Recto, Verso, Spread
“Book design looks easy”, I thought to myself.
It’s 2011 and I’m sitting in a mostly empty lecture hall, half-listening to a talk about 18th century poetry and mostly-reading about book design on my laptop. Verso, recto, spread. These spells and incantations look so simple! To make a beautiful book all you have to do is gather the fanciest fonts and colors together, learn a bit of graphic design, select from an elegant platter of paper stocks and then, finally, you simply emboss every letter on the cover.
You stir them all together and the spell has been cast; your book is now beautiful.
It wasn’t until many years later that what I considered book design was really just cover design. Whereas before I’d walk into a book store, look at the cover designs, and roll my eyes — amateurs — I soon began ignoring the covers altogether, opting for opening up the books to the center and carefully examining the columns of text inside.
Soon after, I realized two things:
- The cover of a book is the least interesting part of its design.
- I have no idea what I’m talking about and book design is incredibly difficult and I need to promptly hush.
Sure, the cover gets all the attention; it likely has the biggest impact on sales or whatever. But the heart of a book is in the spread; two pages, open — recto, verso — and the columns of black text in an endless expanse of empty space. The spread is so much more interesting than the cover! First, if you pay attention closely, there’s a kind of feeling that a beautiful column of text can give you. The problem is finding those beautiful columns as they’re extremely rare and most books don’t take care of the margins, the typesetting, etc.
This might be sappy as hell, but when I think of a beautiful spread I think of music. There‘s a sound you can hear in the pages, the soft ring of confidence and the hum and hush of calm. A great spread tells me that I’m in safe hands. I can trust this thing; it’s worthy of my attention.
Example: this spread I spotted the other day whilst rummaging through the Letterform Archive. It’s a scan from a book called American Mutt Barks in the Yard and behold a truly mighty spread:
Do you hear that? A song of comfort and safety. This designer has spent a foolish amount of time taking care of the margins so that your thumbs can press against the sides and so that the text doesn’t feel rushed or violently crammed into a tiny box.
So if you’re ready for a truly astonishing evening of bookish delights, then I can’t think of anything better than filtering the Letterform Archive by books (like this). Take any other example at random, like this one from a book called Peter Piper:
So much white space! The sound of it! I have no idea why they chose to cram the page numbers and the chapter name up close to the text block but I weirdly like it?
Or wait, wait, check this bad boy out:
There's a profound confidence in a book like this. The designer is telling us that this is all you need, that not every page must be crammed full of every word. Instead? There is value in all this nothingness; the space between words is just as important as the words themselves.
I desperately want to invoke this same feeling with my book. I want the reader to feel safe and respected and not overwhelmed with a million ideas at once. Perhaps now I see how difficult the incantation of book design is though, and perhaps I need to explore a thousand other spells before I gather the correct ingredients together. Before I can say the words and complete the magic:
Recto, verso, spread.