Calderonia

Guest post: Sam2 on… ‘How to Typeset a Book’ (Part 1)

Posted on July 16, 2018 by Jim D G Miles

She shuffled forward.

“I would…”

“Speak up!”

“I would like you to…”

“Yeeeeeesssss?”

“I would like you to typeset this.”

A messy wad of pages; some in different colours, some upside down, some not in any recognisable language.

“You would like me to TYPESET this would you?”

“Yes”

“You have come to the right place.”

—————

I just typeset a book.

It is called George Calderon: Edwardian Genius.

You might have heard of it.

It will be published on 7 September.

Now I will teach you how to typeset a book.

Let’s go.

—————

First of all, what IS typesetting?

The process of self-publishing a book goes something like this:

1. write manuscript
2. make it into a PDF
3. design cover (also PDF)
4. printers print from the PDFs
5. you receive a truck full of copies of your book*

*Note: you now have approximately one fewer room in your house.

Step 2 is what we call “typesetting”, and it is what I did for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. At its most basic, digital typesetting involves resizing pages to the same format as the final book and then setting the font and paragraphs to look “right” under these new page dimensions. (Some self-publishers seem even to leave out that second part. Pro-tip: don’t, it’s really important.)

When I began, I had only a Word document from Sam1 of the complete text of the book. I began experimenting, shaping this Word document into what would eventually be sent to the printers Clays, and I made a short text file of “steps” that I was performing. I felt that if at any point I had to start again from scratch that would be valuable to reconstruct my work.

I quickly moved on from the steps described in this text file, but here is what it looked like at the last point it was updated:

As you will no doubt realise, some of these instructions are esoteric to how we wanted things to look in George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, and some are necessary actions that you will need to take when typesetting ANY book.

Shortly after writing this text file I decided that step 4 was far too crucial to the appearance of the book (and certainly a key dictator of the eventual number of pages)…far too crucial to be awkwardly done somewhere in the middle of the process.

So I recommend as the very first step in typesetting from a text document…

STEP 1: SET UP THE PAGE SIZE

I used LibreOffice Writer for most of the typesetting, so this is what I’ll be taking my example screenshots from.

Before I continue, I need to stress that it is absolutely imperative that every choice you make is associated with a “style” profile.

If you’re used to writing small documents like 12-page essays for school then the concept of “styles” will seem pointless and alien. In a short document you can just highlight what you like, select how you want it to look, and the computer pretty much “remembers” how you’ve asked for it. Then you print it anyway and you’re done. Sometimes you open the document again and it doesn’t remember how you formatted something and you mutter “stupid computer, glitching out, bunch o’ bugs” but it’s not really because of bugs in the code that the document didn’t “remember” your formatting…it’s because you didn’t use styles.

The Calderon book is about 550 pages so I simply CANNOT risk any formatting being lost, and also I need clean ways to standardise and recycle stock pieces of formatting. So it was fundamental that I be rigorous in using styles.

“OK Kamaji, I get it. I need styles. But what ARE styles?”

Styles are little profiles that you set up using the column on the right in the following screenshot.

They are information cards where you define all sorts of formatting details; then, when you need a part of your document to have those properties, you just highlight that part and apply that style.

Once you get used to using them it becomes quite peculiar to think that for smaller documents the software can “remember” at all how you wanted something to look. Applying formatting using a “style” becomes so intuitive that the notion of formatting anything without one seems as ludicrous as baking a cake without a tin.

I won’t go into too much detail about exactly what to click in LibreOffice Writer to set up styles but you can find lots of guides online about how to use styles in whatever word processing package you are using. Indeed, they work EXACTLY the same in Microsoft Word.

Styles are typically divided into Paragraph, Character, Frame, Page, and List styles. Since we’re starting by setting up the page, we’re going to use a Page style. Mine for the Calderon book looks like this:

The “paper format” is the size of your book. For printing with Clays, their “Royal” size is 153mm x 234mm, so that’s what goes in the width and height fields. Interestingly, it appears “Royal” is different for different printers and it is very important to get the exact numbers here so check with your printers exactly what the dimensions are!

The margins are how much white space there is around the content. We went quite low with these, because it was looking like the book was going to be very long already and we were keen to do anything subtle that we could to keep the page count down.

