Response to book design

Find a few well-designed books in your field (that is, medicine and science) and follow those architectures. Even better find out who designed those books and turn the job over to a professional whose work you respect.

Textbook design these days tends toward over-produced, self-conscious, content-unconscious arrangements. Maybe look at older classic textbooks.

Ruari McLean has published several excellent books on book design and typography. Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style is superb.

To do the book yourself requires the use of a serious page-layout program, either Quark XPress or Adobe InDesign, backed up by PhotoShop and Illustrator. You can get help from nearly any student of graphic design, who will know XPress or InDesign. Book design at a high level requires a great deal of professional skill and hard work, and, I believe, close collaboration with the author.

If you have colleagues in medical illustration and medical informatics, they might be able to suggest a designer.

One strategy to do this relatively inexpensively is to find a recent MFA in book design and typography, show them exactly what you want by means of exemplars, and work with them closely on the page layout to insure, among other things, that the images fall properly in relation to the text.

But the first and most important step is to identify good examples of what you want; just go through your library.

-- Edward Tufte, August 13, 2003

Further references

I heartily agree with Dr Tufte on looking at Ruari McLean's work especially "The Thames and Hudson manual of typography and also at Robert Bringhurst's "The elements of typographic style". I would like to add Adrian Wilsons "The design of books" and Hugh Williamsons "Methods of book design". Both are excellent guides to the design and production of a book. The latter offers an excellent if a little dated guide to the industrial process of producing a book.

I'd also like to suggest an addition to the list of software that can be used to produce a book. TeX and it's derivatives LateX and ConTeXt are often used to produce scientific publications especially those that have a lot of equations and they excel at producing structured documents such as textbooks (many Springer-Verlag and Cambridge University Press titles are produced from camera ready copy or PDFs provided by the author and generated using TeX). TeX's biggest drawback is that it is not a WYSIWYG application and that visual formatting is done iteratively. Nevertheless I have used TeX/LaTeX for papers, a great many handouts and several grants and found that I could follow the Tufte guidelines and place figures alongside relevant text rather easily. The quality of the typography is excellent and automated (e.g. fi is replaced by the appropriate ligature without hunting through the symbol tables). More information on TeX and free versions of the software are available at the TeX Users Group website

-- John Walker (email), August 18, 2003

Bringhurst to web design

There's an interesting new enterprise now under construction: Richard Rutter's "The Elements of Typographic Style for the Web." He's taking the central principles of Robert Bringhurst's essential text and applying them to web site design, with not only a discussion of aesthetic issues but with coding examples as well. The initial pages indicate this will be an important resource not only for web site design but for anything meant to be viewed on a computer screen.

Of itself, the web site is an example of clear-minded design. It's worth watching; you can find it at http://webtypography.net.

-- Steve Sprague (email), December 15, 2005

Textbook design

ET rightly recommends studying well-designed textbooks. Perhaps in this thread we can collect our favorites. So, what are yours?

A few of mine are:

• The Feynman Lectures.
• Mark Denny, Air and Water.
• MacQuarrie, Quantum Chemistry.
• Graham, Knuth, Patashnik, Concrete Mathematics (the same Knuth of TeX fame).

Perhaps because it is hard to do, none of these texts integrate figures with text, the topic of this thread and what I'll try for my textbook on the Art of Approximation. One that does integrate them is Veltman's Diagrammatica, mentioned in this Beautiful Evidence chapter on page 13. The reproduced selections look very good, but I haven't seen the book itself so I haven't yet added it to my list.

-- Sanjoy Mahajan (email), May 29, 2006

Good and bad examples

I have The Feyman Lectures and also Concrete Mathematics; both are beautifully designed.

It is also notable that the Feynman lectures (3 volumes) write about all of physics in 1800 pages, using only 2 levels of hierarchical headings: chapters and A-level heads in the text. It also uses the methodology of sentences which then cumulate sequentially into paragraphs, rather than the grunts of bullet points. Undergraduae Caltech physics is very complicated material, but it didn't require an elaborate hierarchy to organize. A useful decision rule in thinking and showing is "What would Feynman do?"

