Making notes user-friendly

Readers reasonably report difficulties when flicking back and forth from text to endnotes in editions of classic novels. What can designers do to help them?

There’s obviously a need for discretion in cueing notes in a text intended for continuous reading. One really wants the reader to be able to decide whether to follow up any cue to a note, or simply let the text wash over them. So, first question, what cueing marks to use? An incrementing/sequential system, or a single mark for all notes? Superior numbers or a symbol system?

Oxford English Novels, a hardback (later paperback) series of the 50s and 60s, used notes numbered by page. This means that almost all notes are cued by single-digit numbers, reducing the disruption in the appearance of the line. InDesign can handle by-page numbering. The notes at the end were identified in the following way:

Page 4. (1) It droppeth like the gentle rain: Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, iv. i. 181.

A problem here is that the start of each note is identical (‘Page‘), and the note number has to be parenthesized to distinguish it from the page number. The lemma (the words quoted from the actual text that are being glossed) is therefore some way into the note. The reader’s operation in seeing a note is as follows:

1. notice the cue
2. notice the words immediately before the cue
3. notice the current page number
4. turn to the back of the book
5. scan through the notes to find ‘Page X’
6. scan to see the relevant note number – if there is only one note to a page, then the note number is omitted as unnecessary
7. confirm that the lemma matches the words you are expecting
8. read the note

Probably the most difficult part of this operation is 5 – the identical starts to notes and the consistent running headline (simply ‘Explanatory Notes’) don’t help.

When OENs were re-purposed as [Oxford] World’s Classics in the 70s, the system was perpetuated. You might still find an OWC with this system. Newly-set OWCs used a system with much more help provided for the reader in the design of the notes pages, but with a less helpful cueing system in the text. Instead of a sequence of numbers, a single cue mark was used, the asterisk. Because asterisks vary in design from font to font, including some which don’t look like asterisks (Bembo and Plantin, for example, have 5-pointed starts instead of asterisks, and Ehrhardt, the default typeface for OWCs, has a very hairy asterisk that fills in at small sizes) it was decided to standardize of Baskerville asterisks, whatever the text face. A model for this is the annotation in many Norton texts, where a degree sign (º) is used.

The presentation of the notes was re-thought with a stub column for the page number (which is inserted only when the page number changes, and with the lemmas, still italicized, brought to the start of the note itself in the main column.

91	crinkum-crankum: a winding way.
	abating: a reduction in price.

This system puts a bit more work on to the reader in the book text, because the step of noting the likely lemma (the context of the note) is now the critical step, but provides more help in the actual look-up:

1. notice the cue
2. notice the words immediately before the cue
3. notice the current page number
4. turn to the back of the book
5. scan through running headlines to find ‘Notes to Page X’
6. scan down the stub column to find ‘Page X’
7. scan down the main column to find the lemma that matches the words you are expecting
8. read the note

The use of the stub column, and the use of a vertical space between each note (the latter admittedly used in the OEN system) are the essential components. Essentially the notes are presented as a continuous table, whereas in the OENs they were a simple list. But the use of the page information in the running headline is a crucial piece of redundancy (redundancy meaning the duplication or re-presentation of information in a way that helps the reader) allowing for stage 5 in the reader’s process. A further consideration is that the page extents in these running headlines (‘123–134’) should probably be set in full rather than in a space-saving convention (‘123–34’).

As an aside, superior numbers are now available in correctly designed form in OpenType fonts (PostScript fonts used to be very variable in their support) so it’s easier to specify numbers that align correctly and blend in colour with the text. There isn’t any excuse for using normal figures scaled and aligned as superiors ¹²³ – which were often too light, too narrow, and too high, unless the designer had carefully specified the parameters to be used.

I'll add some illustrations shortly.

Some readers like footnotes (2)

There is certainly a trade-off between convenience of access and simplicity of appearance in deciding whether to place notes on the page or at the end of the book – especially if the book started life as a non-academic text and explanatory notes have been added later. In the early days of phototypesetting, when pages were made up by hand using (literally) cut and paste, footnotes became an additional cost, and were avoided where possible by many publishers. Large-scale, automated page make-up systems such as Miles and Penta made the position of notes irrelevant, as the pagination process could deal with foot-of-page, end-of-chapter, or end-of-book notes equally well; but these systems could not compete on cost with simpler Mac-based applications such as Quark XPress, which had nothing like the functionality. Footnotes in XPress used to be a real pain.