Your printer will advise you on minimum/recommended margin size but I also strongly urge looking at printed books and measuring their margins to get an idea for what is industry-typical.

If you have images that go all the way to the edge of the page you need to negate your margins on those pages and even run the images outside of the paper size (to create what is called a “bleed”) but I’m not going to talk about that here since we didn’t use it for this book.

The “inner” margin needs to be larger to compensate for the obscuring nature of the middle crease where the book spreads open, and – perhaps more importantly – the fact that some of that part of the page is “eaten” by the binding. In desktop publishing this extra is called the “gutter”.

From studying the materials from Clays, as well as various online resources, I was sure that adding 7mm for the gutter was correct. However, when the book arrived I felt that this was too large and I could have afforded to go closer to the centre of the page. By contrast, the outer margin felt a little near to the edge, so if I could do it all again I would probably reduce the inner margin to 19mm and extend the outer to 16mm. It is worth pointing out too, though, that the apparent asymmetry of horizontal margins in the finished book is not entirely my fault as, upon measuring, it transpires that Clays produced the book with a lessened outer margin than we specified. [Probably because they have a ‘trim tolerance’ of 3mm, which they did not spell out in advance – Ed.]

The “mirrored” page layout is what allows you to set inner and outer margins rather than left and right, so make sure you use it!

At this point I would say experiment experiment experiment. When you typeset a book there is a lot of trying it this way and then that way until you settle on how you like it (which may even be a compromise with increased page count etc.) and the sooner you get used to fiddling with the values, the sooner you will feel familiarity with the process and the confidence to tweak freely.

STEP 1B: SET UP THE HEADERS

In this book we were keen to have “running heads” (the book and chapter titles at the top of alternate pages). To do this you use the “Header” tab.

Even if you don’t want running heads, you likely need to incorporate a header or footer for page numbers so you’ll still be needing these parts of the style menu.

To add page numbers to the header or footer you use “insert -> field -> page number”. You can include a running head here too, and adjust your tabs (at the top of the window) to make sure that everything is in the right place (e.g. page number on outer edge, running head centred). There are plenty of resources online to help you understand how to do such things, for example this article here.

When you insert a page number field, and type text into your header, it typically replicates that for all pages under that style. For this reason I created multiple identical (but differently named) styles so that I could assign a different one to each chapter and thus have a different running head for each chapter. In order to segregate these style regions I used manual page breaks. I am not 100% certain that this is the BEST way to achieve these effects for running heads but it worked perfectly for me.

Remember that you can control page numbers by specifying what page to start on when you do a manual page break. This is particularly useful if you are not doing everything in one file and need a way to “start” on page 46, for example. This came in handy for the Calderon book partly because the prelims (introduction, contents, etc.) were done in a separate document that was then stitched together with the main text at the PDF stage (more about that in the next entry).

Anyyyyyway…at this point you have the book formatted at least with the right paper size and page numbers so it could technically be exported as a PDF and sent to the printers and printed as is…but don’t do that…do this first:

STEP 2: SET UP PARAGRAPH STYLES AND APPLY TYPEFACES/SIZES

In the original document, Sam1 had specified certain properties of spacing for the standard chapter text, for the quotation text, for titles, and for epigraphs, etc.

As soon as you reformat the pages to be “book” sized a lot of that gets messed up. In particular, Sam1 had been meticulous in using a combination of carriage returns, tabs, and spaces to make his text (especially quotations) look “right” as he wrote it. However, that was under the word-processor’s assumption of an A4 page and now we were dealing in Royal. I swiftly got to work defining styles appropriate to the new page size.

Having made styles for every aspect of the main text, I went through all 500ish pages applying these where relevant. Of course, most of that was a stock “Chapter Paragraph” style for the main text, but there was a lot of adding “Quotation Paragraph” to quotations, and also some titling and epigraph style application.

Remember, at this level it’s not that your styles have to be complicated multi-part profiles, but simply that you’re using them at all to make sure your formatting sticks. In the image above, really the only thing we’re defining is a fixed line spacing (for our typeface and font size that 5.5mm is roughly equivalent to 120% or 1.2). You may also have noticed that I have a range of “Chapter Paragraph” styles with different numbers after them. I’ll explain what that’s all about in the next entry (and it’s actually also why I use fixed line spacing instead of proportional).

