(E________, first draft: 18,800 words).
As close readers of this blog will know, since the beginning of Covid I have been alternating my reading between genre books that I enjoy and “posh” books (many also enjoyable) that are meant to be good for me. I have lapsed on several occasions, squeezing in a couple of genre novels before plunging into the next classic. Over the last two or three weeks, however, I have completely fallen off the wagon. After reading The Tempest by William Shakespeare (and feeling much aggrieved by the plight of Caliban), I not only read A Court of Frost and Starlight by Sarah J. Maas but have also been working my way steadily through every single one of Martha Wells’ Murderbot stories. I am presently (re)reading Network Effect and need to swing by my local bookstore next week to pick up the latest novella, Fugitive Telemetry. If pressed on why I am doing this, the short answer would be that I love Sarah J. Maas and Martha Wells. A more honest answer, though, involves a dread of what comes next.
I don’t have a system for deciding what posh books to read next. It’s literally whatever title pops into my head, and what pops into my head tends to be titles of books that I’ve heard posh people (not me) talking about at parties, or that have been mentioned in passing in the literary and/or lifestyle sections of upscale newspapers.
Enter The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevksy. It’s Russian and from the nineteenth century, so I knew it was going to be long and (I’m guessing) probably a bit of a downer. I was OK with that, though. Winter is here. A long read with a grim beginning, middle and end is entirely in keeping with the season. What I’m less OK with is my choice of print copy. I went for the only one my bookstore had in stock: the Penguin Classics paperback. At 985 pages it is predictably massive, but the problem I have – and I’ve always had – with Penguin Classics is that I find them very hard to read. Not because of the language but because of the tiny print and the narrow margins. The margins are a particular source of grievance because, having spent far too much of my childhood reading paperbacks in bookstores without actually buying the book, I can’t stand “breaking” a book’s spine so it will lie flat on the table. Look at my bookshelves and most of my paperbacks look as good as new. Look at my Penguins and every one of them has a badly creased spine: there’s simply no other way to read them because the words start so close to the middle of the book. What has put me off starting on The Brothers Karamazov is the knowledge that the mechanics of reading the thing are going to be so unpleasant.
Which brings me to the subject of book design. Penguin Classics are presumably made harder to read because it saves paper. A lot of classics are long, they are never out of print, and Penguin always includes a lot of high-quality academic commentary, so I imagine the cumulative savings in production costs are enormous. Also (and now I’m just being cynical) because so many Penguin Classics are compulsory reading at high school and college, I can’t help thinking that design aesthetics is lower down the list of priorities than it usually is.
I’m peculiarly sensitive to design at the moment because DAW has just sent me a pdf of the proof of Braking Day for – wait for it – proofreading. This is a copy of what the inside of the book will look like when it hits the shelves in April. My job is to make sure that what’s in the proof matches what I wrote in the original manuscript. I also get some input into how it looks (awesome, by the way! Apart from changing the dedication font to something less “shouty,” there’s absolutely nothing I would want to change). The format for Braking Day is the standard hardback size of six by nine inches. The font size is such that there are 36 lines on a full page and the whole book (130,000 words) will come in at about 360 pages. A couple of DAW hardbacks I’ve plucked off my bookshelves are broadly similar.
Seven Devils, by Laura Lam and Elizabeth May, has 35 lines to the page and is 456 pages long (it didn’t feel that long when I read it!) which equates to a wordcount of (very roughly) 150-160,000.
Alliance Rising, by C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher, has 40 lines to the page and is 346 pages long, so the wordcount will be in the 130-140,000 range.
By comparison, The Brothers Karamazov also has 40 lines to the page but those 40 lines are crammed into a paperback format of five inches by seven and three-quarter inches (I don’t even want to do the wordcount). Which looks, predictably, like this.
And if you’re having trouble envisaging the size difference between a DAW hardback versus Penguin Classics, this is what it looks like. It is significant.
All told, design can have a significant effect on how “readable” a book is. Right now, I am grateful that being a classic author is not in my future!