“There’s just this one letter causing trouble,” Hugh says finally, squinting at the proof.
I blanch at the thought that he might unlock the chase and have another go at the typesetting. But no. He lifts the chase out of the press bed and lays it on its side against the glass. Peering closely at front and back, he locates the h that is refusing to print, its bottom hump paler than everything else on the page. He tears off a sliver of Scotch tape and fastens it to the backside of that character’s matrix and slips the chase back into the press bed.
“That should do it,” he says. He runs another proof. It’s perfect. The type has made a distinct but not brutal impression in the paper. The ink settles smoothly into every letter like a maze of shallow forest pools.
“Doesn’t this drive you crazy?” I say. “All this fiddly, picky work?” I would have given up hours ago.
“What drives me crazy is to see that h not standing up with all the rest. Imagine printing 300 copies of that page and seeing the h fading every time into the background.”
The makeready has been so intimate, Hugh leaning over the press, stroking the paper, gently tapping the type, that I expect him to pat the press on its flank now that it’s done and say, “Good boy!”
“Does it have a nickname?” I ask.
He looks at me blankly.
“The press. We used to call our Westphalia ‘Willy’ and our little green Datsun ‘Esmeralda.’ You know, a nickname.”
“Like ‘Sally,’ or ‘Bert’?” He doesn’t bother to keep the scoffing tone out of his voice. “No. The press is an eight-by-twelve Chandler & Price.”
I should have known.
Hugh is leaning over the tympan, measuring it with a ruler. He draws two pale pencil lines, one vertical, one horizontal, on the left side of the Mylar to show where the leading edge of each sheet of paper should sit so that the columns of text will print precisely where they belong. Perfect register is especially important when he is printing the page twice, once with the image and again with the text.
At last it’s time for the first running proof: a proof made with the motor running, the real test of what will happen when Hugh is printing this page in its 300-page run. He flicks the motor on and the press rumbles to life. Suddenly, I see the risk in this operation. The C&P has a “dwell”—a brief pause when it’s open, enough time to place a sheet of paper on the platen and to get your hands out of the way—which seems like a godsend compared to its nineteenth-century competitors, known in the trade as “snappers” because they opened and closed without a pause. Printers had to be light-fingered or risk losing a digit or two.
Hugh stands in front of the press. On his right is the paper tray, a swivel-arm that holds a stack of fresh Salad sheets, fanned slightly so that the edges stick out for easy picking. With his right hand he pulls a clean page off the tray, and simultaneously with his left he removes the printed sheet from the tympan. The faster the left hand removes the paper, the more time the right hand has to place a fresh sheet.
At maximum speed, his press can print 2,600 sheets an hour. “When I got the press, it ran like a rocket ship!” Hugh exclaims. “I couldn’t feed it that fast so I built a jack shaft to gear down the motor.” Now, it churns out about 500 impressions an hour, but Hugh isn’t aiming for that. He no longer feels the need to prove that he can keep up with a machine. Satisfied with the test run, he turns off the motor and moves even further back in time, to the trusty flywheel and the strength of his arm. He’ll be happy to get this print run of 300 pages done in the course of the afternoon.
He sways with the rhythm of turning the wheel, feeding the paper, pulling it out, stacking the printed sheets carefully in front of him so the ink doesn’t smudge, pausing now and then to transfer the stack to his worktable so he can carry on. His eyes are staring, a bit glazed. I have disappeared. There’s just the thrum of the press, the clack of type, and the intermittent swish of paper and rollers, a syncopated percussion that beats in rhythm with his heart.
PRESS PRINT
What I take for granted:
That the lights will come on when I flick a switch.
That water will flow when I turn on the tap.
That words onscreen will appear as ink on a page when I press Print.
I don’t necessarily want to know the workings behind these magical events. Take electricity. “Think of it as water,” my father used to say, but that didn’t help. I didn’t believe there was water flowing through the walls, either. Pressing and turning those keys, knobs, and switches always seems to me to be an act of faith.
Maybe this explains why I thought the digitization of books had done away with makeready. I assumed that once an ebook was designed and locked into a file, all that remained was to upload the file to a retailer’s website and wait for a reader to click Add to Cart.
“It’s all makeready!” Erik exclaims when I proffer my theory. My ignorance is endless, it seems. “Sure, there’s no physical evidence—no first, second, third draft, nothing you can write Artist Proof on—but just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.”
He sends me the pages of the book as a file that I say is onscreen, but it isn’t. The pixelated image of the words is there. The file itself is a knot of code, an intangible, indecipherable Rosetta stone.
Erik and I once stood before three sky-high Mayan stelae, squinting at the columns of glyphs that told the story of Lady Xoc, overseen by the ruler Shield Jaguar, making sacrifice to the gods by pulling a skein of bark cloth through a piercing in her tongue. Blood drips into a gourd-bowl she holds in her hands. At least that’s what the archeologist guide told us the glyphs meant. While I learned to read the glyph code, Erik painted the images.
