Some recent projects

My most recent and probably last effort for the Concordia University Press was Five Centuries: The Wends and the Reformation. The book, like some others from the Press, contained a new English translation of a text originally published in German and Sorbian – in this case in a dual-language edition. The original presented both texts in series, chapter by chapter, rather than in parallel columns, for reasons unknown to me – but the many illustrations (not directly referred to in the text) ran straight on through the book, requiring one to flip through both languages to see them all. It was printed in A4 or similar format on coated stock, with the text set in Adobe Garamond, justified, in one wide column in the middle of the page, appropriately substantially leaded but also with too much word spacing. As I wrote in explaining my proposed redesign,

The original book is competent enough – the type is reasonably well set in a decent typeface, and there is, for example, some system to the widths at which images are displayed and the relationships between them and the column and page widths – but I feel that it doesn’t take best advantage of the large page, and that it contradicts itself and its content in certain ways.

To wit: the single large text block establishes a certain monumentality and indeed, at 48 lines per page and a good 72 characters or so per line, comprises quite a lot of text, nearing the maximum that one could comfortably read in a single block in English by today’s standards. However, on the one hand, I wonder whether this monumentality is appropriate for what are fairly short chapters in a fairly short book, and on the other hand, I feel the design undermines its own approach without rendering the text actually any friendlier: the type itself being on the light side, the word-spacing being loose enough to stop strong lines from forming, and the leading (line-spacing) also being loose, the overall text color (i.e., density or darkness of the mass of text) is quite light. This diffuseness in turn means that text block and margins – positive and negative space – aren’t holding one another in much tension or balance; the margins (relegated mostly to the sides, and not the top or bottom) seem like passive, leftover space. Add to this the various intrusions into the text block – captions and sidebars, and even the margins themselves in the case of images that don’t run the full width of the text – and the monolith, already looking a bit as though it’s made of Plexiglas, has now got chips and cracks in it while still remaining a large, intimidating object.

Breaking the text block into two columns – very common in a quarto-sized book such as this, and especially when the page is so wide (8.5 × 11 makes an even wider proportion than 3 : 4, the somewhat heavy medieval standard) – allows several things to happen. First, obviously, lines of text are shortened, which, up to a limit which I don’t think we’ll breach in this short text, can ease reading. The shorter lines can then be closer together (long lines invite greater space between them to help keep the eye from skipping or repeating), and thus the overall text block can be denser. Essentially some space on the page is removed from the text block to the margins, so that the two, each now with greater integrity, stand in greater contrast or tension or dynamic relationship. The white space can then be a more active element balancing not only text but also images (for example, a single image on a two-page spread, which might have felt a bit at sea in the original book, would have more modules of both text and margin to anchor and balance it). Finally, not only setting in double columns, but also paying some attention to vertical alignment or placement (seemingly missing in the original), most obviously through the suggested large upper margin and hangline, also provides more structured possibilities for image placement...

It’s also possible to match the original design quite closely – but I think we can make a more interesting book.

And as I wrote elsewhere on this website concerning the type used in this title, 

I have set all previous historically oriented cup titles in digital interpretations of the types cut by Miklós Kis, usually known as the ‘Janson’ types; the delicious, and very readable, roughness of Kis’s work always seemed appropriate for books often dealing with rural settings and illustrated by archival photos, and the parallels (Central European, Protestant, intellectual trying to bring certain ideas of education and religion to his people) between him and, say, Jan Kilian or other Sorbian leaders always seemed apposite, even if the centuries, countries, and confessions differed. But while some of the digital versions of the middle and large sizes of Kis’s types are fairly faithful to the originals, the available interpretations of the text sizes are not, and I’ve never been entirely happy with Linotype Janson Text, which has none of the qualities that made the metal versions so popular in the middle of the twentieth century. I knew that this face would fail utterly on the coated stock needed to reproduce the paintings and photos in Five Centuries – so it seemed like a good time to evolve the house style.

Enter Quadraat, Fred Smeijers’s fine and funky modern interpretation of a Dutch Baroque roman paired with a Renaissance italic. The face has, in a different and unmistakably contemporary way, some of the rumpled character of the Kis types, as well as many features and advantages of its own, the narrowness and independence of the italic being one. And without having been overused – certainly not in the US – it has also been around long enough to demonstrate its staying power. Is it too soon to call it a classic? It certainly has the sense of inevitability and self-possession, the grace that transcends simple notions of perfection, and the combination of timeliness and timelessness that mark ‘classics’ in other areas. In any case I’m extremely pleased with its performance in this case and look forward to working with it more.

