Blogs

They say not to judge a book by its cover, but everyone knows that we do it all the time.

It's hard to avoid, as long as the book is an object to hold in your hands. There is something repellant about an oversized paperback with a cheezy image and a bad title font. And there is something comforting about the feel of a faded cloth binding against your fingertips.

Every time I see the boxy covers of a Norton Critical Edition I flash back to freshman-level literature courses in victorian fiction. Anna recently confessed to purchasing a book exclusively because the cover reminded her of the cover of her copy of Auntie Mame

In this case, Anna says, the book lived up to its cover. The humorous social commentary inside the book (like that inside Auntie Mame) is just what the cover promised.

This is why with our books, cover art can become war. Many authors, exhausted and proud of their literary achievement, burnt out on copy edits and typesetting, throw their hands in the air when the cover question comes their way. Not us.

Even as pub dates approach and new projects build up, we stubbornly resist anything that evokes the 1980's. We are staunchly opposed to images that are reminiscent of romance novels, of clip art, or of Twister. (Unless it's on the cover of Gary Shteyngart's dystopian fiction, of course).

Speaking of Shteyngart, we are enamored with the book trailer he posted online to generate energy for his book. We like the idea of book trailers in general, which, like movie previews, offer a glance into the experience to come.

Everyone knows that in hollywood, a movie is never better than its trailer. (Just like they say that a book is never better than its proposal - but that's another story). I wonder: as the book-as-object becomes obsolete, will book trailers replace covers as the go-to indicator for snap-judgements and spontaneous purchases?

And what will that mean (or will it mean anything) for the words inside?

Here at IPI, we are a bit obsessive about our formatting. Every writer, researcher, free-lancer, and assistant gets a document template and formatting guidelines as soon as they come on board. (This, along with instructions on coffee-machine usage, actually makes up the entirety of our staff training).

Garamond is our font of preference. Wikipedia tells me that Garamond is a group of typefaces named after the 16th-century French punch-cutter Claude Garamond. They are distinguished by the small bowl of the a and the small eye of the e.

It turns out that there are dozens of Garamonds. The Garamond revival began in the early 20th century when several printers designed fonts based on a type specimen stored at the National Printing Office in France. Turns out, that font was actually designed by printer Jean Jannon, working a century after Garamond! But the name stuck, and inspired other printers to return to the original, leading to a true diversity of Garamond fonts.

The font we use is Garamond MT, which was developed in 1924 at Stempel AG in Germany and was inspired by the true Claude Garamond. Why do we love Garamond? Some people say it’s the graceful curves, the balanced strokes, and the lightly rounded serifs. One blogger made it a point to compare Garamond Premier Pro (“graceful and elegant”) with Times New Roman (“clumsy and amateurish”). “Let us change the default font in Microsoft Word this very minute,” he declared. In our office, it’s already been done.

Another artist has gone so far as to put typography in motion by creating a video called “Garamond?” “Typography as apocalypse,” one commenter remarked. “I like it, but it scares me.”

You may have noticed that IPI has recently made some changes: a new company name, a new company website, a new-and-improved company blog. We are proud of many of these changes and we like to show them off. “Look at our new website!” we say to our family, friends, neighbors, clients, and anyone else whose attention we can get.

“What’s with the squiggly thing between the a and the t on your company logo?” they invariably reply.

I thought I would take this opportunity to answer the question once and for all. That squiggly thing is known as a ligature. From the Latin ligare (to bind), the word ligature refers, in general, to anything used in tying or binding. In surgery, a ligature is used to strangulate a tumor. In orthodontics, ligatures are the rubber bands that bind your teeth together. And in printing, a ligature is when two or more graphemes are combined to form a single glyph. That is — a ligature is the binding between two or more letters.

Did you know that the ampersand (&) is a modified ligature? It originated as the letters et, which is Latin for and.

Ligatures originated as time saving devices. Medieval scribes used ligatures while copying Latin texts — they even went so far as to combine the bowls of letters with right-facing bowls (b,o,p) and those with left-facing bowls (d,o,g). (Have you ever before thought of letters in terms of the direction of their bowl?) In typesetting, ligatures would allow a printer to combine multiple characters of a single block: think “fi” or “st,” or the still common œ.