Ironically, Donald Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things has a famously clunky design, with illustrations awkwardly placed distant from their relevant text, mediocre typography and layout, and muddy images.

It would be helpful to provide a few spreads from the books mentioned in this thread. I'll try to do this in the next few days; other contributors should do the same.

-- Edward Tufte, May 29, 2006

Book design examples (and posting images on this forum)

The Feynman Lectures come in several volumes, so I would count the project as using 2.5 levels of hierarchy. But for 1800 pages on a difficult subject, what an achievement! And what a contrast with current introductory physics textbooks, which are exorbitant, overweight, and often incorrect and have a fragmented, distracting, hyper-colored layout.

I'm across the Atlantic from most of my books, but when I return in a few weeks I'll contribute spreads that others haven't already contributed.

Meanwhile what is the recommended way to contribute spreads? The chapter pages from ET are gif images around 650x894 pixels. Those are presumably generated directly from the PDF file (and with anti-aliasing), but if one is scanning a double-page spread, what resolution, color depth, image format, and anti-aliasing (if available) are recommended? Perhaps for the resolution, use 650x450 since spreads are two pages but should still fit in a typical browser window's width? I'd probably use PNG format since that's patent-free so lots of free-software tools read and write it. I ask all of this so that the images are done right when posted, since editing them later seems either hard or at least a hassle for the moderator.

Several posts incorporate the images inline, i.e. stored on the edwardtufte.com server, for example Stewart Muir's answer (9 Feb 2006) in this thread. I haven't figured out how to do the same via this answer form, but is there a trick I missed?

-- Sanjoy Mahajan (email), May 30, 2006

Posting images on forum

The images posted to Ask ET are sent to Graphics Press email as 72dpi JPGs preferably no more than 600 pixels wide. We review the images and if accepted they are posted into your text thread by us.

Some technically proficient contributors have figured out the HTML code and post their own images directly. This is excellent. These images are also reviewed and may be deleted.

-- Elaine Morse (email), May 30, 2006

Auction catalogs as content-oriented design

Auction catalog and antiquarian book catalog design are often very good, indeed among the best book designs around. These page layouts below show off the objects at auction. The layouts are straightforward, workaday, routine, powerfully focused on content, and excellent. There's nothing like an auction to concentrate the mind on desirable objects.

The high-end auction houses use the same templates over and over in their catalogs; what varies among catalogs is the content, not the underlying design. These auction catalog layouts are also distinctly superior to today's fussy, hierarchical, and over-produced textbook designs. For several recent textbooks in art history and science, the designer bureaucracy has actively damaged the content.

Here then are 12 doublepage spreads from recent Christie's and Sotheby's auction catalogs for auctions in Paris, London, and New York. There are hundreds of other such page layouts from recent auction catalogs that are as good.

The first 4 doublepage spreads below from Christies's Paris, Importants livres anciens, cartographie, livres d'artistes et manuscripts, 9 juin 2006, 8-9, 28-29, 92-93, 148-149:

The 2 doublepage spreads below are from Christie's London, Natural history, Plate Books, and Cartography, 7 June 2006, 18-19, 92-93. Immediately below, on the lefthand page, a letter by Charles Darwin is shown and described; on the righthand page, a Darwin manuscript at the top, and at the bottom, in a fine parallel, the printed text of the publication resulting from the manuscript above.

The 2 doublepage spreads below are from Sotheby's Paris, Bibliotheque du Baron Alain de Rothschild, 24 mai 2006, 114-115, 120-121:

The doublespread below is from Christies's New York, Indian and Southeast Asian Art, 30 March 2006, 84-85:

The doublepage spread below is from Sotheby's New York, The Edwin & Mary Triestman Collection of Important Glass, 14 June 2006, 24-25:

-- Edward Tufte, May 31, 2006

Book design examples

The auction catalogs are beautiful!

