Book designers: the unsung heroes of the book world.

If you’ll bear with me for a moment, I’d like to talk about a subject that many don’t give much consideration, book design. Specifically, I’m talking about typesetting: the composition of text by means of arranging types or the digital equivalents.

Why is this important for book readers? To put it simply, it’s the effort of the book designer to make sure that you don’t notice their work. When typesetting they try an arrange the letters on the page in such a way to convey the story in the easiest manner.

Go grab a physical book and crack it open. Look at where your thumb is; I bet you put it on a margin, right? Take a look at the bottom right of the page; does the page end with a complete paragraph? That’s not a coincidence, a designer put a good amount of effort to make sure that paragraphs aren’t broken across page flips. Count the number of words in a few full lines of text. I bet the lines run about 10-15 words a line.

All of these elements are deliberate actions taken by the designer to make sure you’re thinking about the story and characters, not the letters on the page. The actual comfort and ease of reading is their paramount objective.

Personally, I only became aware of this print discipline while in the process of laying out my own book. Initially, I though I would just have to plug my words in some sort of software package, and it would spit out a book, but everything I tried look wrong. Not very wrong, mind you, but not what I was expecting when I think of a book. So I had to poke, wheedle, and nudge fonts, justifications, margins, paragraph keeps, kerning, and other things to get a proper books.

And boy, was it more work than I anticipated. I even used the most powerful professional tools I could get my hands on. It took me a week to layout the color hardcover of Hench.

So, thinking back to the thousands of books I’ve read in my life, I’d like to take a moment to show some gratitude to a group of people who rarely get thanked.

Book designers: thank you! You make the physical book itself a type of art unto itself. I hope my neophyte design efforts stand among the hidden heroes of the literary world, and don’t get noticed by the reader.