Yesterday I mentioned a particularly badly designed book I’d seen over Christmas. I shan’t name it as we all produce things we’re not proud of, but it’s a book which seems to have sold very well and my father-in-law received two copies for Christmas.

The production is quite decent but the design leaves a lot to be desired. For a start, the page is almost square. This can work sometimes but is usually a mistake. Also, the spine and fore edge margins are the same. As even the most inexperienced designer knows, this makes the back margin look too wide, because you see the back margins of facing pages as one block of space. In this case, the fore edge margins are really rather mean. It is set, I think, in 10/14 pt Garamond Premier Pro (why, oh why doesn’t the designer take advantage of the oldstyle numerals?). The generous leading suggests that the designer (if we may use the term loosely) wasn’t desperate to cram the text into as small a space as possible, and yet the line is 33 picas wide. The result is a line of about 90 characters (about 15 words). It has been accepted for centuries that readability suffers when lines exceed about 60 characters and, with the waning attention spans and literacy of the texting generation, this should probably be adjusted downwards. One can forgive many things in book design, but poor readability is not one of them.

Has the ‘designer’ never picked up a book? I ask this not so much because of the 90-character lines or the mean fore edge margins, but because the imprint information - ISBN, copyright, printer etc. - is placed on a separate recto after the title page. Of course, the publisher can have this information wherever he or she wishes, but surely it would have been better in the normal position on the title verso? Apart from anything else, it would have allowed the dedication to appear on a recto rather than being relegated to the verso of the imprint page.