The term “Roman” is customarily used to describe serif typefaces of the early Italian Renaissance period. More recently, the term has also come to denote the upright style of typefaces, as opposed to the word “Italic”, which refers to cursive typefaces inspired by the handwriting of Italian humanists. Thus Linotype offers fonts called Sabon Greek Roman and Sabon Greek Italic, (designed by Jan Tchichold), based on 16th century models. But by using terminology which is typically associated with Latin type and evokes the history of Italian typography, Linotype makes a careless statement. “Greek Roman” and “Greek Italic” are contradictions in terms, mixing two very different histories.

—Peter Biľak, “A View of Latin Typography in Relationship to the World,” Het Wereld Boek (Amsterdam, 2008), reprinted at Typotheque

Huh. Now that you mention it, yes, that sounds stupid.

Photo: Mandragoras by sp!ros; some rights reserved.

So, the other day, I was asked to set up HTML for an e-mail that someone else—let’s call them Agent B—is sending. Today Agent B sent us a preview of the e-mail, with the Agent B logo added at the top and the usual “Click here to unsubscribe, etc., etc.” at the bottom, but the middle of the message—my part—has become completely verkakte in the process. So I looked at the code and found that my nice, clean, valid HTML had been run through MS Word’s garbagealator. For example, this—

<p>Sunday, May 18, 2008<br />
11am to 5pm<br />
The Times Center<br />
242 West 41st Street</p>

—was converted to this—

<p =
style=3D’mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:7.5pt;margin-bottom:12.0pt;
margin-left:7.5pt’><font size=3D3 color=3Dblack face=3DHelvetica><span =
lang=3DEN
style=3D’font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Helvetica;color:black’>Sunday, May =
18, 2008<br>
11am to 5pm<br>
The<span class=3Dapple-converted-space> <st1:place =
u2:st=3D”on”><st1:placename u2:st=3D”on”></span><st1:place
w:st=3D”on”><st1:PlaceName =
w:st=3D”on”>Times</st1:placename></st1:PlaceName><span
class=3Dapple-converted-space> <st1:placetype =
u2:st=3D”on”></span><st1:PlaceType
=
w:st=3D”on”>Center</st1:placetype></st1:place></st1:PlaceType></st1:place=
><br>
<st1:street u2:st=3D”on”><st1:address u2:st=3D”on”><st1:Street =
w:st=3D”on”><st1:address
w:st=3D”on”>242 West 41st =
Street</st1:address></st1:street><u1:p></u1:p></st1:address></st1:Street>=
</span></font><font
color=3Dblack face=3DHelvetica><span =
style=3D’font-family:Helvetica;color:black’><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>=
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“This, is an unsettling trend,” columnist William Sa,fire, told reporters. “We’re seeing a collapse of the grammatical rules that have, held, the English language, together for, centuries.”

—“Commas, Turning Up, Everywhere,” The Onion

Photo: a row of commas by moirabot / Moira Clunie; some rights reserved.

Kevin Pease of Designrants points out the following excellent opportunity—which, oddly, he doesn’t wish to take!—for an up-and-coming type designer to make a few bucks and gain some experience for his or her résumé:

The project is for outputing a variant Typeface from an existing open source Typeface, where the variant is replacing only 1 alphabet (upper,lower case, basic and italic) and putting a sanskrit alphabet (upper,lower case, basic and italic) that will have to be designed.

. . .

The budget is about $100 via Paypal, Moneybookers. Delivery for early/mid-next week.

Um, I don’t know much about designing typefaces, and nothing about Sanskrit, but that sounds . . . how shall I put it? . . . extremely challenging. Still, if you’re really hard up for cash and selling your spinal fluid isn’t working out for you, perhaps this is your dream project. If so, see Kevin’s post for more details!

Via Ultrasparky.

I’m trying to close some browser tabs that I’ve been carrying along for at least two months, and I just can’t click the little x on this one without mentioning it. Scott K. Kellar, bookbinder and conservator? Does some really lovely work. Go look.

Tom Christensen did an informal survey of four book designers to find out how much they’d charge for a hypothetical job.

I was trying to determine a reasonable price for a 320-page hardcover collected poems, interior and cover/jacket design. . . .

According to the 2001 edition of the Graphic Artists Guild handbook of Pricing and Ethics, for an average poetry book a designer might charge $7,500 to $15,000 to design and set the interior plus $1000–$2000 for the jacket. That gives a total range of $8500–17,000. Those figures are seven years old, but several people say the prices in this publication skew high.

Yes, in my experience, they do.

The results? Each different, like a snowflake: $3,100, $8,000, $8,800, and $12,800. See Tom’s post for each designer’s breakdown of charges: rightreading: Book design fees.

Photo: price list by Nick Sherman; some rights reserved.

So I was trying to find an example of a paragraph-styled bibliography in the Chicago Manual when I had one of those irrelevant thoughts that so often interrupt my work: “I wonder if, using the magic of the internet, I could find out what books these sample pages are from?”

—Languagehat: Fun with the Chicago Manual.

(Via Margaret’s del.icio.usness)

Photo: my favorite corner by limonada / Emilie Eagan; some rights reserved.

I’m working on another Flickr set of public domain images—this time, ones from The Americana: A Universal Reference Library Comprising the Arts and Sciences, Literature, History, Biography, Geography, Commerce, etc., of the World, Vol. 21 (Triennial Act–Vivianite), edited by Frederick Converse Beach (New York: Scientific American Compiling Department, 1912).

Extracted, cleaned up (as best I could; most of them suffered from a particularly nasty pink-and-green moiré), captioned, and tagged for your pleasure. Go forth and repurpose them in peace.

I’ve downloaded a lot more old encyclopedias to cannibalize after this one. Idle time is the only constraint. Watch this space!

Other public domain Flickr sets:

• Illustrations from “The San Francisco Call”
• English Literature: An Illustrated Record

(and to anyone else in the United States who hires freelance designers):

If the designer of your book’s jacket or interior is not an employee of your company, rather than an independent contractor, and if you do not have a written contract that expressly says that the design work was done “for hire,” then you do not own the design.

This means that if you or anyone else wishes to reuse it—say, if you sell paperback or foreign rights to another publisher—you can’t just send along the layout files. You do not own them. They do not belong to you. You must negotiate a usage fee with the designer. It will probably cost you money.

Ouch.
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Remember Merrill Perlman, the New York Times copy queen who did a loooooong Q&A last year? Well, she’s just started another one: Talk to the Newsroom: Director of Copy Desks Merrill Perlman. So now’s your chance to have those burning editorial questions finally doused. One of my esteemed former colleagues at St. Martin’s has a question right on the first page:

A Vanishing Breed?

Q. I’m a managing editor at St. Martin’s Press in New York City. We are having more and more trouble finding literate freelance copy editors and proofreaders — people who know the basics of punctuation, spelling, grammar, something of what the English language can or can’t do, perhaps enough knowledge of a major European language to add an accent or make a past participle agree with a noun. Are newspapers experiencing the same problem, and if so, how are you dealing with it?
— Robert Cloud

A. You’re right, Mr. Cloud, it’s harder to find people who know what good copy editors need to know. You can argue that English usage has gone downhill, or you can argue that English is changing, but a better answer, I suspect, is plus ça change. . . .

Note that although Ms. Perlman is, of course, answering many general questions about copy editing, her primary field of expertise is newspaper style, and the Times’s flavor thereof in particular. Should you have questions relating specifically to U.S. trade book style, you might want to ask the wonderfully salty Chicago Manual answeristas instead.

Photo: colour me red by :: Rick :: / Rick Truter; some rights reserved.