April 2023

Rich and Greg Manchess worked together to create the, we hope will be, extraordinary covers for the Frozen Hell books. We wanted them to be a crafted way into the story, a visual, tactile introduction. Here are some of Rich’s tests, done half sized to see whether the designs would work for him. Rich is now creating the prototypes of the books, having worked out the book blocks to see how the spines and bindings would work.

Book blocks. Hope this makes sense, it’s a hard thing to describe. Book blocks are the dummy books that we make using the paper chosen for the text and plates in order to have the bindings made and check every page is correct. Usually it is pretty straight forward, either the plates are to be tipped in as cut plates upon the page, as we did for something like Dorian Gray or tipped in as full bleed images tipped into the gutter. With frozen Hell we’re trying something a bit different. I wanted Greg’s foldout plates, some are four-page plates, to not have a gutter. There are a number of ways to minimise the folding into the gutter, if the plate was in the middle of a section, it would have stitching down the centre but would fold out nicely, however the image often was in the wrong place, you have to adhere to the folding of the section, not what is best for the story. Or you could tip in the plate from the edge and one folds out the image but it is glued to the gutter. We wanted to have the folding out on one side or both to be part of the experience of revealing the picture.

There is an old way of doing these foldout plates. It is still used by maps in books that are bound. It involves stitching a tab into the sections. And then gluing the plates to the tab enabling a relatively gutter free experience of the image. This meant that sections, which have to have 8, 12, 16 pages, have to include in that number the tabs. Because the paper for the letterpress printing would be different from the paper Greg selected for the plates, it would prove to be an incredibly complex dummy, and book, for Ludlow and Rich Tong to create.

It also meant that the single plates would also have to be sewn in too because if we tipped them in it would not help the book open properly.

Their first attempt was a bit of a disaster, three months waiting for it and we’d have to start from scratch again.

In order for everyone to understand how the sections printed with the text would work with the multiple plates I created a mock dummy which showed the way in which they would be stitched together. Starting from an 8-page text section, which allowed us to put a 16-page section together with another 8 pages of tabs and single page tabbed in plates!

All this means is that a another very complex arete/lyra production and should end up being a good reading experience. By the time you have the book in hand I hope none of this work will be seen.

All this is working also with two, possibly three different sized books, if we do a Fine edition, which we are still considering, essentially three completely different books!

Phil Abel at Hand & Eye printing Coraline, it was a complex job printing the book across two print process by a skilful letterpress black and red dead register on the Heidelberg cylinder press by Phil and Robert.

The Thing is coming! Frozen Hell…

Cool trailer for the film and soon … will be our book!

I was a kid when I first saw the b&w film ‘Thing from Another Planet’, it led me to find and read ‘Who Goes There’ by John W. Campbell but it was Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ that blew my mind! A great film from a fantastic story. When the Campbell estate found the original story, pre the edits done by the pulps to fit into the magazine, and found it to be a more adventurous take on his story, I knew we had to make a book of the story. Greg Manchess thought the same, the set up of the horror story felt more grounded and real.

Illustration by Gary Gianni, created for Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Case of Death and Honey’ an Arete Editions project.

Coraline Standard edition printing, this was a really complex job for Phil at Hand and Eye, we wanted to print the plates on the page BUT still have the red thread and frames to be letterpress. The dead register across two forms of printing is complex but…looks great!

Finally the dam breaks! Ludlow’s are getting to make up Words of Fire! YAY! Got the softback book to check it’s all in place, yes, ready to go. Should be shipping in days! Here’s a movie of how each signed numbered softcover book cover is put together.

I thought that I’d like to share with you why everything is late. Apart from the supply chain issues and the closing of paper mills amongst a host of physical, practical, problems, is the time involved in making books an analogue way! Over the next few posts I’ll go into some of the production that goes on behind the scenes.

There are two ways to make letterpress books, one is where you can retain the digital creation using plates and the other is metal type, which has not any real interaction with design using computer software like Indesign. Metal type is old, as you may have seen in the posts below, it requires Phil to set the type into each page to be printed. When using metal type there are two ways to create the page, one is using each individual letter to create a word, the other is monotype, which is each word has been cast at the foundry and then compiled by the printer into each unique page. To make a book of 1-200 pages would take too long to make up using individual letters, so we at Arete use monotype.

When I create a book I use Indesign, setting the type as close as possible to the size of the metal (which has not yet been set) typeface. That allows me to create a book, knowing how many pages the book will come to and also allows me to talk to the artist, explaining and showing how his art could work as page turns.

The artist starts to work on sketches that I then put into the computer design. HOWEVER, that is not what it will end up looking like.

The metal is fixed. Each word has a set size. And I won’t know until I get a ‘soft proof’ from the foundry what is going to happen with each line of text. In the mean time the artist is often finishing the art based upon a computer estimation of what will be happening, text wise, on each page.

Then the soft proof comes in and it will be the first time that I can see what text each line will have, it looks like this:

Widows, orphans, word breaks can not be changed. Metal is immoveable. This often creates … issues with the reading experience that I have worked out with the artist.

Each page’s text, before and during the image placement, has been worked out many months before and when we get the soft proof we start to see what is going to stop or enhance the images.

So I then have to redesign the book, with images that cannot be altered, with metal text that cannot be changed!

I go back using the computer to place each line into the draft computer design. And everything changes. This is often many months later.

With Frozen Hell I was fortunate to have line gaps between story pages that Campbell had done to separate sections within chapters, this allowed me to manipulate the amount of lines that a page has, so if I needed to finish with a specific sentence before, let’s say, a double page spread, (I don’t want a split sentence and then have a plate) I can change the order by a line or two, or start with the chapter having fewer lines in it’s opening page pushing the text down a few pages, by having three lines in the break instead of two. That solves most problems of the reading experience, but not all.

Some you just have to live with.