Now he is tilting his laptop towards me so I can see the columns of code for The Paradise Project scrolling down the screen. We are in a program called Calibre. Erik used an application called InDesign to create the ebook, then dumped the file into Calibre to fine-tune the code and convert the file to other formats for exporting to retail ebook sites.
What I’m looking at, he tells me, are Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Every paragraph, every letter (character) in a word, is shaped by its own chunk of code. This is not news to me: I learned a smattering of basic .html to manage the website Erik designed for me twenty years ago.
“This should look familiar,” he says. “Books are coded in XTML, which is a smarter HTML. From a coding perspective, ebooks are essentially websites viewed on an ereader. They are built the same way.”
Erik explains that the file of The Paradise Project contains the code for how my words will be seen. Every time a letter, word, or phrase is bolded or italicized, or a paragraph needs to begin flush left instead of indented, the CSS for that letter, word, or paragraph has to change.
“An ereader is a format for reading what’s in a book. The ereader doesn’t change what’s there, but sometimes it can fail to recognize certain code.” I’m starting to get that electricity/plumbing feeling, as if we’re talking about faeries and extraterrestrials. “This means that, as well as the basic code, I have to add separate lines of code for specific devices, so that readers looking at the book on Kobo and Kindle and iBooks will all see the same thing.”
“So the makeready for a digital book is like setting up the type to run on half a dozen different presses?”
“Exactly.”
My brain feels like it is about to explode.
Erik goes on. “For instance, there is no code in Kindle for a drop cap. I love drop caps. I designed them into the chapter openings, but Kindle can’t read them. What do I do? Get rid of drop caps? Or be content that Kindle users will have a different reading experience?”
Basically, ebook designers like Erik have to choose one format and design for it, accepting that in other ereader formats the headings might not look the same and the page breaks might fall in different pla
ces. Where he can, he adds extra code to correct the anomalies.
For The Paradise Project, I have up-to-date Word files of all the stories, so the process of dumping the text into a publishing file goes smoothly. But Erik is also designing ebooks for two of my out-of-print books: The Convict Lover and The Lion in the Room Next Door. Typically, I write longhand, enter the story into the computer, editing as I go, then I print out a fresh draft for another go-round, repeating the cycle until the piece is as good as I can make it. Over the years, the process has become increasingly digital, until now I spend more time with my fingers on keys than with a pen in my hand. But even my first book, published thirty-eight years ago, has ended up as a computer file. The computer I worked on then is long dead, the file no longer readable. Even if I could read the file, it wouldn’t match the printed book: editors and copy editors made their own changes to a manuscript on its way to publication. The writer rarely gets a copy of the final digital file.
To make an ebook of The Convict Lover, the pages of the printed book first had to be run through an optical recognition scanner, a machine that reads printed text and converts it to digital code. In this case, the machine needed its eyes checked. On one page alone there were 138 errors. For instance, “the” was consistently read as “die,” and “shifted” became “shitted.” The text required a very thorough proofread.
For The Lion in the Room Next Door, I had digital files of each story, but they were in AppleWorks, a now-defunct word-processing program. Converting them to Microsoft Word was easy, but the new files had to be compared word-for-word with the print edition of the book to catch all the publisher’s copy edits.
In the end, I hired my niece, an editor, to proof both books. The files were flawless when she handed them to Erik. Even so, when he poured the text into the book-formatting program Calibre, there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of conversion errors in the EPUB file, including the old hyphenation from the Microsoft Word format that showed up in the new files. Combing out the misplaced hyphens and other errors was a painstaking and irritating process.
The ebook format requires some unexpected changes in the text, too. A table of contents with page numbers seems pointless now: which “page” a text falls on will depend on the point size and font the reader chose and the device it is read on. There is no longer a single page number that can be referenced and found by every reader from Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Sidney, Vancouver Island, to Sydney, Australia.
Erik looks at me with sympathy. “Not pointless. We’ll keep the table of contents and link the chapter titles directly to the chapter openings. A reader can quickly skip from the contents to where they want to go in the text, they just won’t use page numbers to do it.”
Size has changed, too. It is no longer fixed. Before Gutenberg’s press, the size of a book was left to the whimsy of scribes or the person who commissioned the work. The Codex Gigas, the Giant Book (also known as the Devil’s Bible) is the size of a small table and weighs as much as a sturdy woman; the skins of 160 young donkeys were scraped to create the vellum for its pages. Not taking into account illustrations and embellishments, if a scribe wrote non-stop, 24-7, the Codex Gigas would take five years to copy.
At the other end of the spectrum are the thumb-sized prayer books, Bibles, and Books of the Hours that became popular in medieval Europe. Complete with illuminated portraits, embellished lettering, and intricately worked clasps, these miniatures were small enough for a lady to hang from her belt, yet they contained hundreds of pages written in fine script.