A book that I just learnt of (thanks to Robin Benson of Southampton) and that perhaps rivals those catalogs is the Historical atlas of the United States by the National Geographic Society (Washington, DC, 1993). You don't want the later edition, National Geographic Historical Atlas of the United States (2004), which hardly compares in grandeur or design.

The 1993 edition comes in two varieties, ISBN 0870449702 or 0870449710 (deluxe). Now I'm not sure which one I saw at the university library, but it was giant. The 12.5x18.8 inches given for the page size is about right, and I'm trying to figure out how to logistically and legally get it near a large-enough scanner, otherwise perhaps left and right pages separately and then joined. In England, "fair use" (known as "fair dealing" here) is quite restricted especially for acts that you don't do personally (e.g. when you request a library to make a copy or scan of a non-circulating book).

Each spread in the atlas, which covers a theme and time, has maybe 20 figures, drawings, or maps with explanations -- and of all sizes and shapes and colors -- and also introductory text.

-- Sanjoy Mahajan (email), June 1, 2006

Posting images on Ask ET

Perhaps the easiest way to post images to Ask ET is to upload them to Flickr, which will then host the image and provide you autogenerated HTML instructions telling browsers to insert whichever size of the image you've chosen. The code is available by clicking the "all sizes" link from the photo's Flickr page. Just copy the code from Flickr, paste it into the Ask ET comment form, and make sure to change the box 'text above is:" at the bottom from "Plain Text" to "HTML". If you want to play with the properties of the image, see Philip Greenspun's HTML primer.

-- Niels Olson (email), June 2, 2006

Beautiful Evidence, and LaTeX

Like all the others who have commented, I was delighted with my copy of Beautiful Evidence when I received it about three weeks ago. However, I didn't immediately say so here because I wanted to write some unbiassed comments for Amazon first. It made no difference because, unbiassed or not, one can hardly avoid superlatives when writing about it.

Like, I imagine, most readers who read them with an open mind, I am thoroughly convinced by the arguments for embedding images in the text at exactly the places where they are relevant, but I am curious about the software used to achieve this in the book. For articles published in periodicals one is normally forced to follow the editorial practices of the periodical, no matter how stupid they may be, but for books one may have a little more control, even without going to the extreme of setting up one's own publishing house. (I'd love to be able to emulate Graphics Press and have complete control over everything, but that must involve a large investment of time, effort and money.) The references to Microsoft Word in Beautiful Evidence suggest that this was used at some stage, but surely not for the complete layout of the book? I'd be prepared to invest in a complete layout program if I could be sure if would let me do things the way I want and not insist on imposing the software designer's choices.

In this connection it is pertinent to mention L^AT_EX, which I have recently started to use for preparing scientific articles, because it illustrates very well both the advantages and disadvantages of a page layout program. On the one hand the typographical choices that it makes are expert ones, and a huge improvement on many people's amateurish ideas of typography, but on the other hand it makes it difficult or impossible to do anything differently from what Donald Knuth decided.

-- Athel Cornish-Bowden (email), July 17, 2006

LaTeX

Athel,

You best bet for one book would be Kopka and Daly "A Guide to LaTeX". The LaTeX Companion Series (3 vols) by Mittelbach and others are great sources of information and the TeX user group (http://www.tug.org) has many good recommendations.

Best of all is looking at the source code of a page you like and reusing the code - this is one of the strengths of LaTeX over pure GUI applications. Along those lines, if you'd like a copy of the code/preamble to my handout let me know and I'll email it to you (off the forum, simply becasue it's off-topic here).

As far as fonts go, I used a set I purchased from www.fontsite.com that have a set of LaTeX files available (I have no relationship with fontsite other than I have been a customer). But there are similar latex font files available at the TeX user group website for many commercially available fonts.

