The books they tried to ban

Test your knowledge of censors and would-be censors in this quiz from the Guardian.

The cover illustration is from the first printing of Candide in the Penguin Classics series (1947). This was volume 4 in the series. The text may be a very early design by Jan Tschichold, who took up his role at Penguin in March 1947, but the setting, in Monotype Bembo 270, does not follow his famous composition style – dashes are unspaced em-rules, there are extra spaces after sentence full stops, and the long-tailed R is used.

The cover is the original pre-Tschichold design by John Overton; the roundel is by William Grimmond.

Edit
I’ve now managed to look closely at the first few Penguin Classics, and the Overton/Tschichold question is rather more complex than implied by the above, or by the simple statement in Baines, ‘only the first seven titles appeared in this design, before it was re-styled by Jan Tschichold in 1947–8’. Not surprisingly, the transition from one design to another in a series in production was not clear-cut. There are early PCs with Overton covers/Overton text; Overton covers/Tschchold texts and vice versa. Some books feature pre-war bowing Penguins, some a Penguin standing on an open book (Baines, p. 251); at least one with a Tschichold Penguin on the half-title, but no device on the title-page. Another has an Overton ‘jacket’ wrapped around what looks like a Tschichold cover.

Baines, P. (2005) Penguin by design. London: Allen Lane (pp. 46, 64–7)

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.

The men in white coats

In films and tv dramas of the 1950s and 1960s, the scientist (usually male) was instantly recognizable by his white coat. As the printing industry began to move to photo-typesetting and computer-aided composition in the same period, the image of the printer in a white coat was part of the message to customers that here was a new, less inky age, with highly trained technicians producing perfect results from finely calibrated equipment. The printer was seen with the new tools of his trade: a light-table, film, and a scalpel. All that was missing was the stethoscope. Even when the machinery was not so different (Monotype used the same basic keyboard for its Monophoto machines as for its hot-metal system) the operator was duly dressed up in a white coat for the publicity photo, eschewing the traditional printer's brown garb.

This attempt to rebrand the printer went alongside calls for designers to re-think themselves: ‘Print designers … should be trained not in art schools, but in schools of engineering print design.’ Thus John Duncan in 1964. ‘There is still too much woolly thinking in out training programmes for designers. Too often the basic disciplines of draughtsmanship and the cardinal responsibility of communicating an idea or message are overlooked or neglected and issues are clouded by the striving for the vague goals of so-called originality and aestheticism,’ wrote Lawrence Wallis in 1965. ‘This is an age of specification writing,’ continued Duncan, accurately describing the role of the designer for computer-controlled composition as someone who had thought out all the issues beforehand, so the the machines could run at maximum speed, with little need for time-wasting corrections. ‘What other industry,’ wondered Wallis, ‘would put up with the specification being altered half way through the production of a job, or even worse with no specification at all, or with an inaccurate one.’

Alongside the elevation of the specification was the development of work-flow diagrams: the one below even schematizes the operations with labels such as ‘intellectual–manual’ and ‘automatic–electronic’.


What was this a reaction against? Perhaps the best example I can find from the early post-war years of a designer being determinedly anti-scientific (if you take scientific as meaning a method involving measurable, repeatable things) is Jan van Krimpen, whom Robin Kinross called 'the principal bearer of tradition in Dutch typography’. Here is is talking of how he would ‘specify’ amendments to a typeface design:

‘I meant to offer … to have them put in order, under my own eyes, by my own punch-cutter. … When we talk of punches cut by hand we use terms like “a hair or even less” or “the tiniest little trifle” &c. I am sure they could not convey or mean anything to the people of the [Monotype works who] talk of “tens” and “thous[ands of an inch]”.’

Sources: Penrose Annual, 1964; The Monotype Recorder, 43, 2, Summer 1965; OUP archives