InDesign’s relatively competent handling of footnotes means that there is no reason for foot-of-page notes to be avoided any more, but I wonder if there is still a folk-memory that footnotes are ‘difficult’? I was pleased to see that some readers are still in favour of footnotes, as evidenced by this blog – but note the rueful ‘I guess footnotes have been done away with in this day and age’, as if publishers have persuaded readers that ‘there’s no call for them now, sir.’

Dostoevsky translated by Yoda

Stuart Jeffries has written an amusing article about the inversion of normal English word order that most translations of Братья Карамазовы use, following the Russian pattern slavishly in a way that we would think most odd if it were applied to the Brothers Warner or the Brothers Marx. (The OWC edition calls them The Karamazov Brothers.)

What the readers think …

This blog has some interesting – if light – responses to the redesign of the Oxford World’s Classics series. The overall feeling is very positive, but with some strange asides (‘don’t they look a lot like the Penguin ones?’ – Sophie; how?). The continuity of the colour red from the old design to the new is clearly a good thing (‘I will miss the red banner though. I relied on it to find them on the bookstore shelves!’ – Stefanie; ‘These still have the red on the spine, but it's a bit smaller.’ – Tara).

And I’m glad that someone else has noticed the optical illusion that occurs when you compare the old and the new: the previous design (come on, let's be honest, my old design) made the books look taller and thinner, whereas the new design makes them look wider (‘if they are, that would be a big plus!’ says Sophie; sorry Sophie, they’re exactly the same size).

Relaunching Oxford World’s Classics

This piece by Judith first appeared on blog.oup.com

This week sees the culmination of two years’ planning and preparation with the relaunch of Oxford World’s Classics in new covers. It’s been ten years since we last had a new look, so it was time for a makeover, and yesterday at the London Book Fair we officially unveiled the new livery at a seminar on ‘How to edit the classics’ in the morning, and a drinks reception in the evening.

Managing a relaunch on this scale involves a lot of people and coordination between different publishing functions. There are over 700 titles in the list, and we had both to schedule reprints for those books we wanted to re-cover in the first few months, and deal with other titles whose stock in the old look was going to run out after April 2008. We had to research and choose a new design, and in many cases new images, allocate new isbns, devise a marketing campaign, and talk to the retailers about promotions.

We wanted a new look that would be fresh and contemporary and appeal to general readers and browsers who might previously have thought Oxford World’s Classics were a bit too academic for them. So we have a clean white title panel, and white back and spine, and we have chosen dramatic crops of appropriateillustrations to intrigue and entice the reader. We also wanted a sense of continuity with the old look, so we have retained a red strip at the top of the spine and back cover, and added a tantalizing detail from the cover image in a small thumbnail on the spine (older readers may remember that we used to have a similar feature on a previous incarnation of the series, but at the bottom of the spine, not the top). We also chose a new typeface for the cover, Capitolium, a modern take on classic lettering, based on classical Roman inscriptions and Renaissance calligraphy and designed by Gerard Unger. The insides of the books are unchanged, and we will continue to publish high-quality editions and translations with outstanding introductions and notes at truly affordable prices, editions that are designed to satisfy the needs not just of students, but of the lively general reader as well.

As a way of introducing new readers to the list we have created some collections under the ‘More than Words’ banner. Themes such as Desire, Dream, Escape, and Believe gather familiar as well as unexpected titles as a way of inviting readers to approach books from a new direction, to find connections with works that chime with their own tastes and current interests. Look out for the themed collections in the bookshops from this month.

At the London Book Fair seminar yesterday, John Mullan, Margaret Reynolds and myself, under the lively chairmanship of David Freeman, took part in a discussion about editing the classics and the ways in which different books and markets call for a variety of editorial approaches. This month’s new publications demonstrate this variety at work, with new translations of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and the Mabinogion, new editions of Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks, and a fascinating new anthology of Gandhi’s Essential Writings. Relaunching OWC has been an exhilarating ride, with plenty of highs - and the occasional low - and I am looking forward to seeing the rest of the series roll out in new covers in the course of the coming year.