Today, of course, typing “fi” is hardly labor intensive, and ligatures as time-saving devices are certainly out of fashion. (Maybe this is why the New York Times print edition, already an antiquated text, recently re-instituted ligatures.)

But we like the antiquated aspect of the ligature. We like that it they hark back to a time when words were printed on paper, with ink. A time when books as objects still had value. Even though we just got our first iPad last week, and even though we are constantly exploring new means of digital publication, we use a ligature because it binds us to a long history of literary expression.

And, of course, with thanks to our brilliant graphic designers, we like our ligature because we think it looks good.

If there is one thing that publishers are desperate for right now, it’s counterintuitivity. “Just add some more counterintuitive stuff,” an agent said to me about a book proposal. “You know, something like, ‘You thought you knew that cottage cheese makes for a healthy diet, but, as indicated by new research coming out of the University of Flerstine, as little as three grams of lo-fat cottage cheese can produce one zilligram of xerocrene, which actually increases one’s desire to eat large slices of pie.” Who knew? Cottage cheese linked to pie consumption! That is flippin’ counterintuitive. Didn’t even know there was such a thing as xerocrene. Wow!

I am convinced that some pleasurable physical thing happens in the brain when a few grey cells find out that the tidbit of info they had been storing all those years is complete hooey and can now be shot out through the endocrine system into outer space and replaced with some shiny new bit of correct knowledge. Good riddance, you completely wrong thought! Welcome, you cool, learned, actual fact.

We have Malcolm Gladwell to thank for this. One of his favored expressions is, “It turns out that…” Meaning that, after extensive analysis of all the fascinating research that is being conducted in lofty places by celebrated brainiacs that only he has access to, Malcolm is able to definitively pronounce that all the impressions that most people have about a lot of things are actually ass backwards and he can definitively state how things finally, conclusively, “turn out.” I love that kind of switcheroo, especially when it’s followed by a nice, chunky certainty.

You might assume that publishers (and readers) would never tire of such literary parlor tricks, but, according to recent research conducted by the good folks at The Center for Sudden Twists and Unexpected Turns, it turns out that increased exposure to counterintuitive statements actually leads to a decrease in one’s ability to make any assumptions about anything at all, with the result that it gets harder and harder to displace known incorrect facts with new correct ones, thus reducing the average number of counterintuitive pleasure bursts per page, which eventually reduces book sales, and ultimately causes publishers to look for new ways to stimulate the grey cells. Expect to see a return to the comforting pleasure of affirmation that everything you already know is actually right.

Who knew?

We always love it when Andi steps off his corporate jet to write a guest post for our blog. But I especially appreciated last week’s post about athletics because it reminded me of another favorite summer sport: copyediting.

Last week, I was part of an extensive e-mail string on the subject of the serial comma, which is the comma that goes before the final item in a list. “I like grammar, punctuation, and spelling,” I say. Or is it: “I like grammar, punctuation and spelling?” The serial comma, also known as the Harvard or Oxford comma, caused one writer (poet Robert Francis) to complain, “When I got to Harvard, no one had ever heard of the comma!”

This week we received the copyedited version of one of our manuscripts, prompting a flurry of editorial debates. Although historians say that English writing has been systematic since the middle ages, consistency remains hard to come by. Serial commas are simple compared to the use of ellipses in block quotes, the thin spaces between quotation marks, or the relative placement of punctuation around parentheses. And don’t get me started on the subject of apostrophes at the end of acronyms. (When you have more than one CEO, do you have CEOs, CEO’s, or a problem?) John likes to quote the epitaph on a successful editor’s gravestone: “Changed which to that.”

Some might say that obsessive copyediting is dehumanizing, or worse. Anna was telling me about Roald Dahl’s short story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” in which a man discovers the algorithm for good literature and invents a novel-making machine. The reduction of writing to rules and regulation results in the end of human creativity. It’s a tragic story.

But it’s not my story. In reviewing our copyedited manuscript, we spotted occasions where a misplaced comma or inaccurate punctuation changed the meaning of our writing, sometimes dramatically. Because words are an author’s only medium for communication, writers are dependent on the accuracy of their punctuation. And in my opinion, great writers are those who know how to create magnificent phrases out of the mundane. They do it with style.