Margins and Mountains

Book pals! Titans of the publishing industry! Dad!

I humbly apologize for the late entry. Last week I was moving into a new apartment and it was a lot more physically and emotionally draining than I expected. But enough of that for now: the desk is in, the books are on their shelves, and the new place is already feeling cozy and warm, the neighborhood perfect for trekking around and thinking about the book.

So, a few updates. Over the weekend I tidied up the website a little bit. It needs a lot of work still but now at least I’ve archived every post of this newsletter for safe keeping. I think unlike other newsletters I’ve worked on that are very ephemeral, I’m starting to see this project as being mostly an archive for myself, a notebook of why I made decisions and what problems I bumped into. The website still needs a lot of polish, like the the visuals are still half baked, but this is a good reminder that Magnet by Inga Plönnigs is a beautiful typeface and does most of the heavy lifting without any polish required.

On the book front, I’ve had prototype #002 kicking around on my desk for the last couple of weeks. It’s...interesting!

More compact and tinier than the first version I made a few months ago, it’s now 4.37 x 7 inches compared to 5 x 8 inches in the first prototype. That changes everything about the reading experience and it sure is fantastic to hold (despite the terrible binding but I’ll fix that in future prototypes). It’s also wonderfully lightweight and a breeze to open. Its tiny-ness makes it feel more fragile and more...important somehow? It’s hard to put that into words but smaller books always make me handle them with more care for reasons I don’t quite understand.

There are some problems though. At this size you have so little space to play with! The margins alone take up all the available space so the text feels cramped, just like a Kindle book. If this project was something else entirely, say a collection of essays or long-form writing then I think this format would be perfect. But this book, Adventures in Typography, isn’t that. We’ll need lots of space for illustrations and diagrams and typefaces.

So what’s next? I’m going to try a larger-than-paperback-size and give the thing humungous, skyscraper-sized margins. I mentioned last week that I’m reading Counterpunch and perhaps the most perfect thing about it is the margins. You have so much space to put your thumbs on each page! Your fingers never get in the way as you read, plus all that space makes me slow down in my reading and I end up treating this text more like it’s sacred.

This was a good prototype though! Maybe I’ll come back to this size eventually but for now it’s a sign that this isn’t quite the right direction to take.

Also, this prototype was a reminder of how much work there is left. This morning—as I look over it, prod it, poke it—the mountain of work ahead feels...good? Yes, good. Now I just have to do the thing.