Fast Company has a brief article about the design process for this cover. (Link via LitHub.)
I suppose it may well be true that few trade books opt for purely typographical jacket designs, but such treatment is obviously more common in the academic world. Not too many academic books would however involve petals from wild flowers in their search for the right red.
Flicking through the Pantone book is how must of us would do it.
And talking of the “right red”, here’s a trailer of a new movie, The King of Color, which recounts the life of Larry Herbert, inventor of the Pantone Matching System. Link via Printing Impressions.
PMS, the Pantone Matching System is one of those things it’s almost impossible to imagine not existing. I guess we just went through a lot of proofs prior to 1963 — or just learned to make sensible compromises!
Marco Rubio regards the typeface Calibri as too woke to be used any longer in State Department documents. The Guardian notes the story. The State Department’s going back to Times New Roman.
Of course we can all figure out that, for the current administration, the real problem with Calibri is that the State Department adopted it in 2023 under the Biden administration. At the time Anthony Blinken justified the switch on the grounds that Calibri is “more accessible for people with visual disabilities”. Echoing his master’s voice, Mr Rubio alleges that this typeface choice was “wasteful” pandering to diversity. Times New Roman, he assures us is “more formal and professional”. Serifs obviously communicate dignity and seriousness — everyone knows that!
I never did really like Calibri, but maybe that was mostly because of my anti-Microsoft prejudice! I always thought that Helvetica, Futura, Gill Sans, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all represented a perfectly adequate supply of sans-serif fonts. When all’s said and done Calibri is a pretty inoffensive font, as of course is TNR, maybe the world’s least ever offensive font. Calibri’s designer has described his typeface’s rounded design as having “a warm and soft character”. It is allegedly easier to read on-screen than many faces. It was introduced to the public in 2006 as part of Windows Vista. In 2007 it replaced Times New Roman in Microsoft Word and took over from Arial elsewhere.
In January 2024, the Calibri font was in turn pushed aside by Microsoft in favor of Aptos, a typeface designed by Steve Matteson, and originally called Bierstadt. This new typeface created by Microsoft in 2021 for some applications, was intended to evoke echos of Helvetica and Arial. In 2023/4 it became the new default Microsoft Office font. Now doesn’t that make a huge difference?
According to Wikipedia it has been argued that “Calibri had a ‘friendly’ feeling that could skew writer intent, whereas Aptos could display a writer’s words in a ‘clear and neutral’ tone”! Clear messaging here for Mr Rubio — presumably Times New Roman is even more clear and neutral!
The BBC also covered the story on 10 December, quoting Lucas de Groot, the designer of Calibri, as characterizing the State Department’s decision as both “sad and hilarious”. What may be sadder is our spending all this time analyzing these sorts of shenanigans — there was more commentary on the radio today. Is it not rather hard to generate too much indignation at the typeface used in government documents? I dare say there are many more serious problems with our foreign policy than the typeface in which our policy is communicated. Some might often favor Comic Sans!
But of course the demands of wokeness require us to object to objections to wokeness.
“At the center of the exhibition, thematically and physically, are two extraordinary printings of the Declaration of Independence: its exceedingly rare first newspaper appearance in the Pennsylvania Evening Post, and the gloriously faithful State Department engraving of the original engrossed copy that is now displayed (far less legibly) at the National Archives Museum in Washington, DC.”
John Adams wrote, “The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people”, and this exhibition shows the ammunition which changed those hearts and minds. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense which was published anonymously, is only 47 pages long but made one of the loudest bangs. Wikipedia indicates the uncertainty surrounding the actual sales numbers. Paine himself claimed that 120,000 copies were sold in the first three months, but historians have doubted this, putting the number of literate Americans in the colonies at about 75,000.
Thomas Paine (1736-1809) was born in Thetford, Norfolk. His father was a corset maker and in his youth Thomas apprenticed in the business, and for a year or so ran a corset shop in Sandwich, Kent.
Here in Fashion before Ease; – or, – A good Constitution sacrificed for a Fantastick Form (1793), James Gilray lampoons Paine’s efforts to persuade Britons as well of the costs of monarchy.
In 1774 Paine emigrated to the American colonies with the help of Benjamin Franklin, arriving half dead from typhoid, and having to be escorted off the ship when it docked in Philadelphia by Franklin’s physician. He became the successful editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine.
When he died the Quakers refused to admit him to their cemetery, so he was buried under a walnut tree on his farm in New Rochelle. William Cobbett dug up his bones in 1819 and took them back to England — where he intended some sort of formal reburial. However nothing was done, and the bones were lost sight of after Cobbett’s own death.