Regards

John

-- John Walker (email), July 18, 2006

Auction catalogs: clean unobtrusive design for showing beautiful objects

These straightforward designs celebrate and document the objects for sale.

The above pages are from:

-- Edward Tufte, July 26, 2006

LaTeX

Athel -

I would very much recommend the Memoir class, and its excellent manual.

Actually, I would recommend the first half of that manual as a good answer to the initial question on book design in general. It takes an approach of spending about 40 pages discussing design in general, before delving into the subject of how to implement the ideas in LaTeX.

I should note, also, that the "hard to do anything different than the defaults" problem with LaTeX is due much more to Lamport and LaTeX rather than due to Knuth and TeX itself. And it's a problem of the document classes, rather than the underlying system -- the standard document classes (article, book, etc.) really should be considered more as simple functional examples rather than the final word in doing things, and I believe that was Lamport's intention when he wrote them. The Memoir class is a far more flexible document class, and should be much more what you're looking for.

-- Brooks Moses (email), September 16, 2006

LaTeX

The memoir class is well worth knowing about, and the manual is indeed excellent.

When I read the suggestion I thought I was going to have to search for the package and install it, but it was a pleasant surprise to find that it was already installed and ready to use. This is one of the nicest things I've been learning about LaTeX: many of the packages I want to use turn out to be already present in a standard installation.

-- Athel Cornish-Bowden (email), September 20, 2006

Henning Nelms

Henning Nelms wrote and illustrated several excellent books: Thinking with a Pencil (1981)
and the classic Magic and Showmanship: A Handbook for Conjurers (1969). A few of his illustrations
of magic appear in my Visual Explanations.

Below, from Thinking with a Pencil:

-- Edward Tufte, September 26, 2006

Response to Book design

Source: Catalog, September 2006, from Sokol Books Ltd., P.O. Box 2409, London, W1A 2SH, UK.

-- Edward Tufte, October 16, 2006

Auction catalogs

More from recent auction catalogues; visual statements about beautiful books at auction, not designer statements.

Source: Christies's London, Photobooks, 31 May 2007, 67

Source: Christies's London,Photobooks, 31 May 2007, 76

Source: Christies's London, Photobooks, 31 May 2007, 94

-- Edward Tufte, May 14, 2007

LaTeX

Regarding my "I've been meaning to package my `Tufte-report' LaTeX class and release it to CTAN" post above. Well, I've finally managed to get an open source project setup at tufte-latex.googlecode.com. Contributors welcome.

-- Bil Kleb (email), September 23, 2007

Paper Odor as a element of book design

My wife introduced me to a book for the parents and caregivers of autistic children, not so much to read, but she was reading it (she's an occupational therapist), and I smelled the pages from across the room! It's brand new. We're debating what the smell might be. The clay, the coating, the glue? Oh, it stinks. Considering this is a book destined for the homes of autistic children, who are typically severely hostile to new sensory experiences, this seems to be a predictable problem.

Do publishers ask authors to preview the paper their books will be printed on before printing begins?

-- Niels Olson (email), December 16, 2007

Book smell

Several smell candidates: binding glue, a coating on the cover, or possibly the ink (if very recently printed). Try airing the book out. Probably not the paper.

Or maybe it picked up a smell in transit.

For used books, the smell problem is mildew, especially for used bookstores in areas with humid summers. You'll never get rid of it.

-- Edward Tufte, December 16, 2007

A little diagram

In 1963-1964 I took a course at Stanford University in stochastic processes with
Professor Emanuel Parzen. The textbook was his Stochastic Processes (1962).
In class he mentioned with pride how he had talked the publisher into putting
a diagram into the book's introduction and suggested that perhaps this was
a first in textbook publishing:

Although I studied the book carefully--here are some of my dutiful annotations on the
text--all I remember from the course is his book design remark (which has had
great influence on me over the years) and that I was over my head when it came to
stochastic processes at the graduate level.

