I’m reading Old Men in Love by Alasdair Gray: a Small Beer production touted (along with its more obvious literary qualities) for its design. And indeed it’s very lovely: two-colour (black/blue) with chapter decorations and the occasional sidenote in blue, frequent illustrations (by the author?), and each chapter ending with a gloriously antiquated tapering layout.1

And yet.

There are two typographic decisions I’m complaining about:2

Supra-chapter divisions (call them “parts”) are introduced by double-page illustrated spreads with a “part title” and an apposite quotation. The spreads are uniformly striking, in a positive sense (here’s where the illustrations come in). The typography of the quote is equally striking, but less positively: a narrow column, fully justified, in a particularly wide typeface, leaving just six words or so to each line. A particularly egregious example occurs on pg 12: “Chroniclers are privileged to enter” (34 characters) and “soarings up and down, all” (24 characters) occupy the same line width, and the latter must of course be unpleasantly spaced out (inter- but also intra-word) to make the distance. Obvious solutions: (1) hyphenate; (2) ragged right; (3) both; (4) and maybe (if absolutely necessary) consider a smaller point size or italics.

My other irritation is with the decision not to indent paragraphs, but also not to indicate them with extra linespacing. This means the only signal that a new paragraph is beginning is the early termination of the line before.

I planned not to complain about this. (Let me be very clear: I much prefer a book such as this, with an ideosyncratic design that I disagree with and can complain about, to one with a perfectly readable but utterly unimaginative design that I have no complaints about whatsoever.) It’s a minor point, and it doesn’t interfere with readability, right?

But then it did.

On page 71 we have a dialogue between Brother Filippo and Diamante. A line of dialogue by the latter (“I was remembering…”) happens to almost completely fill two lines. The following line must be understood to be spoken by Brother Filippo, if the dialogue is to make any sense, but only the reader alert to the significance of an en-space will realise this on first reading. (The misreading caused by a wrong interpretation is so obvious that one goes looking for its source.) If paragraphs were only indented, there would be no possibility of confusion: new paragraph, new speaker, clear and obvious.

Lest my typographic complaints give the wrong impression, let me say that I am enjoyed the book very much (so far: page 71 of 311). It’s not cheerful, and its protagonist is not particularly likeable, but there’s plenty else to like besides himself. (Does it sound Scottish to you? Not a clue, me…) And if I’ve put you off, Small Beer has plenty with less adventurous (of course less individual) typography.3

Notes:

  1. Somewhat visible, although not in the glory that it attains in other chapters, at the end of the excerpt on scribd. [↪]
  2. How wonderful to have one’s own soapbox, without even having to witness the effects of one’s spittle-flecked ravings on the public-at-large. [↪]
  3. Of their catalogue, I particularly recommend Kalpa Imperial, and any and all of Kelly Link’s writing. I haven’t read their more recent stuff, but I’m working on it… [↪]