Books that lie open
Introducing the theme
This will be an irregularly appearing set of comments on books – what is in them, and the way they work as editorial structures, and as material artefacts. It continues the kinds of post that I wrote occasionally for the journal pages on the Hyphen Press website. Those pieces perhaps never quite fitted on a website that was ostensibly about books from one particular publisher. A Substack should allow more of a free rein to such meditations.
What I have in mind here is more like the book reviews that used to appear sometimes in the Times Literary Supplement, usually on the occasion of a book fair or a print-production event, in the days when its reviewers were anonymous. After a consideration of the book as a text – it might be a work of history, or of politics, or a biography – the concluding sentences examined the book as a material product. For those of us engaged in the manufacture of books, this was refreshing. My friend Paul Stiff and I used to collect and share them.
I have a few posts in various states of preparation. Most of them seem to be about the recent productions of independent publishers, sometimes almost one-person affairs. These are books that larger, more conventional publishers wouldn’t dare to put out. They are books from publishers that would like to join the mainstream, sold at ordinary prices, and be found ‘in all good bookshops’. But they have to be printed in limited numbers and their publishers struggle to get them into shops. Nevertheless, small publishing is where many interesting books are being made now – and if they are ‘beautiful’, it’s just the beauty of well-organized texts, interesting images, working efficiently in well-made, durable artefacts.
In July 2007, for the London Review of Books, Frank Kermode wrote about Oxford University Press’s recently issued edition of the letters of A.E. Housman, the great Classics editor (and poet). Kermode slipped in a paragraph about the book’s material working:
A word of mild and, as experience suggests, useless complaint about these volumes as physical objects. They are heavy and tightly bound – presumably to save space by reducing margins. You need both hands to hold them down; if you release the pressure they snap shut. Having let go to make a note one is compelled once more to force a new entrance, feeling about as welcome as Wittgenstein. Yet there was a time when Oxford editions were a pleasure to use.
A few weeks before this I had published a piece on the Hyphen Press journal pages that I believed supplied the answer, more or less. So I fired off a letter to the LRB, which was published at the top of its letters page:
Frank Kermode is right to complain that you need both hands to keep open the new edition of Housman’s letters (LRB, 5 July). ‘Yet there was a time when Oxford editions were a pleasure to use,’ he says. In the UK that was up to about 1970, when hot-melt glueing began to displace the cold glueing that had been used in industrial bookbinding. Cold glueing, which leaves a thin and almost invisible layer of water-based glue, allows the book to stay open by itself; hot-melt (a thicker, whiter layer of polymer glue) doesn’t. Cold glue seems to have disappeared from UK and North American book production, for reasons of economic rationalisation. It is still available, however, on the Continent and in the Far East. But this is evidently too far away for Oxford University Press.
That was the end of the matter in the LRB, though I continued to harp on about glue in private conversations and occasionally in public. In 2018 I revised my journal piece, now including the factor of the direction of paper grain. If the grain of a paper runs parallel to the spine of the book, this lets the pages be opened easily. At right angles to the spine, the pages will resist being opened, and the book-block may show a bit of a crinkle when viewed from the side.
Last year, in November, under the heading ‘Something Must be Done’, the LRB published a letter unprompted by any particular book, but following on from what the writer, Stephen Allen, had noticed in his local bookshop: the ‘undulating fore-edges’ of many books. Allen blamed the wrong direction of the grain, and behind that economic rationalization: ‘Publishers place great emphasis on cover design but seem to ignore elementary binding technique. I can only assume it comes down to the economics of printing the maximum number of pages from a given sheet of paper?’
I had to suggest some answers: yes, the grain, but also the glue, and behind both – yes, the larger factor of economic rationalization. From a colleague I had heard the story of one of the large UK printer/binders having installed a binding plant which in its very configuration resulted in books that had the paper’s grain running across the pages. It was now too late to change the layout of the machines on the factory floor.
