I love this series. I am occasionally asked by people with more impressive degrees than I have how to 'get into publishing', who then react with OUTRAGE when I suggest they might consider doing some specialised training, since they already know everything. Next time I'll just send them to your Substack.
(I'm Australian, so I'm hoping I'll be forgiven the single quote marks, commas outside and -ise verb endings.)
It's amazing how you and I can make ourselves understood to each even with such diametrically opposed styles of orthography! Hands across the water and all that!
"Multiply" as an adverb is rare enough, apparently, that it always brings me up short. For that reason I would probably never use it myself if I really didn't have to.
Your “visually pleasing to the eye” triggered an attempt to come up with a crack about it being meaningful to someone with synaesthesia but I gave up.
In some nonfiction categories (textbooks, festschrifts, other sorts of multi-author collections, . . .), starting every chapter recto is a practical necessity, not really optional, from the comp's point of view. Far too often, the book's author or editor will decide late in the game that chapter 27 has to be dropped or chapters 12 and 13 need to be switched. Chapter authors will want to provide reprints to their students. Texas won't accept the book with chapter 3 included, and Massachusetts won't accept the book with chapter 3 excluded. And so forth. Updating chapter numbers is easy. Swapping starts recto for starts verso, not so much.
I’d think that in any sort of multi-author collection, starting each new piece on a right-hand page would feel appropriate both aesthetically and, overall, sensibly. The rest of that dance sounds grisly, though.
Rosemary also seems to have an unusually large paragraph indent.
I notice you didn’t address hyphenating after only 2 letters. Seeing that makes my teeth grind. The New Yorker has beautifully tight composition, but i sigh when I see a hyphen after two letters. It’s a sigh and not a teeth grind because their pages are beautifully made and it’s a magazine with very narrow columns.
Avoiding the two-letter beginning of a word at the end of a line may well cause a series of overloose and overtight lines that will end up looking not only displeasingly irregular but just plain displeasing. At a certain point one has to remember that we do not live in an era of hand-set type and that there's a boundary between taking care about how a page looks and fussing it to death in a way that is both unnecessary and prohibitively expensive.
This is so very interesting. To look at a spread as if it were an artistic composition, to consider the options, to reflect on the reader’s reaction to what appears outside the text and how that is presented…. I think constant readers feel all these things at a very intuitive level, but they have not isolated what goes into their reactions to the page. Very happy you have amplified this and hope you will continue to do so.
Thank you, Benjamin. This is all fascinating to a publishing outsider. I’d like to ask about the case of Strout’s envisioned pauses. In a location where the author senses a need for a certain pacing of the words, if that’s an okay way to put it, does she include a spacebreak ornament in her original manuscript? Or does she provide separate notes about any such page layout thoughts that further the vision she had for the work in print? Or, something else? As a yet unpublished writer, I’ve heard that I should keep my manuscript uncluttered. Makes sense, but wondering how the other things are worked out.
As I recall (I'd have to dig out one of her manuscripts to be sure), Liz marks the smaller spacebreaks with just a line or two of space and the larger ones with a couple of asterisks. When the manuscript is coded for design, the production editor then knows to code two levels of spacebreaks and thus the designer knows what to do next. Otherwise, Liz tends to be happy to leave the designer to do as the designer sees fit, which I think is a wise thing for a writer to do.
I can think of two reasons that might explain sensitivity about the breaks in the word “England.” One might be British editors’ sensitivity to the varying pronunciations of “ng” and associations of class or region with those pronunciations. Or might it be that splitting the two-syllable version of originally trisyllabic “Ang-le-land” offended some editors’ sense of propriety?
But mixing up etymology with deciding where a word breaks is inherently fraught; my favorite example is how, etymologically, one should break up “he-li-co-pter”!
Publishers (at least some of them) seem to be warming to the term "novella," in this brave new era of ebooks. Tor.com embraced the novella for both ebooks and paperbacks, and has been cleaning up in the Best Novella category at the Hugo Awards ever since. And I see a lot of holiday novellas in hardcover, maybe because they feel more like a classy gift or a keepsake.
I like the backstory for "Yankee trim." In the comics field, DC Comics had a big hit with BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, which was in a 48-page square bound format, and for years afterward, DC called that "Dark Knight format." Marvel Comics rushed out their own competitors in the format, but there it was called "prestige format."
And I've been known to ask publishers for "fat paper" on short books, ever since a publisher printed a 120+ page book on stock so thin that when I'd ask people to guess how long it was, they'd typically guess 48 pages. It saved them money on shipping, for sure, but I can't help but think it cost them sales on the rack. Make it look like something worth paying the cover price for!
Lacking anything but inference, I can only imagine that a publisher might indeed market a novella as a novella if that would lead more directly to winning an award for novellas.
In my former parish, if it was a single work of fiction in a single binding, no matter that it was of merely novella length (and how long is a novella anyway?), that sucker got published as a novel.
