Other novellas, like James’ The Aspern Papers, are much shorter than novels, but pack the punch of longer, more ambitious works.

 

Some clues as to the return of the novella:

To begin with, there was Julian Barnes’ first Booker victory in October with The Sense of and Ending, which was the shortest book on the shortlist, and has been called a novella by some. Also, last year, the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris inaugurated the Paris Literary Prize to celebrate the novella, which is awarded to a work of fiction between 20,000 and 30,000 words. And let’s remember how much ink was spilled a few years ago about Robert Bolano’s posthumous masterpiece 2666, which is really 5 interlinked novellas. Also, the American short story genius Jim Shepard’s most recent collection, You Think That’s Bad, contained a novella titled “Gojira, King of the Monsters”, which was also published separately as a stand-alone book. As for publishing houses, Penguin has of course recently had a lot of success with elegant collections of short books: Penguin Great Ideas, Penguin English Journeys, Penguin Great Loves… Last year, they came out with Mini Modern Classics, 50 short pieces of fiction, published as their own, lovely little books, to celebrate 50 years of Penguin Classics. What’s great about the selection is that the editors have generally chosen little-known stories; letting them stand on their own gives them some well-deserved visibility. To be fair, a lot of the stories that make up the books in the series are actually short stories, not novellas. Moreover, from what I can see most of the volumes collect more than one story. Borges’ The Widow Ching—Pirate, for instance, also includes 5 other stories from the Argentine master. The design for the collection is very nice, playing off the silver, black, and white of the traditional Penguin Modern Classics, with much bigger author pictures on the back covers. Penguin has also released 5 production videos for the series: they’re great fun to watch.

More directly novella-related, perhaps, Melville House, which is becoming increasingly renowned for great books and great designs, has published a collection of books called The Art of the Novella, featuring, among many others, Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf, The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville, and 5 different stories entitled The Duel (by Casanova, Checkhov, Conrad, von Kleist, and Kuprin). The whole series is a great idea, and is perfectly executed: the choice is varied and classic, and the designs are remarkably simple and fresh. Their selection is sometimes a little wobbly in terms of form, however: I’m not entirely sure The Hounds of the Baskerville, for instance, is usually considered to be a novella, but that’s another story…

All this attention on novellas is wonderful; for one thing, novellas are awesome. They’re short enough to be read in a few sittings and to be quite focused aesthetically, but they’re also long enough that they have the time to creep into the brain of the reader; they cut out their own space and demand that their issues be addressed. I have a short-standing theory that the act of reading happens en deux temps. Maybe this only happens to me, but I feel like I always need a short period of adaptation when I start reading a book, not really to get used to the characters and the setting so much as to adjust my reader’s ear to the rhythm of the writer’s voice and the linguistic rules of the book’s universe. I believe this is why I can’t immerse myself completely in a book and read long swaths of it in one sitting until I’ve passed a certain point (sometimes this point comes early, sometimes later, never after the midway point) — then all is well and I can drive on to the end, perfectly attuned to the story’s music. The advantage with novellas is that they’re so short and well-formed that even a reading en deux temps can occur quickly. You can begin with two or three short sittings to start immersing yourself in the world of the story bit by bit, like a swimmer gradually dipping his limbs deeper and deeper in cold water, and then finish off the rest of the story in a single, smooth dive. The novella invites you to do all of that in one day, or even a few hours. Ideally, I would suggest leaving a night’s sleep in the middle to allow the shift to occur and finish the novella the next day — it makes the experience last longer. 

Long-winded, baggy novels are great, but I have a particular fondness for the tight focus of short books. Among my favorite novellas are Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Alice Munro’s ”A Queer Streak”, Mann’s Death in Venice, James Joyce’s “The Dead”, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Henry James’ ”The Lesson of the Master”, Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Disinherited”, Maupassant’s Boule de Suif, and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. Some of these straddle the line with the short story or the novel, but the long and short of it is that they’re just the right length. Plus, they’re all exquisite and quick to revisit. Between lengthy dinners and short shopping sprees, why don’t we all dip into a novella for the Holidays? Happy reading!

Atwood Covers Here and Elsewhere

This is the North American cover for Margaret Atwood's book on science-fiction, out in October. I'm not entirely sure what to think about this one; the angle in the writing at the top makes me a little dizzy.

When a writer has been productive over a large number of years and has reached a certain level of prominence, you’d think this author’s publishers would take the opportunity to create elegant, consistent designs in order to make the books stand out as a group. In the case of Margaret Atwood, the famous Canadian poet, novelist, inventor, and ecological activist, this opportunity was certainly there, although what her Canadian, American, and British publishers did with the designs of her books has not necessarily given the most fortunate results. 

Same book, different cover. The British cover design for In Other Worlds uses the same elements as the North American cover, but has fit them into the rest of their Atwood collection.

For one, Atwood’s Canadian publisher, McClelland, used to have horrendous covers for her novels, featuring sepia-toned, blurry images of naked women and odd collages. All the covers had the same, plain black border. I’ve put some bellow. Most, as you see, are not particularly attractive, some are interesting, others are plain ugly. 

More recently, McCelland have released new paperback Atwoods, with generally nicer monochrome images and more modern (although a tad redundant) font work. Although some of these new covers remain a little bit unremarkable, they’re all a great improvement on the old ones, and some of them are quite good. I especially like when the photographs have been tampered a bit to look old or grainy. The covers I prefer in this collection are Alias Grace and The Handmaid’s Tale.

As an aside, the image used on the cover of The Blind Assassin is the same one Penguin used on the cover of their Red Classics edition of The Great Gatsby.

For Atwood’s American and UK covers, see the next post!