In the larger sphere of company rationalization, certainly the changes in the ownership of British printing and binding companies show sequences of ownership transfer that have become so familiar in the Western economies over the last 40 years. Thus the printer Clay, a family business dating back to the early nineteenth century, was then re-established in Suffolk in the 1870s, to become a pillar of the British printing and binding industry in the twentieth century. In 1986 it was bought and incorporated into the St Ives printing group (still British, and run by Bob Gavron, a good-hearted and enlightened businessman). In 2018 St Ives sold Clays to the Italian firm Elcograf, its present owner.
Another case: the CPI group boasts of ‘16 factories spread over five countries’. Among its British components are Cox & Wyman of Reading (established 1777, acquired by CPI in 1999), CPI Mackays of Chatham (established 1857, acquired by CPI in 2000) and Clowes (established 1803, acquired by CPI in 1997). ‘CPI’ stands for Chevrillon Philippe Industrie. In 1996 two French private investors, Cyrille Chevrillon and Nicolas Philippe, established their firm, building it through the acquisition of printing and binding companies.
Meanwhile the book publishers, the clients of these conglomerating manufacturing companies, were themselves being acquired and subsumed within larger entities. This has led to the situation we now have. Go to your local bookshop – independent or conglomerated (in Britain, Blackwells, Waterstones, Foyles, Daunt, Dillons, Hatchards, all now belong to the same company, Elliott Investment Management, headquarters in West Palm Beach, Florida) – open any book and look at the imprint information on page 4. Who published it? It’s likely that behind an old-established name on the title-page – Hamish Hamilton or Jonathan Cape – you will see the name of the real publisher: Penguin Random House (which is now owned by the German conglomerate Bertelsmann). And the printer and binder will be Clays or CPI.
Large companies can still make good things, but the pressures to rationalize and economize are much greater than in the small firm in which the owner sits in the factory office and knows everyone there by their first name. This isn’t or wasn’t pure fantasy. I have witnessed this 10 or so years ago in the factory of one of the very good binders in the Netherlands, started by the father of the man who was showing me around. But soon afterwards, this firm sold its binding machinery and began to operate as a warehousing, accounting and despatch business.
So my letter agreeing with Stephen Allen that ‘something must be done’ went through these themes – material and economic. In the next issue the paper’s letters page was led by three replies.
The first letter was from Jim Pennington, a printer of much experience:
Both Stephen Allen and Robin Kinross overlook that the reason books come to have waves on the fore-edge is that high-speed printing and binding involve setting the ink and drying the glue with heat, and not enough time is allowed for the paper to condition during these operations (Letters, 21 November and 5 December). This means that the cockling that is inevitable stays with the paper, which is left gasping for air and moisture. You would think that after binding, it would settle down and lay flat but unfortunately paper, like many living beings, can never quite get rid of the stress and the waves do not go calm, retaining the distortion. It is known as paper hysteresis (‘lagging behind’).
The second letter came from Colin Cohen, another person with long experience in book production. He waved away my ideas about a conglomerated industry and binding materials. Rather:
The problem actually stems from the increasing use of presses fed from a roll of paper, rather than printed on sheets. The way these presses were originally designed, for magazines roughly twice the size of an octavo book, means that books almost always have short-grain pages while magazines, where it matters less, had long grain.
Pennington and Cohen come up with very particular and different theories. They both might be right. But what has changed in the UK book production industry in the past fifty years or so? What are the economic and organizational factors that lead once proud producers of well-functioning books to equip their factories with machines that produce ill-functioning books?
The third letter in that issue of the LRB, nicely supporting my ideas, came from J.P. Loo at Somerville College, Oxford. He turned his attention to academic books, their poor material qualities and their extortionate prices:
… reviewers can disapprove as much as they like: it would take readers withholding their custom to create more than a marginal market for properly bound books.
Consortia of academic libraries, on the other hand, have large budgets and the power to act in concert; they have already forced concessions on open access and publishing fees. Yet they seem content to buy even reference works that are barely usable when new and will be difficult to repair after heavy use.
‘Books that lie open’ – the overall title of this Substack – refers both to the material qualities of a book and to the ways in which its producers have been able to let its text and images speak clearly to its readers. ‘Open’ here suggests something good, and the examples discussed will, as much as possible, be good rather than bad.