In unison with applying paragraph styles I also applied character styles in exactly the same way.

It is highly likely I didn’t strictly need to do separate character styles for these font properties and could have used a part of the menu in my paragraph styles. I realised this somewhat deep into the typesetting process though and decided to stick to this technique as it felt “safe” somehow. I think that what I was concerned about was that somehow I might lose the “inherited” formatting from Sam1’s typescript, such as italicised book titles or underlining. My fears may well have been founded though, as there WAS one place where italics were dropped and I DO think it had something to do with paragraph styles imposing an umbrella character style (this is an error that Sam1 mentioned in his previous entry).

Important to do too in this stage is to adjust tab positions as the defaults will likely still be sticking around from when the document was A4 sized, and that means the tabs (indents) could be far deeper than they should be. You do that by moving the crosshairs at the top of the document in the bar that looks like a ruler, or alternatively directly through your style’s properties menu. But make sure that either way you resave the style afterwards!

By this stage the document should be looking pretty much like a proper book and no longer like A-level coursework. If it all appears correct for printing then you can go to:

STEP 3: EXPORT AS A PDF

This was straightforward in LibreOffice Writer, you just click this:

Which gives you this…

And then you click Export and choose a sensible folder on your computer to put it in.

You get a .pdf file of your book wherever you chose, you can check it over and – assuming all looks good – you’re safe to send it to the printers!

However…as you might have guessed, in the case of the Calderon book there were many, many quirks and complications that vastly overshot the boundaries of this bare-bones typesetting guide.

For now, I hope you have enjoyed seeing a little behind the curtain on how to get a text document into a publisher-ready PDF, but in the next entry I will tackle the really interesting stuff: those challenges unique to typesetting George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, and how we overcame them.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, bleeds, Character style, Chihiro, Clays Ltd, comments, fonts, formatting, Frame style, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Ghibli, guest post, headers, indie publiishing, James Miles, Kamaji, layout, LibreOffice Writer, List style, margins, page numbers, Page style, paper formats, Paragraph style, PDF files, printers, publishers, running heads, Sam&Sam, Sam1, Sam2, self-publishing, Sen, Spirited Away, Studio Ghibli, trims, typefaces, typesetting, typesetting a book, typesetting styles | 5 Comments

Does computer typesetting produce a ‘chaotic system’?

Posted on July 12, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Morpho butterfly in a rainforest…
(taken by Wikipedia user Asturnut)

Like me, I expect you have wondered why a modern commercially published book that is to all appearances superbly produced can neverthless have typographical garbage and weird other phenomena in it, or why odd entries in its Index are consistently a page out.

One of the forms of garbage that has always intrigued me most is foreign fonts — letters with accents or diacritics etc — that MUST have been correct in the final proof seen by the author, but have neverthless come out in the printing as percentage signs or something. How could this and other weirdnesses be the fault of the author, I reasoned to myself; they must have crept in at the printing stage. Yet this does not make much sense either, since what the printer receives from the typesetter is a PDF file corrected by the author and typesetter, and how could the printer’s software alter a PDF file? (In fairness, two computer-literate people have suggested to me that it can.)

Well, as a result of Sam1 and Sam2’s experience of seeing George Calderon: Edwardian Genius through the press, I think I can say that we have got to the bottom of it. The phenomenon is the fault neither of the author nor the printer. It is the fault of the complexity of modern computer typesetting software itself.

Take the following example. From the first typescript input by the author in Libre Office in about 2013 through three sets of proofs up to and including the fourth, which was in PDF, two book titles in chapter 8 of my book have always been italicised. But, for goodness’ sake, in the published book they are in roman! How? Why? A quick check with the hard copy proof 4 shows that they were still in italics then, and that was the form in which the text was submitted to the printers…

Except that, unbeknown to us, it wasn’t. When we received the final, fifth, proof from the printers, we were checking for typos, changes in exotic fonts, and in particular top and bottom justification of the spreads of pages (this was because we had noticed in another book printed by Clays, Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life, that the bottoms of the printed text on right and left pages were rarely level). Two days was not enough to proofread the whole thing word by word, and we certainly did not think that, for example, italics that had been there for five years could have been dropped between proof 4 and proof 5. But they had been dropped in that interval.

