Harvard University Press Blog

A Peek Inside our Pride and Prejudice

There’s no two ways about it: gift book season is upon us. ‘Tis the time for lush stacks of beautifully illustrated almanacs, glossy art books, lush boxed sets, impenetrable cookbooks, and smart new editions of old favorites. Well, we’ve got one of those last, and if you’ve been paying attention it’s not news by now: we’re quite pleased with our annotated edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, edited by Patricia Meyer Spacks.

We think it’s a book well-worth gifting, so we’ve put together a little something to try to simulate that feeling of flipping through a beautiful book and realizing who it’d be perfect for. And we have the book’s designer and acquiring editor to talk us through it. For Graciela Galup, the designer, part of the challenge in working on the cover for this book was in figuring out how a Harvard University Press edition of Pride and Prejudice would be different from all of the other editions already out there. Our books manage to stand out, she says, without straying from a classic, subtle style.  Which is why this image to the right may work fine for Android Karenina, but didn’t quite cut it for us (just a little too racy, even without the robotics).

So, take a look at the video for a peek inside our Pride and Prejudice. It may just be the perfect gift for your favorite romantic, history buff, Austenite, Victorianist, or plain old book-lover. Or maybe it’s a little something for yourself? You deserve it.

 

  

(Image above right: The Kiss by G. Baldry (19th century) Simon Carter Gallery, Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK/ The Bridgeman Art Library)

HUP Jackets: How Many Friends Does One Person Need?

Last month we introduced our new series of audio slideshows spotlighting jacket design. We’ve just finished up the latest installment, again featuring HUP Art Director Tim Jones. This time, he explains his design for Robin Dunbar’s How Many Friends Does One Person Need?  

The book consists of short articles intended to convey the various ways in which we humans are as much the product of our evolutionary history as is any other species.  New Scientist called it an "eclectic collection of essays on humanity and evolution with something for everyone."

And the slideshow has even more!  There are bunnies, there are sheep, there's the world's loneliest cow, and there's a gang of roosters that we just couldn't quit.  Take a look.  

 

 

 

 

Are HUP books vegan?

This would seem to be an odd question, but take a look at the spine of your favorite book—hardcover or paperback. If it’s a hardcover, what do you see oozing out there from underneath the signatures? And if it’s a paperback, what’s that opaque stuff holding the pages to the cover? Glue, of course. And what is glue famously made of? …

We actually got this question the other day from a Harvard professor working on an article, and we did a little digging to find out whether animal glues are still commonly used in book production. For this, we turned to Paul Parisi, the president of Acme Bookbinding Co. in Charlestown, MA, one of the premier bookbinders in the world (no joke—we are lucky to be located so close to them).

The answer? We can say, it turns out, that virtually all HUP books are, in fact, vegan. Mr Parisi:

I think the only place you are likely to see animal glue (now called “protein glue” —less offensive to the lovers of Mr. Ed) would be in case-making glue and possibly in spine lining—where the headband is glued to the book. Most adhesive binding for perfect binding, notch-cased binding and sewn bindings would be EVA (hot-melt which is wax based—not protein), PUR (polyurethane) or PVA (polyvinyl acetate). These are all chemical formulations and I imagine have some petroleum basis rather than protein/animal.

In short, the glues used in bookbinding today are primarily chemical emulsions with no animal content. It’s possible, our production manager speculates, that older, animal-based adhesives are still used in lower-end binding, like that for catalogues, directories, and the like, but when it comes to books, binders have pretty much completely switched over to newer chemical formulas, save for a unique project here or there where a customer has requested, say, "calf-binding," which is just what it sounds like.

If you really want to get technical about it, however, remember that today’s inks are primarily petroleum-based, thus carbon-based, and thus composed in large part of the fossil remains of creatures that dwelt upon this earth however many millions of years ago ...

Image: An HUP title in hardcover with a traditional sewn binding—click the image to get a close-up.

"Literature that has a particular resonance with someone has a vibrant, living quality": An interview with Stefanie Posavec

When the affordable-original-print site 20x200 featured a piece based on The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, we were both seduced and intrigued. Who was this Stefanie Posavec, and how had she transformed Benjamin’s most famous essay into an organic form (tree? anemone?) with spreading multi-colored branches?  Happily, Posavec, a London-based book designer for Penguin UK, proved willing to answer our questions via e-mail, and to share some images of the progression of the work, interspersed below.  
The finished product
Q: Do you have an idea of what a visualization will look like before you begin your work, or does it evolve as your analysis progresses?
A: I have an idea of what the visualisation will look like up to a point: I keep experimenting with the data and try to see whether the shapes that I have in my head are feasible using this data set. Sometimes I have an idea in my mind, yet, when the data is actually gathered for this visual, I realise that the graphic that I was so fixed upon actually is impossible to create with the given data, which is part of the process, I suppose. Often I try to use forms to visualise the text that not only represent the data but also become a visual metaphor for some of the themes found within the text. For example, the Literary Organism method of visualising text, while merely a simple tree structure, was meant to look like a living and breathing organic being. I wanted to communicate how literature that has a particular resonance with someone has a vibrant, living quality. Also, comparing text and organisms works neatly as both are cellular in that they are complex structures produced of smaller and smaller components.

First image

Q: How did you choose "Work of Art" as a subject?

