/ 4 October 2010

Not my type

Not My Type

Convention, in the sense I’m using it, means an accepted rule or usage. Not all conventions last forever, of course. Men, for instance, no longer as a rule wear hats when out of doors, neither do women always wear hats and gloves when they go out in public. Such conventions of dress seem quaint and old-fashioned to us now.

But when it comes to designing a book, certain “old-fashioned” printers’ conventions are broken at the publisher’s peril. Such is the case with Caves of the Ape-men and, unfortunately, this makes the book almost unreadable.

The text is too wide for the size of the pages — it should have been divided into two columns, preferably with ragged-right edges — and there’s too much variation in the size of the font; in fact, too much playing around with fonts altogether, varying between serif and sans serif, bold and light, giving the pages a busy, messy appearance.

To the average reader, this might seem like technical nitpicking on my part, but what it adds up to is unreadability.

As I tried to read this book, instead of just moving my eyes along lines of text, I became aware that I was having to move my head slightly from side to side, which is surprisingly tiring. Usually I read with great concentration, but with this book I kept finding my mind wandering, my thoughts spiralling away, despite having a great interest in the subject matter.

At first I was puzzled, but then I compared Caves of the Ape-men with one of its peers, Donald Johanson and Blake Edwards’s From Lucy to Language, published in 1996 and just about the same size, in which the typography is conventional and the text is broken up on the page into two or three columns, and also discussed Caves with a colleague who has designed several books himself, and the reasons for this peculiar unreadability became clear.

So, sadly, I must confess I have not read enough of Caves of the Ape-men to review its worthy subject matter on its own merits. Other interested readers will have to judge for themselves.

I have one more nitpicking question. Looking at both Caves of the Ape-men and From Lucy to Language, why are these books always made as glossy coffee-table editions, not the kind of books one can easily carry around in a handbag? Perhaps the publishers of Caves will consider republishing it as a standard-size paperback, with the text reconfigured into a conventional style and then perhaps I’ll manage to read it at last.