Harvard University Press Blog

Making Books -- spine dies

Walking around this place, I realized that there's a lot of book stuff lying around. What's more, there are whole lot of people sitting around here who, collectively, can tell you just about everything you need to actually do to make a book the way they're made today. Realizing as well (a lot of realizing happening for a Friday) that most people who don't work in publishing probably don't know how books get made, but that at least a fraction of them might take an interest, I thought why not do a little series here about "Making Books"? With any luck, we'll persevere and do occasional installments, not in any particular order, but just whatever we can manage and what seems interesting. And thus is born the Harvard Press Publicity Blog **special feature** -- MAKING BOOKS.

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We'll start simple, with something that is literally lying around the office. Take the jacket off one of your hardcover books (you're not one of those people who "waits for it to come out in paperback," are you?), and take a look at the spine. The spine, of course, is the backbone of the book, where the pages are stitched together (this is not the case with paperbacks, where glue tends to be the main binding agent). But look on the outside and you'll notice that the title and the names of author and publisher are actually stamped onto the outside of the spine. This is achieved via the use of an instrument called ...

Discarded spine dies arrayed on a desk

... a spine die, pictured above in a few sizes. Each hardcover book has a unique die, produced on its behalf by a bindery or other component manufacturer. That reminds me -- people sometimes ask if we print the books here on site, and the answer to that is no, we don't have a printing operation here, despite what the name "Press" might imply. On the contrary, we have many, many partners in crime, including printing presses and binderies across New England and the mid-Atlantic states, and even a few overseas for specialized jobs.

Last but not least in this somewhat half-baked first entry in our series is the answer to the question, "where do spine dies go to, er, 'die?'" The answer is that many of them come here, to our offices, where they make fantastic paperweights. Thus their service to the cause never ends. And that concludes the first installment of our series. Next up? Perhaps the wonderful world of galleys, or an interview with a book designer -- who knows?

||| Extra reading -- Wikipedia's article on bookbinding is actually pretty good.

||| Extra trivia fact -- we're all used to thinking that the type on a spine runs from top to bottom. But that's an American convention; most books produced in Europe actually have the type running from bottom to top. Drop into any bookshop in the UK and see what we're talking about.

Out of Town News, resuscitated

News just in that Harvard Square landmark Out of Town News will in fact not be closing, as an outfit called Muckey's Corp., which runs newsstands in the Boston area, has signed a five-year lease to operate the venerable newsstand located on the pedestrian island in Harvard Square (home also to the subway entrance once known affectionately as "the pit").

Book World

As we learned yesterday, the Washington Post Book World will in February cease publication as a standalone section. Books coverage will be split between the "Outlook" and "Style" sections, and Book World will remain a discrete entity online. Reactions differ -- David Ulin at the LA Times recently underwent such a shift in the paper's books coverage, and in the NYT account he says he's dealing. Others are less sanguine, but some chose to see this development as "a shift, not a death."

SNOW DAY

Here in Cambridge the snow has turned to rain and it is 100% gross out there. Schools were closed today in Arlington, Ashland, Belmont, Boston, Brookline, Braintree, Burlington, Chelsea, Concord, Danvers, Gloucester, Lowell, Lawrence, Lexington, Lincoln-Sudbury, Marlborough, Medford, Methuen, Milton, Natick, North Andover, North Reading, Peabody, Reading, Topsfield, Somerville, Stoughton, Walpole, Westwood, Winchester, Worcester, and Woburn (non-New Englanders always get a kick out of those place names -- FYI, it's "Woo-stah," not "Wor-che-ster," folks).

Most of the Press has gone home before this stuff freezes over and sends everyone's cars off the road, but some of us are still here, listening to Black Sabbath, trying to come up with relevant blog posts. Meanwhile, a bit of local custom -- did you know that in Boston, when you shovel out a spot, it's yours? Sometimes until spring? Hint for visitors -- if you're crusing though South Boston and you think "oh I'll just move that orange cone/trash barrel/Laz-E-Boy recliner that's sitting in the road where that nice looking parking space is" -- better to leave it alone.

UPDATE: President Obama tells tells Washingtionians to toughen up -- apparently in Chicago they don't even have snow days.

Embrace happiness, read the I Tatti Renaissance Library

Martin Levin, books editor at the Globe & Mail, has done just this.

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Pictured from left to right in a detail from Domenico Ghirlandaio's Zachariah in the Temple are Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino, Angelo Poliziano, and Demetrios Chalkondyles. The first three are HUP authors, thanks to the establishment of the I Tatti Renaissance Library, which presents the Latin works of Italian Renaissance humanists in the original language, with facing-page English translations.

Rise, argonauts, rise

Interestingly, a cross-medium coincidence. You might be aware (or you might not) that we've just released a new translation of Loeb #1 (does that make it the "Alpha Loeb?"), Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica, which chronicles, of course, the trials and tribulations of Jason and friends, including but not limited to: the search for the Golden Fleece, the discovery of the Kingdom of Women, the timeless love story of Jason and Medea, and this and that other legendary exploit (there are a lot -- these guys really got around).