Robert Gray, at Shelf Awareness of 6 November (scroll down) speculates on time and the book. Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, but of course they can all be simultaneously present in a book.
Mr Gray quotes Ian Patterson’s Books: A Manifesto (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025), “The more you think about novels, the more impossible it becomes to ignore thinking about time. Novels are all about time: they take time, and make time, but the imagined time you inhabit as you read them is just that, imagined, illusory, a fictional time confirmed within the parameters of a book”.
He also quotes the New York Times reviewing the recent production of Krapp’s Last Tape: “This lean-in contemplation of it [our technology] is timed just right for our too-short attention spans: 55 minutes, at the end of which you’ll have added a classic to your day”.
This sort of thing gets my goat. “Our too-short attention spans”?! Come off it. All that has happened in the world of concentration is that maybe we now have more simultaneous claims on our attention because of that bit of metal and plastic in our pockets. One might actually claim superior powers of concentration now that we are capable of attending to several simultaneous items all at one. My granddaughter recently asserted that because of her cell phone she was incapable of concentrating any more. I pointed out to her that she is currently studying law, which I rather thought was an unanswerable refutation. What she really meant of course was no more than that all her contemporaries are making this claim, by which they tacitly acknowledge that social media are really a waste of time, and ask us to realize that they are fighting the good fight. I insist that when they need to concentrate modern youth is perfectly capable of concentrating. Sure, most social media posts are pretty silly, so concentration will not be called into play; and, at a slightly more serious level, most novels are not that good, and inevitably your attention will wander. This happened with Emily Brontë’s contemporaries, and surprise, surprise, it still happens today. The Brontës didn’t have Instagram to blame, but otherwise human nature has not changed. Evolution requires thousands of generations to do its thing. I spent much of my youth not concentrating — indeed I can remember the moment when I worked out what concentration meant and how useful it might be. It was an entirely optional state which you could activate at will and, for most of the time, leave on the shelf while you got on with gossip and games.
See, you can even learn it — and a bit of self defense while you’re at it.
I’m not sure “book time” is a very useful concept, but it obviously exists. When you read War and Peace you are clearly in 2025, but you are also in 1812 — and perhaps even more interestingly in 1992 or 2001 or 2012 or whenever you previously read it. While the events described by Tolstoy took several years to go by, you were able to relive them in a matter of hours — well maybe weeks. Is that not a little odd?
For book publishers the future is where it’s all at. As Mr Gray, writing from the bookseller’s perspective, says: “bookish folk have always toiled in the future (reading ARCs of books that won’t be published for months) as well as the past (well, most books). We are time travelers, too.” In the publishing game I was first engaged in sales and marketing where your future perspective is relatively short: most of the books you’re dealing with actually exist already, but you will also have to be working on some books which will be turning into physical objects in the next few months. Your primary object is this year’s sales. In production you are working on stuff which will assume book-form in about a year. Editors, while they may be reading a few manuscripts which are only a year or two from the target, will be spending most of their lives dealing with books which may not come out for several years. Much of the job is persuading Professor X to turn lecture notes or whatever into a book etc., etc., and that’ll take however long it takes — I once worked on a book the contract for which had been signed fifty years previously.
As more and more books plop off the production line you think, “Oh, I’d like to read that one” and that’s one of the delights of publishing. But life being what it is most of these interesting books join that pile you never have time to get round to. That’s what retirement’s for, when the past outweighs the future! In book time it’s never too late.
At SHuSH Ken Whyte expresses concern about Penguin Random House. He tells us that Bertelsmann, their owners, are demanding of revenue and profit growth, and he sees difficulty in keeping up EBITDA rates at 55-56th and Broadway. He suggests that the government is preventing PRH from taking over any big publishing companies, so they have to satisfy their appetite by acquiring small companies which are incapable of providing growth sufficient for the Bertelsmaniacal appetite*. However he allows that “Not all the damage at Penguin Random House is a direct consequence of the failed S&S acquisition. Some job loss was inevitable in that scenario, too. And HarperCollins, unaffected by the PRH-S&S deal, has also been laying off staff. These are tough times in book publishing.”
Mr Whyte continues “Nevertheless, it’s hard to see a victory for writers, readers, and the whole of the publishing world in any of this.” For myself I wonder if the news that PRH is finding it hard to expand its profit by acquisition is actually all that dire.