Months before, we had noticed whilst we were editing the typeset version that strange effects could appear from nowhere, for example sudden single-line spacing, or a break in right justification preceding an image (see, unfortunately, the last line on page 334). These phenomena seemed random and incomprehensible, but at least they stood out on the page. They were easy to spot. It did not occur to me, at least, that other, less conspicuous phenomena were popping up at random elsewhere.

At this point, it is worth realising that ‘random and incomprehensible’ phenomena have always occurred in printing. Here, for example, is George complaining to the publisher Grant Richards in 1912 that the word ‘name’ at one point in his Two Plays by Anton Tchekhof has been printed as ‘game’, despite the fact that it was accurately printed as ‘name’ in the final proof sent to Richards:

On referring to my proofs I find that it was correctly printed in everything that passed me, and only when it had gone forth with the final blessing, ‘bon à tirer’, did some freakish Puckish mischievous intelligence play this absurd prank with my text, and make Tchekhof talk nonsense.

For heaven’s sake tell me by what rites this impish spirit is to be propitiated in future, or by what prophylactic charms disarmed, tell me where the creature resides, that I may avoid his habitation. One hardly feels safe, if such things can occur, perhaps even under your very nose. I dare not read the rest of the book lest I find more instances of such sacriligious sabotage.

Of course, there was a reason for the wrong character in George’s case, whether it was an anarchic compositor getting his fix or the force of gravity causing the right character to drop out, but still the problem was genuinely random. I fail to see, however, that a change that one hasn’t noticed in a computer typeset text can be random. It seems to me that the text is a deterministic digital system of such complexity that it meets the chaos theory requirement of being ‘highly sensitive to initial conditions’. You flutter your space bar on one page and it produces a cyclone of reformatting on another one without you knowing.

In fact, on page 237 of proof 4 we had to move up the inset quotation with which it starts, because another glitch earlier on had dropped the top of the text too far beneath the running head (PERFORMING FOR THE TLS)… Although there is nothing that I would describe as a logical connection between doing this and losing the italics from book titles in the next paragraph, Sam2 assures me that there is a computer reason, a causal link in a chain reaction. The italics were automatically lost when we moved the inset quotation up, but we didn’t notice that. One can easily see, then, how the bottom line of an indexed page could jump to the next page unobserved.

…and glitches on the printed page

But it is my very great pleasure to hand over now to Sam2 to discuss features of our experience of typesetting the book, in two guest posts. Being a typesetter, computer programmer and mathematician, he knows what he is talking about in this subject-area!

Posted in Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, butterfly effect, chaology, chaos theory, comments, determinism, garbage, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, glitches, Grant Richards, italics, John Aubrey: My Own Life, morpho butterflies, PDF files, printers, proofs, publishers, random events, roman, Ruth Scurr, Sam&Sam, Sam2, Two Plays by Tchekhof, typesetting | Leave a comment

The tome weighs in

Posted on July 5, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Here is what I believe to be the first side view of the newly printed biography:

Weighing in at 2 lbs 2 oz (544 pages)

This is the heaviest book in every sense that I shall ever write…

Pre-publication orders continue to flow in from loyal followers of this blog, for which RENEWED PROFOUND THANKS!

Just a reminder: copies at nearly 10% discount can be bought before 7 September by contacting me direct through mail@patrickmiles.co.uk

If you wish to buy more than one copy, for example as future Christmas presents, naturally you can until 6 September inclusive at the discounted price of £30 including postage.

Another thing I should have mentioned is that I am very happy to sign these copies or write in them whatever you would like for you or their recipients.

We shall finish sending out all advance copies by 13 July, then we shall concentrate on the ‘launch’ — if the publishers can afford one!

