The Word Made Paper

I am holding in my hands an advanced reader copy of what will be my eighth published novel: For Darkness Shows the Stars. It is a gorgeously designed book, filled with special fonts and curlicues and tiny touches of fabulousness that work in concert with the text to create an atmosphere of otherworldliness.

I love book design. I love books where it is clear a lot of care has been taken with the design, to create something a little off the beaten path, a signature look for that book which is instantly recognizable. I’m a bit spoiled, since my first series was handled by a team at Bantam Dell for whom book design was not a lost art. My first editor had been trained up by a boss who had originally come from the design side of the publishing business. And thus, I got things like this:

And this:

And this:

And, unbelievably, even this:

I was not aware how unusual it was to have a book designed with such attention to detail, and to the various and sundry non-text objects that existed inside.

I honestly think it adds to the experience.There are those for whom design is merely a distraction — they want nothing between them and the words. They want the pages and the words themselves to disappear. These are the readers for whom the Kindle revolution and the death of book design doesn’t matter. They want to be able to change the font at will — they don’t care where page breaks occur. They aren’t interested in the idea that someone went to the trouble of choosing that font, that layout, that arrangement, to create a mood and a world for the reader.

I am not that reader. I love some good design. Some recent books where the design knocked me off my feet are:

• Want to Go Private, by Sarah Darer Littman, where the police reports and such are set off from the text and look like words on a “dark” computer screen.
• The Midnighters series, by Scott Westerfeld, in which the fractal lore symbols signifying each type of midnighters were designed by Scott and inserted in the text to show who is narrating that section. (I’ve heard some folks have even gotten tattoos of their favorite symbol.
• the little zombies and unicorns and the cartoon-style author names in Zombies vs. Unicorns. (True story: there was once a plan to print all the zombie stories on black paper, but it proved too hard to read.)
• the black “moon phase” chapter dividers in Andrea Cremer’s Nightshade. SUCH a brilliant idea.
• The ornate frames on the chapter openers of Jessica Spotswood’s upcoming Born Wicked. (Actually, that whole book has droolworthy design. The soft-touch cover! The coppery foil title! Jess wants me to give her her ARC back but I may just conveniently “lose” it.)

But design can also be divisive. (Cf. the “black pages” for ZVU.) Anything that makes the book hard to read is going to bother people, and people have different metrics for “hard to read.” For instance, I loved the idea of the “frozen” blue text in Shiver, but I heard a lot of complaints about the green and red texts of the subsequent novels hurting people’s eyes.

Design is something you lose when you read the ebook version. My “Shiver” is on Kindle. The text is kindle text.

I often wonder if my love of book design is related to my love of metafiction and metatextual interpolations (this, I am told, is the proper name for the doodads peppering my first series). The Secret Society Girl series lent itself specifically to unusual design, as it was filled with metatextual interpolations, which was a style I employed heavily in that series (lists, footnotes, emails, text messages, letters, etc) and not so much with any book since.

I have been in love with such storytelling flourishes all my reading life. From Nabokov’s footnotes to Clarissa‘s “mad papers” to simple epistolary novels, I love the idea of books that are more than just books — that are little puzzles on the page — story and more than story, too.

How will such elements survive the coming ebook revolution? When you read something with footnotes on a Kindle, it requires hypertext to flip you there and back. With Secret Society Girl on Kindle, the “Hello My Name Is” sticker is transferred like a picture, but you lose the “electronic” look of the text messages and the “script” of the letters. My early-gen kindle is black and white, but I wonder if the new colored ereaders show Shiver’s text in blue. I have NO idea how they do Clarissa‘s mad papers.

When you realize that Richardson was pulling this kind of stunt in the eighteenth century, before we even had a rightful understanding of what a novel was and certainly before this kind of thing was as easy as  setting up text boxes in your computer document, it’s even more impressed. Of course, he owned the printing press and so employed the poor printer he was causing this headache. Ah, Richardson, you cruel taskmaster.

(I know I talk about Clarissa a lot on this blog. I talk about Clarissa a lot in general. I love Clarissa. I don’t know a whole lot of other people who have read it, or even seen the BBC version they did with Sean Bean as Lovelace. I don’t remember anything else about it, except Sean Bean as frickin’ Lovelace, people! That is a triumph of casting. I can’t actually even picture the Lovelace who lived in my head now. All I see is Bean. Anyway, if you haven’t read it or seen it, or know anything about it — let’s just say it’s approximately 2,000 pages long, it’s completely epistolary, it’ll take over your LIFE as it did me my second semester senior year in college, and it will forever change the way you, a costume drama loving, historical romance reading, Jane Austen obsessed female individual looks at her heretofore romanticized past. In short: sucked to be a woman for most of recorded history.)

Where was I? Right, book design.

For Darkness has gorgeous book design. Guys, even the font. I drool. And I cry, too, because I know a lot of people are going to buy it as an ebook. Which is nice, I guess — any way they read it, plus I get nice royalties for ebooks — but they’re going to miss out on some of the design. The slightly unusual font. The curlicues around each page number. (Can’t have ’em if you don’t have pages.)

You want a peek? Of course you do.