At the same time, video game developer Codemasters has seen fit to release Rise of the Argonauts for PC, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3. Rise of the Argonauts, say the developers, "immerses gamers in a gladiatorial adventure, set in wondrously imagined vision of ancient Greece. With deep exploration and epic quests, players live a life of brutal combat as they lead a team of iconic warriors - including Jason, Hercules and Atalanta - through a world ruled by mythological gods."

We don't really know what to say (it is, after all, 4:30 on a Friday afternoon), but we're guessing this is the first time that "Loeb Classical Library" and "Xbox 360" have appeared together in a blog post.

People are talking about Booker T. again

... as a result of Robert J. Norrell's new biography of the once-admired, now-maligned Tuskegee founder. In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley writes that he's reappraised his view of Washington:

Few great Americans have been more cruelly treated by history than Booker Taliaferro Washington. He has been mocked, vilified and caricatured, yet by any reasonable measure his life was extraordinary.

[...]

As one who came of age in 1960, who shared the movement's impatience for change, and who greatly admired Vann Woodward's work, I reflexively accepted the received opinion of Washington. Norrell persuades me that I was wrong. He has granted Washington what Du Bois, Woodward and so many others have willfully denied him: He sees Washington in the context of his own times and declines to judge him by the ostensibly more enlightened moral assumptions of our own. Certainly, Washington was not a perfect man; his fascination with politics led him into alliances and commitments of questionable value to his cause, and at times his willingness to curry the favor of whites led him into embarrassing self-abnegation. But he was the great African American leader of the day, a man who gave inspiration and hope to millions and played no small role in altering white perceptions of blacks, a remarkable accomplishment at what may have been the worst time for blacks in American history.

And in the Wall Street Journal, out today, a new piece on "The Wizard of Tuskegee":

Yet to the extent that Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) is remembered at all today, he is usually misremembered, which is a travesty ... In "Up From History," a compelling biography, Robert J. Norrell restores the Wizard of Tuskegee to his rightful place in the black pantheon.

For more on the motivation behind this trend toward reassessment of Washington's "place in the pantheon," see our post "100 Years Before President Obama," which explains the context and reprints the Prologue from Norrell's book in an effort to show why now is the time to take another look at a figure whose proper significance evades us to this day.

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Booker T. Washington's first home as a free person, in Malden, West Virginia. Photo by Frank Beard; from Booker T. Washington, The Story of My Life and Work (Atlanta: J. L. Nichols, 1901).

Death of the monograph?

We hear a lot in publishing circles about the decline of the monograph, but perhaps less about what might replace it. In an article published this month in The Journal of Scholarly Publishing, HUP's Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters, a frequent contributor to conversations on the future of publishing, imagines a world in which the "well-wrought, slowly gestated essay" replaces the monograph as the scholarly item of record, at least in the humanities. The article is not yet online, but see Scott McLemee's summary of and response to the idea in his column at Inside Higher Ed. Waters addressed similar issues in a 2007 IHE column titled "A Call for Slow Writing."

The John Harvard Library, back from the grave

Those of you with a few more years under your belts may remember a series we did during the 60s and 70s called the John Harvard Library. Sadly it's sort of petered out, but in its heyday we used it to collect important documents in American history as well as the writings of significant figures from said history and place them under one rubric -- a sort of "library of America" that presaged the emergence of the excellent collections by that name that began to show up in the 80s. At the time, colonial stuff tended to make up the backbone of our series, with an old-but-still-worth-reading biography of George Washington, the collected writings of Anne Bradstreet, and Bernard Bailyn's collection of pamphlets from the American Revolution proving among the most popular entries.

But wait ... now, Lazarus-like, the John Harvard Library arises once more, in newly-commissioned and designed editions that provide to you, friend, the writings that have shaped our consciousness as a nation, complete with explanation and context from some of our smartest scholars, for a really cheap price. Such a move now seems rather in keeping with both the newfound reverence for American ideals and the grim, sober determination that characterized the new president's inaugural speech. So maybe this is our contribution to a new zeitgeist, or something.

Unlike previous incarnations, the new editions in the JHL will have a uniform look, with cover illustrations courtesy of artist Robert Carter. Below is an example; the rest follow after the break.

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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself

Introduction by Robert B. Stepto

New Seminary Co-op column - UPfront

Since without university presses, nerd types like us wouldn't have anything to read, we're glad that there are still some stores dedicated to putting forth what we're putting out, front and center (like literally, on the front table). Among these is of course the legendary Seminary Co-op, going strong in Chicago's Hyde Park (as well as two other locations) since 1961. As you may have learned from a previous post of ours, the Co-op operates an online mag called The Front Table, where they post lists, features, reviews, and the like from employees. Now there's a new column called UPfront (get it?), in which friends and family (well, the spiritual family of UP employees, at least) talk about what's likely to be on the physical front table during the weeks and months to come. The enthusiasm bleeds through pretty strong in these little blurbs -- you may in fact recognize the inimitable style of listmaker extraordinaire John Eklund in the HUP entries on Naming Infinity, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, and Worlds Made by Words.