-- Edward Tufte, November 24, 2008

Weightless flight manuals aboard the shuttle

Bill Readdy, the Commander of Atlantis STS-79 (Mir docking), gave me a copy of his flight manual as a most generous souvenir during some recent work at NASA Headquarters. He noted that, under weightless conditions, the manual in a 3-ring binder floats and opens up 360 degrees as the pages fan out. At last, manuals have escaped flatland.

Since this flight of the shuttle docked with Mir, the manual was also written in Russian. In the Russian section, the classic "This Page Intentionally Blank" (note the telltale first-letter caps of manualese) was in English, perhaps because the phrase is universally cryptic, thus needing no translation.

"This Page Intentionally Left Blank" has some of the same deadpan obviousness of "This is not a pipe" (Magritte's 1926 painting Ceci n'est pas une pipe). For important documents, like shuttle manuals, checking of individual copies will eliminate the possibility that the xerox machine or a printing press threw off a blank page.

-- Edward Tufte, December 2, 2008

Blank pages in technical manuals

It's obvious that you have never had to deal with a customer demanding another copy of a manual because, "there's a blank page, and I know there should be something printed on it."

-- Ed Mikula (email), December 2, 2008

EPA corporate pitch document: "unintentionally left blank"

Ah, but what to make of the second page of the EPA's "Improving Air Quality With Economic Incentive Programs" (at http://www.epa.gov/ttn/oarpg/t1/memoranda/eipfin.pdf)? It reads: "This page unintentionally left blank."

Okay, I just googled it and got 72 hits. Apparently EPA is not alone in adding an extra layer to the whole liar's paradox quality of the statement.

-- Michael Boydston (email), December 2, 2008

More blank page humor

Wonderful, thank you Kindly Contributor Michael Boydston. Page 4 of the EPA document, nonetheless, was "intentionally" left blank.

-- Edward Tufte, December 2, 2008

Don't you mean that page was intentionally left unblank?

-- Ric Werme (email), December 2, 2008

No, misunintentionally.

-- ET, December 2, 2008

End of blank page humor

An engineer would probably state: This page left blank except for this sentence.

-- Bill Sharpe (email), December 2, 2008

Beautiful Evidence

The thread on Beautiful Evidence chronicles my experiences with the book's production and design.

-- Edward Tufte, December 2, 2008

I would like to second my support for LaTex, though perhaps I am biased by the fact that I am a mathematician. But in particular, I would like to draw attention to the "tufte-latex" package, inspired by the layout of Tufte's books, and created by the previous respondent Kleb and others. I have recently created a handout using the Tufte-LaTex package for a lecture, having been inspired by Tufte's one-day class in San Jose. I also used the fine PGF/TikZ package to produce graphics akin to the illustrated Euclid. The handout can be found online here Comments on design are welcome, but primarily I am writing to bring attention to the tufte-latex package which is developing into a fantastic tool. best, Marty

-- Marty Weissman (email), January 30, 2009

"This Page Intentionally Left Blank" had a purpose

I worked in military intelligence for a while. I was told that censors sanitized classified documents (i.e., removed information from them so that they could be released at a lower classification level) by simply excising it, leading to situations in which white space tended to indicate that more information was available in the original document. In that situation, "This Page Intentionally Left Blank" indicated that the page contained no content. Sort of a bureaucratic "Move along, folks, nothing to see here!"

-- Jake Freivald (email), February 11, 2009

One great blog worthy to be checked: http://www.designersreviewofbooks.com/ and the review of a beatiful book, Designing design by Kenya Hara: http://www.designersreviewofbooks.com/2009/03/designing-design/

-- Javier (email), April 7, 2009

tufte-latex

http://code.google.com/p/tufte-latex/

Good practical examples of layouts (of scientific and mathematical reports) modelled after my books. The layouts are also similar to Richard Feynman's physics extbooks.

