A FEW DAYS AFTER THE London Review Bookshop opened in Bloomsbury two-and-a-half years ago, a salesperson manoeuvred past the lavish display of new hardbacks, stepped up to the counter of the manager, Andrew Stilwell, and placed a smooth metal object in front of him.
This, he said proudly, was the future of books. Others in the queue held their breath. A Palm Pilot. Thank you, but no it wasn’t, Stilwell said. They sold Gameboys down the road.
The Palm Pilot Men talk with much confidence about publishing these days. The era of the printed page, they claim, is ending. The future is digital, paperless and Bluetooth-compatible. Bill Gates insists that Microsoft’s portable Tablet PC — launched in 2002 — could render traditional publishing obsolete in four to five years.
But take any of the apostles of the e-book to a bookshop this Christmas and they might lose some of their swagger. They may pick up the new McSweeney’s Quarterly, for example. The American author Dave Eggers’s playful, experimental journal for fiction, now on its sixteenth issue, has perfected the old-fashioned, dusty tome look: these are books that look like books. The latest is a cheeky foldout number, complete with a pack of playing cards and comb.
They may also chance upon Taschen’s table-sized Atlas Maior of 1665, a reprint of Joan Blaeu’s baroque masterpiece of mapmaking. The original’s 596 maps came in 11 volumes, and kept Blaeu’s copperplate presses busy for 1,600 days.
Perhaps it is just coincidence that Taschen decided to republish it in the year that Google launched its virtual globe project, Google Earth. At £100 a copy, it doesn’t come cheap, but then the price has symbolic value: quality doesn’t sell for £99.99.
The result of an even more painstaking labour of love is Audrey Niffenegger’s The Three Incestuous Sisters. Her bestselling novel The Time Traveler’s Wife took five years to travel from the conception of its title to the bookshelves in Sainsbury’s — no time at all, compared with her visual tale of jealous siblings, ghostly ancestors and flying babies. Using aquatint, she spent 14 years making ten copies. Before Cape decided to publish a cheaper mass market version, they sold for around £1,000 each.
Collector’s edition chic is also in vogue: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, for example, comes complete with beautifully patterned endpapers — a design quirk that one used to find almost exclusively in special editions. Even the booklets in Penguin’s “Great Ideas” series, with their proud typography and ornamental frames, look like the sort of thing that one would pick up at a fine press fair not a book chain.
Waterstone’s picked up on the success of internet book auction sites earlier this year and started commissioning special editions from publishers. Commercially successful new titles — from Kazuo Ishiguro to Lauren Bacall — now come with a slightly more expensive collectable twin.
Far from pushing traditional bookmaking to the edge, internet publishing seems to have breathed new life into it and reminded it of its strengths. Any of the above titles could make your iBook melt with envy, so self-assured are they in their celebration of the nostalgic, emotive qualities of the book as a material object.
Simon Prosser, the Penguin editor who decided to publish McSweeney's in Britain, says: “You can pick them up, put them down, take them to bed, admire the way they’ve been conserved within their covers, show them off to your friends or smell the distinctive scent of print on paper. Books are sometimes more than the words they contain.”
Niffenegger, who has a professorship at the Columbia College Chicago Centre for Book and Paper Arts, agrees that the electronic book is still a long while away. “The internet hasn’t yet adapted to the human body,” she says. “The book is different: even its different parts are named after parts of the human body. You have the head and the foot of the book, the spine, and the size is adapted to the size of your hands.”
This hands-on approach to bookmaking would have struck a chord with William Morris, the late-nineteenth century socialist, textile designer and patron saint of the good page. After the Industrial Revolution, Morris was much concerned with cleaning up British book design; a “sordid, aimless, ugly confusion” not a far cry from what reigns on the web today. Is there a return to the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement?
Real typesetters say no: “What we are dealing with is a return to the old-fashioned style of bookmaking, but not a return to the original principles,” according to Michael Mitchell, director of Libanus Press and the author of Book Typography: A Designer’s Manual. No big publishing house in Britain still prints and typesets its own books, he points out, and with cheap printers available all over the world, the distance between the editorial boardroom and the inkies’ workshop is ever increasing. Claire M. Bolton, of Alembic Press in Abingdon, chuckles: “I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of editors don’t even know what a typeface looks like.”
But for the big publishers, “fine” printing can make commercial sense if executed strategically. The production costs of a reprint are well below that of the original art book, so experiments such as the Niffenegger book are unlikely to send Cape’s sales teams into a panic. The Three Incestuous Sisters has boosted her respectability. Profit margins on Waterstone’s limited editions are healthy too: with print runs of 1,000, they are “limited” only in the faintest sense — rare enough to justify a price rise but available in every branch. Even the lavish Atlas Maior is less of a risk than it seems — Taschen saves money by selling one multilingual edition in different countries.
At the London Review Bookshop, Stilwell decided to do things the old-fashioned way when he started publishing a series of special editions this year. He purchased the pages of Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George from Random House and had 125 copies cloth-bound at £50, and 25 with a leather cover at £125. The venture was a success, and the books sold out in ten days. Then the standard hardback edition arrived, they too were clothbound with an old-world engraving.
Random House had pastiched the look of a special edition and was selling it for no more than £17.99. “We wanted to court the bookshop browser, not just the Amazon surfer,” according to the publisher’s sales manager, Tom Drake-Lee.
Perhaps the future of books is in the past — just try to explain that to Palm Pilot Man.
A PASSION FOR PRINT
For anyone with a passion for printed paper, the St Bride Library in London is a place of wonder and marvel. Tucked away in a dark alley behind Fleet Street, it houses one of the most extensive collections of books on printing and typography, a fully-equipped letterpress printing workshop and a rich treasury of artefacts from the trade.
Whether you are doing a PhD on Tibetan typesetting or are simply interested in the origins of the fonts on your computer, this is probably the one place where you can find the original typefaces, literature on the subject and a friendly member of staff waiting to offer you his expertise.
But since the press exodus from Fleet Street, times have been hard for the little archive next to St Bride’s Church. The library was funded for 38 years by the Corporation of London, but in April 2004 it was handed over to the St Bride Foundation, which now faces the enormous task of having to raise funds from voluntary sources to keep it open to the public.
This month, Penguin Books is helping to launch the Foundation Benefactors Scheme for the St Bride Library with a fundraising event. Penguin has a proud record in book design (its former in-house designers include Jan Tschichold and Germano Facetti) — and it owes its most recent coup to the library. David Pearson, who designed the award-winning “Great Ideas” books, is a regular visitor to the reading rooms of this “wonderful, magical place, which never ceases to inspire”.
To find out more about the St Bride Benefactors Scheme, e-mail benefactors@stbrideinstitute.org or contact Caragh Stewart on 020-7427 4740.
