The final stretch from proofread text to printed book always feels like an eternity! But there are so many things to be finalised from cover art to fonts, from inners papers to ISBN numbers. And the closer to the end you get the further away it seems.
The montage above shows how the cover image changed over time; the warmer colour on the left giving way to a cool look on the right.
A particular challenge for SCRAVIR was the issue of the different voices in the narrative. The story mixes standard narrative with text messages, emails, autopsy reports, and a fragment of a journal from several centuries ago. How should the layout and typography represent this? For several hundred years, since the 12th century, there was a long “s” and a short “s” that was the lowercase version of the letter and looked similar to an “f”. It is part of the experience and the fun of looking at old manuscripts. Text messages use emojis. At what point does adding all this textual colour impede reading rather than enhance it? We decided to dive in with both feet!
We hope that in the end we got everything right, but as the French writer Jean Paul Sartre discovered when Les Main Sales was first performed in 1948, neither the author nor the publisher ultimately decide what a work means or how it is received; that is down to the reader 😉
A particular challenge for SCRAVIR was the issue of the different voices in the narrative. The story mixes standard narrative with text messages, emails, autopsy reports, and a fragment of a journal from several centuries ago. How should the layout and typography represent this? For several hundred years, since the 12th century, there was a long “s” and a short “s” that was the lowercase version of the letter and looked similar to an “f”. It is part of the experience and the fun of looking at old manuscripts. Text messages use emojis. At what point does adding all this textual colour impede reading rather than enhance it? We decided to dive in with both feet!