A: I worked with 20x200 for the selection of this essay. It was the first time that I ever read this essay, to be honest! Normally I either pick my favourite, most influential books to analyse or work with text that influences and inspires other people and use the project to understand their reasons for this love of the text.

Second image

Lipstick Traces gets a new look

Greil Marcus's seminal Lipstick Traces is getting a twentieth-anniversary edition later this year. Poster art legend Chuck Sperry has designed a new cover for this treasured tome; the poster version will debut at Book Expo in May, where you can get a silkscreened edition:

Meanwhile, the new edition of Lipstick Traces (link is to the current, "old" -- but still nice! -- edition) hits a shelf near you in November.

(UPDATE: here's the new one!)

You are invited

Come on down ... you're the next contestant on ... just kidding, come on down to the Harvard Museum of Natural History this Thursday at 6pm to see Scott Edwards, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Curator of Ornithology in Harvard’s MCZ, and Leslie Morris, Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at Harvard’s Houghton Library, discuss the origin and scientific significance of John James Audubon’s early drawings. Edwards and Morris are among the principal contributors (along with Audubon's biographer Richard Rhodes) to Audubon: Early Drawings, which collects the naturalist's crucial early work in a full-color, large-format (11"x14") volume. Extra bonus for those who choose to attend--the speakers have decided to bring some of the Audubon originals with them, which will be on public display during the lecture. Normally this stuff is locked away in the Houghton Library, so this is your chance people!

To get an idea of what's in the book, take a look at the slide show we've set up--just a few of the 116 portraits contained in the published volume.

Saad Eskander and the Baghdad Library

From today's New York Times, the remarkable story of Saad Eskander, the director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad, who has kept a diary (now hosted at the website of the British Museum) of his efforts to keep the library open amid the increasing sectarian violence that ravages the city. Imagine if your day-to-day work included not only the problems of how to restore the burned and looted library to its former glory, but also devising ways to keep yourself and your employees alive amid unimaginable carnage. Take a look at what Mr. Eskander returned to after attending a conference in Rome last November:

I received bad news, as soon as I arrived to my office. In my absent, INLA was bombed twice and snipers' bullets broke several windows. Fortunately, no body was hurt. My staff withheld these information from me, when I contacted them. They claimed that they did not want me to be worried and to spoil my visit.

I spent the rest of the week trying to advise a number of my employees what to do, as they got death threats. The Sunnis, who lived in Shi'i dominated districtwere given an ultimatum to abandon their homes and the Shi'is, who lived in a Sunni dominated district, had to leave their homes. So far, two of my employees were murdered, the first worked in the Computer Department, and the second was a guard. Three of our drivers, who worked with us by contract, were murdered and three others were injured.

Read the whole thing if you can--"sobering" does not begin to describe Mr. Eskander's account of what he and his staff have to endure every day. The word "hero" gets thrown around a lot these days; this is a situation where it actually applies.

Manga from the Floating World

Here's the lowdown from the Harvard University Asia Center on their latest offering, Adam L. Kern's Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyoshi of Edo Japan:

Manga from the Floating World is the first full-length study in English of the kibyôshi, a genre of sophisticated pictorial fiction widely read in late-eighteenth-century Japan. By combining analysis of the socioeconomic and historical milieus in which the genre was produced and consumed with three annotated translations of works by major author-artist Santô Kyôden (1761–1816) that closely reproduce the experience of encountering the originals, Adam Kern offers a sustained close reading of the vibrant popular imagination of the mid-Edo period. The kibyôshi, Kern argues, became an influential form of political satire that seemed poised to transform the uniquely Edoesque brand of urban commoner culture into something more, perhaps even a national culture, until the shogunal government intervened.

Based on extensive research using primary sources in their original Edo editions, the volume is copiously illustrated with rare prints from Japanese archival collections. It serves as an introduction not only to the kibyôshi but also to the genre’s readers and critics, narratological conventions, modes of visuality, format, and relationship to the modern Japanese comicbook (manga) and to the popular literature and wit of Edo. Filled with graphic puns and caricatures, these entertaining works will appeal to the general reader as well as to the more experienced student of Japanese cultural history.

It's a beautiful, innovatively-designed volume that does justice to Kern's path-breaking research on this little-known predecessor to manga, which has experienced a steady growth in popularity even outside of Japan that shows no signs of abating.

Typesetters and book nerds take note

Some of us love music. Some of us love horses. And some of us love...fonts. And margins. And heads, sub-heads, rectos and versos. It's hard to realize the importance of decent book (or flyer, or poster, or billboard) design until you see a bad one. Try reading a manuscript in 12-point Courier and then then try it again once it's been designed by our crack team of book artists (they're like sandwich artists, except smarter, cooler, and more talented) and typeset (oftentimes by our good friends at Technologies 'N Typography) in a way that's easy on the eyes--only then will you appreciate what good design and a good font can do for you.

With that in mind, we call your attention to a film about that most ubiquitous and illustrious of fonts--Helvetica. Anyone who's been to New York City will immediately recognize it as the typeface used on the city's subway signage:

Beautiful, isn't it? Anyway, the film is called (appropriately enough) Helvetica, and it's coming out on Helvetica's 50th birthday in 2007. No, we are not affiliated with the producers, and no, we haven't been paid to say this, but as people who care about making things look good, we thought we'd share.

P.S. Please feel free to weigh in with your thoughts on other fonts, including Optima, which I love and use for all my press releases, but which is often criticized for having "awkward" punctuation (quotation marks, etc).