During the hand-press period—from Gutenberg up to about 1820—the dimensions of a book were determined largely by the size of page that could be printed on the press. Paper was manufactured in a variety of sizes defined by terms such as pot, demy, foolscap, and crown. As printing and papermaking technology developed, it became possible to print on larger sheets and even rolls of paper. At the same time, experiments were honing in on the optimal line length for reading and the optimal size for holding in the hand—for a novel or biography, for instance, the ideal size is six-by-nine inches. All of this worked towards standard book sizing, although rogues abound. In 2012 the biggest book in the world was declared to be This the Prophet Mohamed, made in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It is the size of a backyard swimming pool. The smallest book is Teeny Ted from Turnip Town, written by Malcolm Chaplin and illustrated by his brother Robert, published at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2014. A thirty-page story, it is printed on a single tablet the width of a human hair and can be read only with an electron microscope.
Erik doesn’t have to deal with the far ends of the size spectrum, but his challenge is great enough: to design a book that can be read equally well on a full-size computer monitor and on a cellphone screen smaller than a deck of cards.
When the digital design for The Paradise Project is finished, Erik tests the EPUB file across as many devices as he can: desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and phones of various sizes from the major manufacturers. He asks me to try to open the file on all the devices I own, and on Wayne’s, too.
“Send me screenshots,” he says. “The final, uncontrollable factor is the user, because, in ebooks, the user has control over some of the design elements. What will the design look like if the user views it on a black background with white characters, or a purple background with green characters? What if the user bumps up the text size to 24 point? How does the text size and every variable under the user’s control affect the page breaks, the way the text sits on the page? The type is changeable, but I still have control over the spacing and flow. That’s what I’ve been working on—making sure that no matter what the user does, the book will still look good, the reading experience will be everything it can be.”
This is the digital makeready, a process just as fussy and perhaps even more time-consuming than Hugh’s makeready on the old Chandler & Price. At least Hugh only has one press to deal with.
“We’ve let computer programs determine how we see text,” Erik says, “but we still have to go in and make sure the program is working correctly and is consistent. In the same way that there are limitations on the machinery that lets people see the words, there are limitations in coding that the designer has to find a way to work around.”
Ebook formats are intuitive: they will remove excess, unnecessary coding. But even so, a lot of what Erik does during his digital makeready is to edit the metadata to make sure that the coding not only works, but is elegant. Once he’s done everything he can, he runs the file through an EPUB validator website set up by the International Digital Publishing Forum: he uploads the EPUB file, runs a validation on the code, and the program spits out a list of errors. When he validates the EPUB file for The Paradise Project, it comes up with solid green checkmarks: no errors. He converts the file to MOBI, which Amazon uses for the Kindle, and sends me the final files. Then, one more format: a PDF for reading on a computer screen.
Many self-publishing authors don’t use a designer. The Amazon uploader will convert a simple Word doc quickly and easily to a file that can be launched on Amazon in seconds. The conversion tool at Smashwords, another self-publishing platform, is called the meat grinder, a name that speaks for itself. In the world of Hit Publish, writing replete with typos and redundancies and elementary design is the norm. But readers can tell the difference.
“There’s a certain magic to this, a certain finesse,” Erik says quietly, almost defensively, yet with pride. “Really, really clean code is a beautiful thing. In the same way that a smooth-running press with a perfect skim of ink on the disc and a perfect bite of type into the paper is, and perfect consistency to the prints even when you look closely at the pages through a loupe—in that same way, you can see beauty and elegance in a well-coded ebook.”
The language he is speaking is as foreign as the Mayan glyphs, but at the same time I understand exactly what he means, the way I understand Spanish from th
e cadence even when I can’t translate the words.
Where did he learn to speak this digital language with such ease? Have I raised a nerd?
Not a nerd. A born-again Gutenberg, a next-generation Hugh.
THE BALLET OF THE SIGNATURES
The Salad paper arrives in twenty-two-by-thirty-inch sheets. The book, as Hugh envisions it, will be relatively narrow, with text columns three inches wide and eight inches long. The question is how to get the maximum number of pages out of a single sheet of Saint-Armand paper.
Hugh and Erik toss this back and forth at our first meeting of Team Paradise Project. I’m not really listening. I figure there must be mathematical equations for such things. They are talking about ways of folding and cutting when I throw in my two cents.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to have uncut pages,” I muse, more an effort to participate than a serious suggestion.
I’ve used the term incorrectly, I discover later when I cruise the rare-book sites. What I meant was: Wouldn’t it be nice to leave the pages “unopened”? When mechanical printing presses proliferated around 1830, among the many inventions designed to speed book manufacture were the paper-folding, cutting, and binding machines. Before that, printers rarely trimmed pages. If large sheets of paper had to be folded to create pages, the book would be issued with the edges untrimmed and the folded pages “unopened,” known in the trade as intonso. Once the trimming of the fore-edges of a book was relegated to machines, it sometimes happened that a folded page or two was missed. These “uncut” pages are accidental—a delight or irritation, depending on the reader’s temperament.
Gutenberg's Fingerprint Page 17