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, Christmas presents, comments, discounts, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, heaviness, launch, publication, publishers, Sam&Sam, scales, weight | 2 Comments

Interlude on a familiar theme

Posted on June 28, 2018 by Patrick Miles

‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’, © Derek Clarke

Clays have pleasantly surprised me by discovering that they have over-printed by not 20 copies, which is the number under/over contractually allowed, but 59 — which they offer me at an extraordinarily good price including free delivery. I have snapped them up. This will enable us to send out more review copies than we had planned. The gnomes of Sam&Sam’s distribution department will therefore work overtime to get these off, with covering letters, before 7 July, the two-month mark before publication…

Meanwhile, Richard Morrison has delivered a Big Bertha salvo about WW1 commemoration in The Times of 22 June 2018 (2 Arts, p. 6) which I feel I simply cannot ignore. It is entitled ‘This national war tribute has descended into overpriced poppycock’. Given that I am supposed to be taking part in presentations about the commemoration around Armistice Day this year, I would be intensely interested to hear what followers of Calderonia think of Morrison’s claims. Unfortunately, the piece is currently available online only behind a pay wall, so I shall have to summarise it.

‘Now that we are approaching the end of 14-18 NOW, the government’s £50 million centenary commemoration of that catastrophic event’, Morrison begins, ‘the same question that was asked in 1918 must be asked again, albeit in a less tragic context. What was the point of it all?’

I won’t mince words. So far, 14-18 NOW has been a colossal waste of money, a bandwagon to which have been hitched some inconsequential arts projects with, at best, a tangential connection to the First World War. And apart from ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’, the installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies that attracted millions of people (and wasn’t originally part of 14-18 NOW anyway), it has had minimal impact on the public.

I was instantly reminded of a similar piece by Morrison in The Times of 22 January 2016 in which he fulminated about the fact that the creators of Blood Swept Lands, Paul Cummins and Tom Piper, were ‘even refused an Arts Council grant and [Cummins] had to sell his house in Derby to develop the project’. As I shall elaborate in a moment, the fact that this powerful and inspired installation had no official funding does not surprise me one jot. But ought not Morrison at least to recognise the creative opportunism of the Arts Council in taking it up and bringing it to a far bigger audience? Was this not a good thing? Similarly, I personally found it hilarious that the 14-18 NOW website co-opted the unveiling of Millicent Fawcett’s superb statue in Parliament Square as though they, 14-18 NOW, had been somehow involved in campaigning for and funding it, but even so I applaud their opportunism in recognising the significance of the moment. Surely one should be grateful to them for contextualising women’s suffrage in the War?

According to Morrison there are two reasons for the ‘minimal impact’ that 14-18 NOW has supposedly had on people:

First, with no veterans left, the personal connection to the First World War has been lost. Of course there’s nobody alive who can remember women getting the vote either, but that centenary has resonated much more widely because the issues that galvanised the suffragettes are still hot topics.

Even if First World War veterans were still around, though, I doubt whether 14-18 NOW would have made much impression. Not with our politicians so fixated on Brexit. The mood is all wrong. How can we lament the conflict that tore apart Europe a century ago when we are obsessed with how to tear apart Europe now? [There follow ten lines of similar impassioned questions comparing aspects of WW1 with Brexit.]

It seems to me that this overlooks two fundamental things. First, ‘personal connection’ does not depend on people still being alive who lived through a catastrophic event. Personal connection is experienced by those left behind who emotionally connect with the dead and grieve for them. Feeling and thinking like this is what ordinary people do. You only have to have followed Twitter or read local newspapers in the last four years to know that it’s what millions of families in Britain have been doing. Almost every week I hear about projects in villages up and down the country that ‘personally connect’ with those who did not come back to their villages or town streets. The epitome of such personal connection is Andrew Tatham’s history and art project A Group Photograph: Before, Now & In-between, which was also awarded no Arts Council funding and has received precious little official recognition, e.g. from 14-18 NOW, either.

Second, the shenanigans of Brexit negotiations cannot, in my opinion, influence people’s emotions and thinking about the commemoration, rather the reverse: the electorate’s mood about the First World War may have influenced Brexit. Why people grieve and shed tears for soldiers they never knew is that they feel these soldiers’ lives were nihilistically wasted in a war that should not have happened and that we should not have had to fight. They feel that men and women of their families had to go and die because we had to help save Europe from itself. We had to fight and win the war because of our tragic geopolitical position, namely that we are with Europe but not of it. Whether we realise it or not, commemorating the national holocaust of 1914-18 has reminded us every day of our tenuous historical relation to Europe. It has held constantly before us our apartness and the dangers of involvement. The issues of the First World War are therefore white-hot topics. Subliminally, could that have made the difference of 4%?

