Book design, explained

It’s a truism that editors focus on words. But there’s more that editors need to be aware of, particularly when combing through final designed page proofs.

Having proofread numerous magazine issues and books over the past few decades, I thought I had a decent grasp of the design and layout elements that need to be paid attention to.

However, when I recently began proofreading a book designed by a novice book designer, I realized I needed a better understanding of the field so that I could explain what my eyes and brain were telling me didn’t work but that I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate.

Fortunately, some time ago, a colleague had recommended Debbie Berne’s The Design of Books (University of Chicago Press, 2024). It was in my stack of to-read volumes but hadn’t yet migrated to the top. I plucked the orange-covered book from mid-pile and started flipping through it, quickly realizing that it would absolutely help me in my current quest.

So I set aside an afternoon and, along with half a bar of dark chocolate, one cup of tea, and two slumbering cats, started at the beginning. It’s a book I wish I’d read long ago!

True to its subtitle—An Explainer for Authors, Editors, Agents, and Other Curious Readers—the book explains the many fascinating elements of book design and discusses layout for those of us who work in the word professions or are otherwise curious about the look of books.

I was hooked right in the introduction when I learned that transferring a text document into a design file is called placing, or pouring, the text. What a delightful image that creates in my mind! I can see all the words in a manuscript flowing from mixing bowl to cake pan.

Chapter 1, about the physical book, was a good refresher of a book’s anatomy; then I dove into chapter 2, all about type. I have always loved letters, with their different shapes and personalities, but I had no idea how many vocabulary words are used in discussing letter anatomy—ascender, descender, bowl, spur, ear, eye, and more.

I discovered the difference between a typeface and a font, the former being a family like Calibri or Cambria and the latter being a specific look within the family, such as 10 point Calibri italic. The distinction between typeface and font, critical in the days when printing involved laying out and inking metal type, isn’t necessary today with digital fonts. Still, I enjoyed the dip into history, which is another quality of Berne’s book. She frequently mentions historical tidbits.

Chapter 3, discussing book covers, was eye-opening, and it sent me off for a brief interlude to pull out and examine dozens of covers from my bookshelves. I had never before considered that many business books have clean, white covers, that non-fiction books about abstract concepts often rely on text alone on their covers, or that memoirs may try to convey a fiction-like quality through their covers.

And then, in chapter 4, the inside of a book, I found the explanations I needed and the vocabulary to discuss what was off-kilter in the pages I was proofreading. This chapter helped me unscramble the terms widow (the last line of a paragraph alone at the top of a page), orphan (the first line of a paragraph alone at the bottom of a page), and runt (the last word of a paragraph alone on its own line).

I especially appreciated a section called “The Well-Groomed Spread” that discusses the overall look of each spread and emphasizes that a seemingly simple design is anything but.

Now equipped with the knowledge I needed to point my client’s newbie designer in the right direction, I could have stopped reading Berne’s book. But I was so enjoying her sprightly writing that I continued on to chapter 5, about illustrated books, and learned about page grids, spot art, and colour.

Chapter 6 gave an overview of e-books and chapter 7 a run-through of the design process from start to finish, including a helpful section for self-publishing authors.

I even read the appendix about type etiquette—what writers and editors can do to prepare a clean text document with correct post-period spacing (one space only), correct dash length (en versus em), correct quotation marks and apostrophes (the curly ones, also called “smart” or typographer’s quotation marks, not straight ones or prime marks), and so on.

I ended by reading the glossary and then flipping back through the book to take a good look at each of the full-page chapter-opening illustrations. Drawn by Vivian Barad, the black-and-white illustrations deliver a touch of whimsy.

So absorbed was I in this engaging book that I didn’t finish the last quarter of my tea, and one of the cats had awoken and wandered off without my noticing. (I did, of course, eat all the chocolate.)

As you can tell, I thoroughly enjoyed The Design of Books, and I recommend that all editors read it and have it on hand to dip into whenever needed.