With the US-letter format and extent dictated, and my modular-grid-based design direction agreed to, by the publishers, I was largely free to lay the book out as I saw fit. Feeling the disposition of the illustrations in the original to be odd, or perhaps even at odds with an ideal reading experience, I resolved at once to place the images on the spreads on which the text they related to appeared. I soon realized that I would need to establish more guidelines for myself to keep the project under control. Having tried to digest Derek Birdsall’s insights on the subject as set forth in notes on book design, I adopted the following further constraints:

·   when possible, give full-page-width images a page to themselves

·   use the camera angle, perspective, or situation of the object or building to help guide logical placement on the page

·   show similar subject matter at close to the same scale throughout the book, and furthermore,

·   don’t let the image of a small object be larger than the image of a larger one on the same spread (except when details such as text in a book or on an object must be legible)

·   cropping is fine, but don’t silhouette three-dimensional objects

These constraints led to some perhaps unexpected white spaces, were overruled by one of the co-publishers in one case, and broke down entirely when a raft of photos far in excess of the proportion of images to text that obtained throughout the rest of the book was required to be inserted in one chapter so as to appeal to the target market for the book. Nevertheless I don’t think the book would have been as strong without these constraints, which mostly had to do with maintaining some kind of relationship between the illustrated objects and their real-world situations, and proper relationships among them as well; that is, with integrity and order. Indeed, I think that that all the thinking that went into the disposition of both text and image ultimately centered round a concern that the reader not be fatigued, interrupted, or confused.

On the other hand, I would say now that the title spead – featuring, as it did, a last gasp of the Fell types, a probably clichéd blackletter (another historicizing move, an attempt to match the lettering in the required image, and finally an act of desperation to find a viable companion to the idiosyncratic Quadraat), and a space-filling graphic device – could have done more with less: if one is going to break the silence of the empty page, one had better have something to say. I suppose it will be hard to escape the influence of the very many books-on-books that imply, by their illustrations, that book design is title-page design, and that this constitutes some sort of playground for the typographer. It’s worth asking how much time, in the end, the reader spends looking at the title page.

I once wrote that ‘I also did a good bit of work to edit and refine the translation from the German text of the original German–Wendish publication.’ This was something of an understatement: in fact I spent between twenty-four and thirty intense hours on this when I first got hold of the MS, making, documenting, and discussing corrections to the by turns unidiomatic, ungrammatical, incorrect, and garbled draft translation. (The week I spent doing this – uncovering the meaning of the text and finding analogues for it – was one of the most energized periods I can remember; the effort was appropriate, of course, only because of my longstanding and close relationship with the publishers.) But I felt that if I was going to go to the trouble of designing a book, the text had to be something worth publishing.


My Gospel of Mark project is more thoroughly detailed here. Suffice it to say that a major concern was to show forth the structure of the text in a way that I feel is rarely, if ever, done in editions of the Scriptures. I will add here that, absent the responsibility to a publisher, I felt it appropriate to reconsider the conventions of front matter, and the function of the jacket, for a book so slight as this, letting the cover (the title-bearing top of which is revealed by the cropping of the jacket) serve as bastard title and getting right on to the heart of the matter (beginning with a seven-page outline of contents). The main types (Gandhi Serif and Sans) were chosen for their usefulness in this particular situation – their constitution as a pair, the availability of inclined small caps, the subordinated italic – and their generally clean and contemporary air; a reserved use of the crisp Christel Display furthered the sense of something designed in our era and for our current circumstances. The fact that these faces were generously given away by their creators also made them seem appropriate for a text that should belong to everyone.


Finally, the current work in hand – Coverdale’s Goostly psalmes and spirituall songes – presents some interesting challenges. Perhaps that work has paused enough (due to unforeseen technical complications for which I am now grateful) for me to hazard some self-reflection. Unlike most of the historically oriented Concordia titles, this is not a text about a past era, but one from an earlier age, and a much earlier one at that. If this project was begun partly as an exercise in tackling the typographical display of scholarly annotation, nevertheless the content itself has a compelling reason to be brought to light, as the text has never been reprinted in full and never had a critical edition attempting to get to grips with its many problematic readings.

In fact the display of annotations has turned out to be the least difficult part of it as, on the one hand, the many editorial challenges of the music have become clear, and on the other, repeated reëxaminations of the ways in which it is appropriate to present an old text have brought on several waves of evolution. It may be an occupational hazard of the editor-typographer that these various levels of concern should be intertwined and occasionally lead to quite a tangle; I can only hope that in the end the unified labor will have equal integrity of result.

[Update, many years later:]

Goostly psalmes remains unfinished, having first spawned a series of concerts of choral and organ music based on its contents, itself interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, then been postponed by the ongoing churn of post-pandemic life. I am left, in a way, where I began, not knowing how to resolve the text underlay in the context of a particular musical gesture. Were this to be answered, and the entire work reviewed in detail after so long a gap, there would remain the question of production: such a narrow book is unlikely to stay open absent some paper and binding too fancy for me to know anything about; the rather nasty alternatives include comb- and ring-binding, purely electronic distribution also being an option. I still like the way it looks.