![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Sep. 22nd, 2005 12:42 amI'm a messy, lazy, easygoing person. My few OCD tendencies have to do with books.
For size I like small paperbacks best. This is probably from habit, that was how books were when I was growing up and I haven't shaken it in this Trade Paper age. You never worry about hurting the little ones, either. The Trade ones can be such haughty art objects. Still, maybe there's a reason I have eye troubles.
40 lines to a page. Library of America understands this. Penguin often does. Anchor did.
Anchor: I love maybe above all the '50s-early '60s Anchor paperbacks, typeset and often with simple cover art by Edward Gorey, with marvellously square corners. Most were pretty long, lots of anthologies and treatises and tomes, looked like little sections of 2" by 4". There was a Dolphin companion series, I think supposedly for younger readers though the stuff seems advanced enough today (Longfellow's Dante, Milton, Walter Scott, the Brontes etc.). The art for these was odd, pictures made with lots of pale unbordered watercolor-like colors, inside a sort of mauve vault.
I like old Signets too, they're less attractive but the glue's usually lasted better. Also they're quite cheap at the various Half Price Books locations, since the old ones were often fifty, sixty cents; therefore I can afford to collect them.
I don't like the new scratchy black Penguin Classics. The NYRB series is beautiful if unaffordable. The previous black Penguins and the various Oxford World's Classics styles had a lovely way of blowing up some stray detail or other from old paintings, using that as the cover. The Vintage International series is very pleasing. I don't like this new one, Hesperus, with the foldover covers (particularly silly for such short books--I guess they're trying to make them look thicker?) though I like many of the entries. Everyman Library hardbacks are nice; Modern Library, not so much.
I hate when hardback page edges are all jaggedy, as if cut as you went through like in the old days. If there's a money or tree-saving reason for this I guess it's excusable, but it seems an awful lot like a trend. It's very easy to accidentally skip a page in one of those. Also surely they give more papercuts on average. Anyway, a messy look.
John Ashbery and Anne Carson have the most strikingly designed books, I think.
For size I like small paperbacks best. This is probably from habit, that was how books were when I was growing up and I haven't shaken it in this Trade Paper age. You never worry about hurting the little ones, either. The Trade ones can be such haughty art objects. Still, maybe there's a reason I have eye troubles.
40 lines to a page. Library of America understands this. Penguin often does. Anchor did.
Anchor: I love maybe above all the '50s-early '60s Anchor paperbacks, typeset and often with simple cover art by Edward Gorey, with marvellously square corners. Most were pretty long, lots of anthologies and treatises and tomes, looked like little sections of 2" by 4". There was a Dolphin companion series, I think supposedly for younger readers though the stuff seems advanced enough today (Longfellow's Dante, Milton, Walter Scott, the Brontes etc.). The art for these was odd, pictures made with lots of pale unbordered watercolor-like colors, inside a sort of mauve vault.
I like old Signets too, they're less attractive but the glue's usually lasted better. Also they're quite cheap at the various Half Price Books locations, since the old ones were often fifty, sixty cents; therefore I can afford to collect them.
I don't like the new scratchy black Penguin Classics. The NYRB series is beautiful if unaffordable. The previous black Penguins and the various Oxford World's Classics styles had a lovely way of blowing up some stray detail or other from old paintings, using that as the cover. The Vintage International series is very pleasing. I don't like this new one, Hesperus, with the foldover covers (particularly silly for such short books--I guess they're trying to make them look thicker?) though I like many of the entries. Everyman Library hardbacks are nice; Modern Library, not so much.
I hate when hardback page edges are all jaggedy, as if cut as you went through like in the old days. If there's a money or tree-saving reason for this I guess it's excusable, but it seems an awful lot like a trend. It's very easy to accidentally skip a page in one of those. Also surely they give more papercuts on average. Anyway, a messy look.
John Ashbery and Anne Carson have the most strikingly designed books, I think.