As Mr Whyte tells it, after that striking down of PRH’s attempt to take over Simon & Schuster, “Penguin Random House continued to purge itself of older, higher-salaried employees. A whole generation of proven editorial leadership departed in moves Malaviya described as ‘designed to meet market challenges.’ Voluntary buyouts were offered to US employees at the end of 2023, followed by layoffs. The company also substantially reduced the number of books it acquires. The elite are doing fine — Penguin Random House is signing more big-money deals than ever. It’s the regular authors who are going hungry.”
Now of course nobody enjoys downsizing, and we always deplore publishing layoffs, but be it recognized that PRH is still a very large publisher, and is still publishing a whole lot of books, and making lots of profit. Mr Whyte’s “tough times” don’t look too bad from here. I presume that “the regular authors who are going hungry” refers to authors of mid-list books. Mid-list is a category in which I bet PRH wishes it wasn’t as active as it is — everyone in sales-oriented book publishing always wants all their books to be bestsellers, and for a trade house the mid-list label signals failure to achieve this status. But for every behemoth publishing for the bestseller list there are shoals and shoals of little pilot fish eager to pick up the scraps which fall from the leviathan’s jaws. It’s easier nowadays than ever before to set up a publishing company, and lots of the people laid off by publishers (or taking a buy-out) no doubt consider doing so. Mid-list titles disparaged by that dieting whale are likely to provide these little companies with fantastic opportunities. The poor old “regular authors” Mr Whyte refers to will now be getting a royalty from Little Publisher XYZ, rather than from their hoped-for PRH. Nobody’s really going hungry — though of course we do have to remember that making very much money off writing a book is a feat achieved by only a tiny minority of writers, even when they are published by one of the big trade houses. I dare say one group whose belt gets tightened by such changes in trade publishing will be the literary agencies.†
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* Richard Charkin delivers a nice little rebuke to such numerology at Publishing Perspectives, pointing out how easily fixation on numerical targets can damage a company.
† Perhaps we should read Mr Whyte’s “hunger” as an acknowledgment of the reduction in those over-generous advances which once upon a time were such a big feature of a rather self-destructive trade publishing operation.
“Beginning at the end of this month [i.e. December 2025], PRH will release a range of ‘fan-forward’* titles featuring the world of KPop Demon Hunters. Random House will publish the program’s two inaugural titles, For the Fans! Little Golden Book and KPop Demon Hunters: The Official Poster Book, on December 30. These will be followed by additional titles based on the original plot, which blends ‘K-pop culture, supernatural adventure, and heartfelt storytelling,’ in a range of formats beginning spring 2026, including activity books, sticker books, and more.”
And who can resist “heartfelt storytelling”?
Three Penguin Random House divisions will be collaborating in this push; Random House Children’s Books, Random House Worlds, and Penguin Young Readers. Adult KPop “demons” need not despair — “For the adult fan base, Random House Worlds, PRH’s imprint for licensed titles, will publish a ‘sophisticated’ coloring book in fall 2026 and a manhwa adaptation of the film slated to release in 2027.” (According to Wikipedia, manhwa is just the Korean term for comics and print cartoons.) Sony Pictures’ movie KPop Demon Hunters, which was only released for streaming in June 2025, has become the most-watched Netflix film ever.
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* Credit where credit’s due — “fan-forward” appears to be a term originating from golf and its fan-management issues.
Many publishers’ warehouses, mostly the larger warehouses, often ship individual books direct to an Amazon customer on behalf of Amazon, using Amazon’s packaging and shipping accounts. The customer remains unaware of the fact that the book is reaching them without ever being touched by Amazon — and really the knowledge is not something anyone’d need to know anyway. This technique will be used by Amazon mainly at crunch times — they often resort to it in the Christmas rush — and presumably costs them something. But it beats waiting for a big reorder to be delivered to Amazon from the publisher’s warehouse.
The other world in which a book will reach the customer without ever being touched by Amazon employees is the world of print-on-demand. Amazon will sometimes be capable of outputting the book themselves, but often they send the order to the printing company responsible for the printing that book and get them to ship direct to the customer, using the Amazon packaging which the manufacturer stores against such occurrences.
The distribution of books is more linked up behind the scenes than we imagine.
The Border Telegraph notifies us of two local bookshops mentioned in the Booksellers Association report on the trade in Scotland. “Compiled from data representing 53 per cent of Scottish independent bookshops and in-depth interviews with 22 (alongside Waterstones), the report is an examination of how bookshops of all shapes and sizes foster connection, creativity and reading for pleasure across the country.”
