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.