-- Edward Tufte, June 14, 2009

Dear ET,

I have been reading up on Jan Tscichold (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Tschichold) and in particular his 'Penguin Composition Rules' which was a very short set of rules he articulated for the UK Penguin imprint in about 1947.

I have had trouble finding them either physically or electronically. There is a set of rules for web pages derived from Tscichold's rules here (http://www.beyondstandards.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/penguin_rules_for_the_web.html) and I have a rather thinly referenced electronic text of them from here (http://ronin-group.org/misc_etext_tschichold.html). My intention was to typeset them in LateX using the rules themselves as a style guide, thereby showing by example the rules in action. Do you have any images of the original set of Penguin rules, or know where I could access them either as text or images?

Best wishes

Matt R

-- Matt R (email), December 14, 2009

Dear ET,

here ( www.tug.org/twg/mactex/heathcote/heathcote_ConfPaper.pdf ) is a thoughtful essay by an Australian philosopher called Adrian Heathcote on how using free, robust and clever LaTeX typesetting programs can help small printers in the UK and Australia make better, more beautiful, books.

Heathcote makes the following point:

'There are, however, many other aspects of LaTeX that facilitate high quality typesetting. For one, the lines are not justified individually, as they are in Pagemaker and Quark, but in entire paragraph blocks. This simulates the decision making of the master typesetters of old, who would set a page so as to get the greatest evenness of word spacing. LaTeX--or rather the underlying TeX hyphenation-justification algorithm--is able to produce that evenness automatically (see fig. 1). This has been so successful an implementation of this old technique that it has been borrowed now for Adobe's InDesign program, where it is called the multi-line composer.'

The image below is his fig.1 - showing a LaTeX produced page of his own with even text due to the LaTeX hyphenation algorithm. Also note margin kerning and ff ligatures. (Font: Adobe Garamond).

Matt

-- Matt R (email), December 14, 2009

Dear ET,

Having now spent the best part of 6 months hacking older electronic files of my book into LATEX and at the same time reading whatever I can on typography and book design I can now say that using LATEX to write an illustrated science textbook is not only possible but very enjoyable. I have about 250 pages done, some appendices and indexing to do then its off to the printers. For me the chance to combine my love of science and my love of graphic design has found a new outlet. I already have another volume of notes and case studies on the way and another book planned.

The memoir LATEX class already mentioned gives an incredible flexibility and using default settings can easily give you great page design and typesetting. For example, the command \medievalpage will use the paper size you have selected and produce a medieval page layout based on classic proportions such as those of the 13th century French architect Villard de Honnecourt who devised an ingenious method of setting out optimum proportions for margins and text block on a book page. Other simple commands deliver Robert Bringhurst layouts. If necessary you can set up your own.

Using a single command and default font installations one can use a nice implementation of Zapf's Linotype Palatino. This font family comes as default with modern Latex installations and is complete with Palatino maths fonts.

Once the LATEX and memoir class syntax is learnt then page after page can be typeset easily - after a while specific manual commands can be learnt to tidy up small details.

One of the most interesting things I have learned in my reading around book design and typography is the discipline required to avoid being what Beatrice Warde described as a 'stunt typographer' in her famous essay 'The Crystal Goblet' from 1937;

"Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments. There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realise that ugly typography never effaces itself, you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else."

Here is a page of another piece of work I am doing alonside the book - set using the \medievalpage and Palatino settings I mentioned. Latex and Tex do the hardwork.

All of the software above is free, very robust and surprisingly user friendly. I use TexLive on Mac OS X and TexNic Center and MikTex on my laptop. Output is direct to PDF.

Have a great 2010 and thanks again for the great site and books.

Best wishes

Matt R

-- Matt R (email), January 1, 2010

Dear ET

Here is a book of photography and personal journals by Joel Peter Witkin published by Kat Ran Press. It is part of a bigger gallery of two-page spreads of their typography and book design.