Pretty hard to read this map. The dots are tiny. Green dots show independent stores, white Waterstones, and red T. G. Jones (the old W. H. Smith shops). Clicking on the map enlarges it a bit, but if you really want to get into it go to the report itself!
The report’s recommendations include calls to
Introduce £250 (about $325) culture vouchers for 16-year-olds
Fund school author visits, including for authors of Gaelic and Scots-language titles
Reform non-domestic tax rates to strengthen high streets
Provide dedicated grant funding for bookshop events, including Creative Scotland establishing a dedicated budget to enable bookshops to hold writer events
Strengthen arts and language partnerships across Scotland to improve flow of Gaelic and Scots-language titles, for example between Creative Scotland and the Gaelic Books Council
Develop regional literary tours to boost tourism
Encourage publishers to support bookshop events more
Boost collaboration between libraries and bookshops to enhance cultural enrichment and community literacy.
Gordon Stewart, owner of Wedale Bookshop is quoted as saying: “Scotland has been called a land o’ cakes, but to me it is very much a land of books and of bookshops.” But cakes and sweeties too! We hear Wedale is increasing the size of its cake anyway by taking over a Melrose bookshop, The Reading Room. Is Wedale on the road to muckle dale?
The Economist tells us that the European Union, unable to find the political will to help business by investing in productivity, has embarked on a red-tape cutting exercise. There’s lots of scope here apparently: European businesses spend about €150 billion a year on form-filling, including having to “provide up to 1,555 data points on what is happening in their global supply chains”.
One reform provoking sighs of relief in the publishing industry is the decision of the European Parliament to amend the EU Deforestation Regulations (EUDR), removing from the scope of the regulations all printed products, including books, journals, newspapers and magazines. The Bookseller brings the news from Ghent (well from Strasburg actually). The regulations are intended to force importers of palm oil, coffee, cocoa, cattle, timber and rubber to show that these products have not been produced on deforested land. As so often in the case of well-intentioned regulation, innocents got caught up in the wording. Publishers were scratching their heads trying to figure out just how they were meant to “prove” the ethical purity of the papers they use. Apparently it would have been necessary even to identify the species of trees which had been used in the making of the paper!
Of course the European Parliament is just step one: no doubt much red tape stands between a decision to cut red tape being made by one branch of government and its being adopted by all. Publishing breath remains bated.
“So far this year, about 18 million Bibles have been sold, which is about 11% up from last year. What’s interesting is last year, sales were up 20% from the year before. So we’re in — for the last four or five years, we’ve been in kind of a Bible-selling boom.” Thus Bob Smietana of Religion News Service on NPR’s 23 November Weekend Edition Sunday.
So what’s going on? Is this some sort of hangover from the Covid epidemic? Aren’t we constantly being told religious observance is in retreat? The radio program suggests that formerly irreligious young people may be returning to the fold, and now need to get themselves a Bible. The fact that there are now so many different versions of the Bible is also advanced as a possible explanation for the burst in sales. “The best-selling is the paperback version of the English Standard Version. You get it for about six bucks, and people buy it in bulk at churches. Another one that’s really popular is called ‘She Reads Truth’. It’s part of a Bible study for women. There’s a great Bible called the ‘Grace Bible For Kids’. It’s a Bible that is for kids with dyslexia. It’s really different colored and it has different kind of print. Parts of the font make it easier for kids with dyslexia to read. And that thing sold so many, they couldn’t keep it on the shelves.”
I wonder what’s really driving this sales activity. When I was involved in Bible-making Cambridge University Press published maybe four translations. The mainstay was the Authorized Version, aka the King James Version, and jointly with Oxford we had recently published the New English Bible. Now CUP offers ten versions. Back in those ancient days we used to say to ourselves that people were either KJV or NASB (New American Standard Bible) or whatever people — in other words that any one person was only a customer for any one Bible translation. If you could coax them into buying two different bindings, maybe a white one and a black one, or a big one and a little one, that would represent a big buyer. No evidence is suggested in the broadcast that this has changed much. The answer to the question how many Bibles does any household need has ever been a limiting factor in the Bible business. Bibles tend not to fall apart, so once you have one, you have one.
According to Circana BookScan “2024 marked a 20-year high for Bible sales in the U.S., and 2025 is on track to surpass these levels”. I can find no satisfactory explanation of this — beyond the fact that there seems to be money around. People are buying all sorts of stuff, including of course non-religious books (despite the doom-sayers warnings that nobody reads anymore), so why not Bibles too? I suppose the arrival of new translations/versions must be driving some curiosity sales.
Making Book 