Stephen King's DIFFERENT SEASONS has a very entertaining introduction on how uncommercial the novella is. But times change, however slowly. Macmillan, which owns Tor.com, has been identifying books as novellas on the cover even outside SF, and a lot of digital publishers apparently see the form as a plus, perhaps because there's an audience for a nice short read.
Elsewhere, I see the form doing well -- Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize! Claire Keegan's SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE made the Booker shortlist! -- but their publishers, as you note for RH, aren't often cover-featuring the word.
I seem to recall that in the same essay, Stephen King sneered the term 'novelette' almost clear out of existence. That book epitomized the novella for me.
“By which I mean: This is all that I can, for the moment, recall. If you can think of something key I’ve forgotten, of course give it a shoutout in the comments.”
You covered word breaks at line endings with elegance and thoroughness, in what may be my favourite section of the piece. You alluded to numbers with the Henrys, but there’s as much to consider as with syllable breaks. I’d add keeping together numbers and units of measure,* mathematical operators in formulas, address numbers with street names, numbered streets with thoroughfare type &c.
Whether in Word or InDesign, I save the proofreader much trouble by chaining those terms with nonbreaking spaces so they remain together. Designers may object to deliberate breaking (always done with proper invisible characters, never forced with soft returns), because it affects word spacing and type fitting. That has not dissuaded me.
* Proper breaking with units and numbers and in mathematical formulas has played a big part in my work for clients in medical-pharmaceutical and mining.
And as for Ira Levin’s name repeated some 120 times, I would have my name not just repeated (with reverence) but sung out loud and accompanied by a marching band … kept in tune by satan’s pitchpipes, of course.
I'll say it again: this has been a quite delightful series.
'It’s not every day you run into an adverbial “multiply,” is it.'
I've noticed a few instances like this, where you've written something that's a question but doesn't terminate with a question mark. Indeed, it's something I seem to have been noticing more widely with increasing frequency in recent years.
This produces a vaguely comical effect, which I assume is your intention? I guess it conveys a kind of ironic tension between the form indicated by the words and their arrangement (a question) and that indicated by the punctuation (a declarative).
I love this series. I am occasionally asked by people with more impressive degrees than I have how to 'get into publishing', who then react with OUTRAGE when I suggest they might consider doing some specialised training, since they already know everything. Next time I'll just send them to your Substack.
(I'm Australian, so I'm hoping I'll be forgiven the single quote marks, commas outside and -ise verb endings.)
It's amazing how you and I can make ourselves understood to each even with such diametrically opposed styles of orthography! Hands across the water and all that!
:-)
From the footnotes -
"Multiply" as an adverb is rare enough, apparently, that it always brings me up short. For that reason I would probably never use it myself if I really didn't have to.
Your “visually pleasing to the eye” triggered an attempt to come up with a crack about it being meaningful to someone with synaesthesia but I gave up.
In some nonfiction categories (textbooks, festschrifts, other sorts of multi-author collections, . . .), starting every chapter recto is a practical necessity, not really optional, from the comp's point of view. Far too often, the book's author or editor will decide late in the game that chapter 27 has to be dropped or chapters 12 and 13 need to be switched. Chapter authors will want to provide reprints to their students. Texas won't accept the book with chapter 3 included, and Massachusetts won't accept the book with chapter 3 excluded. And so forth. Updating chapter numbers is easy. Swapping starts recto for starts verso, not so much.
I’d think that in any sort of multi-author collection, starting each new piece on a right-hand page would feel appropriate both aesthetically and, overall, sensibly. The rest of that dance sounds grisly, though.
In showing Elizabeth Strout book: will you pick future copy editing of long term clients?
Rosemary also seems to have an unusually large paragraph indent.
I notice you didn’t address hyphenating after only 2 letters. Seeing that makes my teeth grind. The New Yorker has beautifully tight composition, but i sigh when I see a hyphen after two letters. It’s a sigh and not a teeth grind because their pages are beautifully made and it’s a magazine with very narrow columns.
Avoiding the two-letter beginning of a word at the end of a line may well cause a series of overloose and overtight lines that will end up looking not only displeasingly irregular but just plain displeasing. At a certain point one has to remember that we do not live in an era of hand-set type and that there's a boundary between taking care about how a page looks and fussing it to death in a way that is both unnecessary and prohibitively expensive.
Also, the paragraph indents in R.B. are four character spaces deep, which is about as standard as they come.
The New Yorker has been committing some crummy* word breaks lately that make me wonder if a human being is reading proofs there.
*unpronounceable
This is so very interesting. To look at a spread as if it were an artistic composition, to consider the options, to reflect on the reader’s reaction to what appears outside the text and how that is presented…. I think constant readers feel all these things at a very intuitive level, but they have not isolated what goes into their reactions to the page. Very happy you have amplified this and hope you will continue to do so.
Oh and footnote 8 is wonderful.