There are about 20 books they have published showcased here = http://www.katranpress.com/typography_index.html

Best wishes

Matt R

-- Matt R (email), March 23, 2010

Dear ET,

Here is an Italian museum (http://www.typevents.com/index.php?id=422,0,0,1,0,0) that is raising funds to preserve sets of punches for a type designed by Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813) in 1798.

The image is a set of punches showing a centimetre scale bar (I assume). The full set of letters includes special glyphs (the long s between the s and t) and ligatures (such as ae, oe, fi, ffl, fl at the end of the alphabet). I have flipped the image of this so you see a mirror image of the punches. These punches are driven into metal to make matrices from which the lead type is cast.

Best wishes

Matt

-- Matt R (email), April 21, 2010

Dear ET,

I am working on a journal piece on Text and have tried to get my head around the idea of a book being a multidimensional mapping of black ink into a structured 3D space.

As part of this I wanted to try and show that if you break open a book and consider it as a 2D object then there is an extended dynamic range of lengthscales that have to be right for the book to work. It has to have a coherence and structure in the use of black ink in white space over a set of objects: Book - Page - TextBlock - Paragraph - Line - Word - Glyph.

[Robert Bringhurst makes the point in ETS 3.1 - when describing the Digital typeface Requiem by Jonathon Hoefler that, "...Requiem, unlike Bembo, Centaur and Dante, was born in the digital medium, where two dimensions have to do the work of three" p244].

I have chosen to measure the area of each of these 'objects' in millimetres squred and plotted these areas as a measure of the length scale of coherence of the text. The example is based on some pages of text from an article I wrote a few years ago about Ancient Geometry, Stereology and Modern Medics.

The typesetting has been done with the memoir class in LaTeX and the free font Utopia that was designed by Robert Slimbach and released for 'free' use by Adobe.

I have a high resolution image of my analysis here = http://www.datadeluge.com/2010/04/many-dimensions-of-book-mapped-out.html

In it I have 2 panels;

LEFT PANEL:

Book [Here represented by a two page spread - but a 296 page book is thimultiplied by 148 times] Page [Here shown as a grey on white diagram.] Textblock [Here is the actual textblock, individual words can now be seen and the structure of the paragraphs and headings etc. If you zoom in you can read it.]

RIGHT PANEL:

Paragraph [Words and their spacing, leading between lines, justification.] Line [How words interact and word and letter white space, punctuation] Word [how glyphs and whitespace interacts] Glyph [the fi glyph looks close up]

In each case I have measured the area of the object (page or line or glyph etc) along with appropriate white space ("text" is all about interplay of the black and white space on the 2D flatland of paper) in squared millimetres and plotted these estimates in a graph on a logarithmic axis.

I have attached the plot here.

The structure of ink on white space has coherence across about 7 orders of magnitude in area terms.

Best wishes

Matt

-- Matt R (email), April 21, 2010

A historic graph 1919 - Extracts from an Investigation into the Physical Properties of Books as They Are At Present Published. The Society of Calligraphers, Boston. This is a small pamphlet that was designed and authored by the graphic designer W.A. Dwiggins and his cousin L.B. Sigfried. It pilloried the format of books and his concern for the poor methods of printing trade books in the US at that time.

The book was published by the imaginary Society of Calligraphers and the stinging investigation was a hoax cooked up by Dwiggins - nevertheless it did have an effect on publishing in the US following its wide distribution.

The graph by Dwiggins shows the reduction in book quality since 1910.

Note added by ET, August 4, 2010: Back in 1982 the Dwiggins cartoon-graph inspired my redesign of a misleading graph by the National Science Foundation. The NSF original suggested that the United States had encountered a big downturn in Nobel Prizes. My corrected, updated design revealed in fact a US Nobel prize boom that broke right out of the grid, Dwiggin-like. From ET, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, page 60:

-- Matt R (email), August 2, 2010