A SHORT INSIGHT INTO
A BOOK SHAPING SKILL
Author: Ilija Knežević
October 2005

translation into English: Danijela Tomazović

A book is a medium, a tool (machine a lire – Paul Valéry) and an object. [1]

If we take this definition as the starting point in describing the process of book shaping, because one has to start from somewhere, we might have an opportunity to faster and more clearly expose some of the many interventions that make it a skill and an art. While appreciating a bit populist sounding view point that »any book is a good book«, here we will still discuss how to make a book which could be beautiful as a medium, and as a tool, and as an object.

Shaping a book is a very complicated project. It has been like that since forever, starting from organized handwritten Antic classics copies making in the time of Carlo the Great and scholar Alcuin, through medieval handwritten books over which the monks lost their sight and health, only in order to glorify God and his word in as greater way as possible (with a bit of personal vanity of course, testified about in the column makers’ colophons at the end of many manuscripts). Then further through educated Italian humanists whose wealth was measured in thousands of florins – in books – and eventually all the way to the printed book whose maker, Johann Gutenberg did not regret the time nor the money in order to stay worthy of his famous and great predecessors. A book always had an extremely prominent position in the world of educated people. With press expansion, the circle of literate and educated people also expanded, and the book finally became a universal instrument of knowledge spreading.

The books layout always mirrored contemporary social circumstances, and was in accordance with the current art movements. The books of late Renaissance can be easily distinguished from the Baroque or Classicistic books, just as the books from the time of industrial revolution can be recognized based on their inappropriate »clothing«. Based on ascetic composedness and pragmatism, the books from the first quarter of 20th century can be recognized, created while the Bauhaus and »the new typography« of Jan Tschichold were rising. Each period created its own books.

In the end of previous and the beginning of this century, in a multicultural society largely oriented towards technological innovations, the book ended within the empty space, »endangered« by the radio, film, television, internet and multimedia. Fighting these challenges, the artists who were shaping books had to find new approaches and resort in new ways of text interpreting, in order to »stay competitive«. A book got a new face – eclectic approach to shaping, quotes and deconstruction of classic book shape, rumbled through the book shops and libraries. Anything became possible.

That’s how we come to our topic – what is necessary to do in order to shape the book someone will take with joy and devote to it while forgetting everyday concerns and troubles, traveling somewhere to the world, far in time and space, while sitting in a warm room, with rustle paper within fingers.

A book as an object has its dimensions – height, width and thickness. The first thing to decide when an artist confronts a new project that needs to be turned into a book is its format. Is it a book that will be read on the go, in public transportation or in a queue in a bank or in a post office, or it is envisioned and written for careful study at home or in a library, placed onto a table or a reading table? Will it be softbound or hardbound, will it have protective cover? If the book is hardbound, will it be enwrapped in textile, foil or paper, plasticized or not? How the chosen format will fit in standard (DIN) formats of the printing paper? Will it be printed in one color or more of them? On what kind of paper it will be printed, does it contain any reproductions which demand coated paper (kunstdruck), or contains text only and can be printed on the offset paper? Will the coated paper be matte or glossy, will offset paper be lime white or will it have light yellowish tone of the eggshell? What will be the grammature of the paper, will the pages be more or less transparent, finally, how thick the book will be and how much will it weigh? All of this is only the beginning.

When the artist has more or less successfully dealt with these basic requirements, a sea of new problems awaits for him. Which typeface to choose for the book? Will it be Cyrillic or Latin? Will the typeface be from »the epoch« or not? If it is Cyrillic, how to choose the right one out of five proper book Cyrillic typefaces created for usage in computer layout? Are all spaces between the letters of the chosen font made? Are there many numbers in the text, and which figures to choose for the book – lowercase (»medieval«) or uppercase? How to emphasize the text parts: in italics, half-black font or small caps? What will be the size of the font, of line spacing? How to determine text width and the number of characters in a row with regard to the margins and in order to achieve a harmony on the page, to make the text as easy for reading as possible? Where the pagination will be placed and of what kind will it be, will the book have live headings in the top of the page, what will they contain and where will they be placed? How the headings and subheadings will be emphasized (and how many different of those there are)? Will the explanations and references be within the footnotes or margins, what will be their size? How many structural parts the future book has (zero sheet, main text, pages in between, addendums, index…) and how will they be organized? Are the explanations of the illustrations or reproductions next to them or on separate pages, as well as how they will be separated from the main text? Are there reproductions not fitting the format (»bleed«)?

While thinking about all of this, one can take some rest with the reading of the text which will become the content of our book. We will carefully take a look at how the text was typed – in a large number of cases this will be »typing on a typing machine« with dashes (-) instead of proper hyphens (–), with the parts of the text which are supposed to be emphasized with typed uppercase or underlines, all figures are uppercase… All of this has to be changed and adjusted to the idea of the future book. Double spaces between the words can be easily removed, but the other details which are not in accordance with the idea should be carefully and »manually« looked for and removed.

When finally, and based on the previous decisions, text is within a layout, it has to be organized page by page, because not a single computer software can give a text of even »color« – without uneven spaces between the words for example. All has to be carefully overviewed, and where needed, the changes have to be made in the spacing in a line in order for the previous and the following line to fit in »the color« of the overall text. After this comes printing for the proofreader. If the format of the future book is larger than A4 format, the pages are printed in two parts, and then glued together and cut around the edges. For a book with 250 pages, this means 500 prints, plus gluing and cutting. Time wise this is quite a demanding job. Since any proper proofreading comes with a lot of errors identified, this part of the job has to be done as many times as needed in order for the book to be printed with as less errors as possible…

When all of this is done, the book is sent to »imagesetting« and the films are afterwards sent to the printing house. This is where the true torture starts. All that the artist carefully decided about, did and confirmed, the printer can (not necessarily) change and devalue. It is not at all easy to stay alerted while the book is in the printing. You can go to the printing house and supervise the printing process (which is an unimaginable thing in the world today), or you can stay at home and bite your nails until you get a call saying that the book is finished. After ten years of experience, I still do not know what is more stressful.

Finally, the book is printed and bounded, right in time – just before some fair or anniversary – an event for the promotion of the book and the whole project is organized, the newspapers write about it, the TV talks about it, and the poor artist who survived all we talked about, with more or less health consequences, will rarely be mentioned. He did his job, and there are few of those who know what he did, and even fewer of those who will appreciate it.

There, like that, in short, without many smaller (but important) details and troubles which can occur during the work, is how the book shaping process looks like.

[1] »A few Principles of Typography«, Felix Janssens, Emigre No36, 1995

Illustrations from the book »Typography — when, who, how«, Philipp Luidl, Köln , 1998