The remaining three-fifths of Morrison’s article are devoted to taking apart the latest 14-18 NOW event Fly by Night, as well as Rachel Whiteread’s ‘inside-out Nissen hut’ in Dalby Forest, the forthcoming Shrouds of the Somme installation (‘just a remake of Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, only with ghoulishness replacing tragic beauty’), and Danny Boyle’s event advertised for 11 November ‘inviting communities across the UK to come together in marking 100 years since the Armistice’. Morrison has been

surprised by how spurious many arts projects promoted by 14-18 NOW are. It’s possible that, in the 150-odd days remaining until November 11 we will be struck speechless by some extraordinary statement, but I’m not hopeful.

This too is wrong-headed. Like it or not, 14-18 NOW is a species of official art. Official art is enacted to recognise, and not much more, what a nation is feeling or in the opinion of the establishment should feel. It is very rarely great art, can be good art, but is usually kitsch and tat. Are Nelson’s Column, the Gold State Coach, or William Orpen’s vast canvas The Treaty of Versailles, 1919, great art? Although we know that Edwin Lutyens’ aesthetic decisions for the design of the Cenotaph were extremely fine, you could still not call the Cenotaph great art. It is disingenuous of Morrison, therefore, to expect ‘extraordinary artistic statements’ from those artists commissioned by 14-18 NOW.

Partly that is because they are doing it for money. It may sound laughably romantic, but I do not think extraordinary artistic statements can be conjured up for money; rather, they are produced by individuals who viscerally HAVE to create them, whether they are paid for it or not. But if they would not create official art for normal inspirational reasons, they have to be more or less, er…well…bribed to do it! That’s one reason why official art has never come cheap. Given the scale of some of 14-18 NOW’s events, the length of time it covers, and the number of administrators it has to employ, I actually don’t think £50 million is off the scale for official art of this national importance.

Moreover, it is taxpayers’ money spent on taxpayers. As far as I know, there have not been howls of protest at what the taxpayer is getting for £50 million. True, there have not been tidal waves of approval and gratitude, either. But that is exactly how it is with official art: if it is fine, if it more or less works for people, then it is accepted and no-one says anything. The original Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at the Tower of London had five million visitors in four months and even a full-page image and commentary in the German newspaper Die Zeit. I am reliably informed that it was 14-18 NOW’s idea to turn off one’s house lights on the evening of 4 August 2014 and place a lighted candle in one’s window. This was observed by millions, too. It utterly caught the national mood: despair clinging to hope. Similarly, Dr Kenneth Bogle, writing in The Times on 25 June, was affected ‘among many evocative [14-18 NOW] artworks’ by Jeremy Deller’s We Are Here:

On July 1, 2016, the centenary of the first day of the Somme offensive, volunteers dressed as First World War soldiers appeared in public spaces across the UK, such as high streets and railway stations. Each carried a card with the name of the soldier they represented, his age and when he died.

Commuters and passers-by were mesmerised by these ghost soldiers. This imaginative project, which lasted only a day, was a reminder that the Great War casualties were living, breathing human beings, often pitifully young. Their war did not take place in black and white.

Clips of this ‘modern memorial’ are available online and never fail to move me to tears.

There we have it. Two things strike me: the actors were volunteers and the writer’s personal connection with the 14-18 NOW event moved him to tears. From the general lack of grumbling and from the conversations I have had about the subject, I think people feel that the 14-18 NOW commemoration is fitting and proper. In a strange way, I think families are touched that their government has put its money where the people’s heart is. For official art, 14-18 NOW’s success rate has been well above average. It has enabled us to share, in Wilfred Owen’s words, ‘The eternal reciprocity of tears’.

Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged 14-18 NOW, Arts Council, biographies, biography, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, Brexit, British Expeditionary Force, commemoration, comments, Dalby Forest, Danny Boyle, Die Zeit, Europe, Fly By Night, George Calderon, Kenneth Bogle, Millicent Fawcett, official art, Paul Cummins, personal connection, Rachel Whiteread, Richard Morrison, Shrouds of the Somme, taxpayers, The Cenotaph, the government, The Great War, The Times, Tom Piper, Wilfred Owen, William Orpen, World War I | 5 Comments

Thank you!