Thank you, Benjamin. This is all fascinating to a publishing outsider. I’d like to ask about the case of Strout’s envisioned pauses. In a location where the author senses a need for a certain pacing of the words, if that’s an okay way to put it, does she include a spacebreak ornament in her original manuscript? Or does she provide separate notes about any such page layout thoughts that further the vision she had for the work in print? Or, something else? As a yet unpublished writer, I’ve heard that I should keep my manuscript uncluttered. Makes sense, but wondering how the other things are worked out.
As I recall (I'd have to dig out one of her manuscripts to be sure), Liz marks the smaller spacebreaks with just a line or two of space and the larger ones with a couple of asterisks. When the manuscript is coded for design, the production editor then knows to code two levels of spacebreaks and thus the designer knows what to do next. Otherwise, Liz tends to be happy to leave the designer to do as the designer sees fit, which I think is a wise thing for a writer to do.
I can think of two reasons that might explain sensitivity about the breaks in the word “England.” One might be British editors’ sensitivity to the varying pronunciations of “ng” and associations of class or region with those pronunciations. Or might it be that splitting the two-syllable version of originally trisyllabic “Ang-le-land” offended some editors’ sense of propriety?
But mixing up etymology with deciding where a word breaks is inherently fraught; my favorite example is how, etymologically, one should break up “he-li-co-pter”!
The derivation of helicopter is a great delight.
Particularly when the subject turns inexorably to pterodactyls.
Publishers (at least some of them) seem to be warming to the term "novella," in this brave new era of ebooks. Tor.com embraced the novella for both ebooks and paperbacks, and has been cleaning up in the Best Novella category at the Hugo Awards ever since. And I see a lot of holiday novellas in hardcover, maybe because they feel more like a classy gift or a keepsake.
I like the backstory for "Yankee trim." In the comics field, DC Comics had a big hit with BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, which was in a 48-page square bound format, and for years afterward, DC called that "Dark Knight format." Marvel Comics rushed out their own competitors in the format, but there it was called "prestige format."
And I've been known to ask publishers for "fat paper" on short books, ever since a publisher printed a 120+ page book on stock so thin that when I'd ask people to guess how long it was, they'd typically guess 48 pages. It saved them money on shipping, for sure, but I can't help but think it cost them sales on the rack. Make it look like something worth paying the cover price for!
Lacking anything but inference, I can only imagine that a publisher might indeed market a novella as a novella if that would lead more directly to winning an award for novellas.
In my former parish, if it was a single work of fiction in a single binding, no matter that it was of merely novella length (and how long is a novella anyway?), that sucker got published as a novel.
And perhaps the secret to getting really good high-bulking paper is to write short.
Stephen King's DIFFERENT SEASONS has a very entertaining introduction on how uncommercial the novella is. But times change, however slowly. Macmillan, which owns Tor.com, has been identifying books as novellas on the cover even outside SF, and a lot of digital publishers apparently see the form as a plus, perhaps because there's an audience for a nice short read.
Elsewhere, I see the form doing well -- Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize! Claire Keegan's SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE made the Booker shortlist! -- but their publishers, as you note for RH, aren't often cover-featuring the word.
I seem to recall that in the same essay, Stephen King sneered the term 'novelette' almost clear out of existence. That book epitomized the novella for me.
Even books of short stories are occasionally sent out into the world with the subtitle “Fiction.”
“By which I mean: This is all that I can, for the moment, recall. If you can think of something key I’ve forgotten, of course give it a shoutout in the comments.”
You covered word breaks at line endings with elegance and thoroughness, in what may be my favourite section of the piece. You alluded to numbers with the Henrys, but there’s as much to consider as with syllable breaks. I’d add keeping together numbers and units of measure,* mathematical operators in formulas, address numbers with street names, numbered streets with thoroughfare type &c.
Whether in Word or InDesign, I save the proofreader much trouble by chaining those terms with nonbreaking spaces so they remain together. Designers may object to deliberate breaking (always done with proper invisible characters, never forced with soft returns), because it affects word spacing and type fitting. That has not dissuaded me.
* Proper breaking with units and numbers and in mathematical formulas has played a big part in my work for clients in medical-pharmaceutical and mining.
Better doorstoppy than doorstroppy.
And I, for one (and one for all) would love to see satan’s pitchforks inserted between paragraphs … much quieter than pitchpipes.
And as for Ira Levin’s name repeated some 120 times, I would have my name not just repeated (with reverence) but sung out loud and accompanied by a marching band … kept in tune by satan’s pitchpipes, of course.
Finally, En-gland? Glands have never been so polite or well-spoken.
As a graphic designer of both advertising and editorial pages, I appreciate your attention to a well-made page in this series.
I'll say it again: this has been a quite delightful series.
'It’s not every day you run into an adverbial “multiply,” is it.'
I've noticed a few instances like this, where you've written something that's a question but doesn't terminate with a question mark. Indeed, it's something I seem to have been noticing more widely with increasing frequency in recent years.
This produces a vaguely comical effect, which I assume is your intention? I guess it conveys a kind of ironic tension between the form indicated by the words and their arrangement (a question) and that indicated by the punctuation (a declarative).