Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Galchen, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Peter Campbell and the Art of Book Design

For over ten years Peter Campbell reviewed art exhibitions for the London Review of Books. His writing was one of the main reasons I began subscribing to the magazine. He died in 2011. Last month, the LRB published a wonderful new essay by him - “In the Print Shop.” It contains a footnote: “Peter Campbell began writing this piece in 2010. It was left unpublished at the time of his death the following year.”

Campbell’s essay celebrates the craft of printing. It begins with an extraordinary description of his experience working in a New Zealand print shop. Here’s an excerpt:

It was noisy in Harry H. Tombs Ltd, the New Zealand print shop where I served a small part of an apprenticeship that would have made me a compositor. I worked upstairs in the composing room where the rhythm was set by the Linotype machines: the tap of the keyboard, the rustle of the matrices sliding from the magazine into their place in the line, followed, when the line was full, by a heavy thump as the spaces were wedged home. There were clanks and bangs as the line of matrices was offered up to the mould and the molten type-metal that glistened in the crucible behind was injected. The hot, bright line of newly cast type joined others in the tray with a metallic slither. Meanwhile, we hand-compositors stood at our frames and quietly clicked type into our composing sticks for the odd heading or display line, or dissed it, dropping used type back into the case with a louder click. We assembled the metal lines of type (called slugs) and titles and any other elements of the printed page, and grouped them together with other pages for printing, creating what was known as a forme. From time to time there would be a thump as one of us heaved a forme (four, eight or sixteen pages of type weigh a lot) up onto the stone – the metal table on which they were put together. The pages of the forme were wedged into a metal frame, the chase, where they were held firm by quoins (wedges). A hoist creaked as the finished formes were lowered to the ground-floor press room.

The piece goes on to discuss Linotype and Monotype printing, the design of typeface, and the beauty of letterpress printing:

Letterpress has its own aesthetic. A raised surface – type and blocks – is inked. When it is pressed against a sheet of paper, the raised surface digs into it. It was the tactile quality of the object as much as the detail of the image that distinguished the private press books made around the end of the 19th century from the smooth, commercially printed pages of the books they wanted to improve on. Handmade paper and an even, black impression make the page a three-dimensional object, not a two-dimensional image. 

Campbell’s absorbing essay kindled my own thoughts on book design. My idea of the ideal book is the harmonious marriage of text and picture, elegant serif font, vivid color, wide margins, and texture, texture, texture! Such a book is T. J. Clark’s gorgeous If These Apples Should Fall (2022), published by Hudson & Thames. Such a book is Geoff Dyer’s ravishing The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand (2018), published by the University of Texas Press. Yes, these are my models. If my house was burning down, these are the books I’d grab.  

1 comment:

  1. Ah John, this reminds me of a recent piece by Michael Chabon in nyrb: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/12/19/the-midnight-world-michael-chabon/

    ReplyDelete