Posted on June 20, 2018 by Patrick Miles

We are two-thirds of our way through sending out advance, review and complimentary copies all over the world, and have received many plaudits for the appearance and even ‘beauty’ of the book, as well as overwhelming approval of the in-text images. Thank you all no end, and also for the numerous literary comments early readers have made! Obviously, I will marshal both positive and critical responses in a future post.

Meanwhile, I am also fantastically grateful to those followers who within a fortnight have bought 31 copies of the book at the pre-publication price of £30 including postage. This suggests we will meet our target for such sales before the official publication date of 7 September. Until 6 September you will still be able to buy copies at the reduced price from me direct, but after that sales will be managed through http://samandsam.co.uk/.

Back to packing…

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, comments, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Kittie Calderon, marketing, publishers, sales, Sam&Sam | Leave a comment

The Announcement

Posted on June 7, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Click on image to enlarge

We have now received the book in Cambridge — and we think Clays Ltd have done a superb job! Any flaws you notice will be of the author’s making; Clays have printed to the last foreign font and idiosyncrasy the typeset text that Sam&Sam submitted to them.

I cannot praise highly enough the efficiency of Georgina Aldridge, Sales Executive in Clays London office, and Jodi Foulgar, Account Controller at the works in Bungay, who with their respective teams have taken us through the whole complex process since 19 October last year. They always responded in real time and with real courtesy. They are two of the most professional people I have ever worked with. Clays are famous for their attention to detail and for me this was exemplified by Jodi personally ringing me from the factory floor to check exactly where I wanted the 150th anniversary ‘bellyband’ positioned round the book. The designer and I had thought one thing, but her team’s judgement was better. I understand now why Clays are the U.K.’s No. 1 monochrome printer.

We are well into packing and despatching the advance copies, review copies and preordered copies. As I said in my previous post, this process will be complete within six weeks. The official publication date is still 7 September. That is when the first reviews should appear and the web-page will be available for buying copies online.

I feel I should stress that this is a limited edition. If demand exceeded supply, we would reprint with Clays as a hardback. However, I would first need persuading that the demand was sustainable. We have always said that when the limited first edition sold out we would go into Amazon paperback and Kindle. The whole purpose of a limited edition, of course, is to give a book a future rarity value. Please consider investing in that now! Pre-publication copies can be bought by contacting me direct through my website http://patrickmileswriter.co.uk/. They cost £30 postage free, but from 7 September will cost £32.95 including postage. An invoice with directions how to pay will be sent with the book.

Naturally, a lot of people will attempt to buy the book through Amazon (although they should be able to find Calderonia and the Sam&Sam checkout easily enough on the Web). Some copies will appear on Amazon and ABE in due course, but Amazon’s commission precluded our selling the limited edition through them.

Nielsen offer an ‘Enhanced BookData Service’ that helps position the ‘Metadata’ about your book deeply worldwide. It is pricey, but I shall probably have to go for it. I am also enormously grateful to John Dewey, Harvey Pitcher and other ‘indie’ publishers for their advice about sales to Slavonic libraries, academic institutions, and individuals.

The key date, of course, is 2 December 2018, George Calderon’s 150th birthday. I am hoping to give talks and sign copies around then at bookshops in Cambridge, Oxford and St Andrews. Before that, at Armistice time, Andrew Tatham and I plan joint presentations on the theme THE WAR IS OVER: HOW DID WE COMMEMORATE IT AND WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT? at which we shall offer our respective books. Watch out for details of these events later in the year on this blog.

Sam2 had hoped to feature above the actual cover of the book, with its gold ‘foiling’ of George’s name, but the gold proved too dazzling for a computer. At a very late stage, incidentally, I had to abandon the idea of gold-foiling the thin frame of the photograph on the back (Autumn tea at Emmetts, 1912), as the ‘movement tolerance’ for it was 1 mm, which might have meant it came out skewed. The real purpose of our image today is to display the front jacket flap ‘blurb’. It may surprise some readers that Martin Shaw described George first as a mathematician, but there is an explanation…in my book!

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged ABE, Amazon, Andrew Tatham, biographies, biography, Cambridge, Clays Ltd, comments, Dardanelles, Gallipoli, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Georgina Aldridge, Harvey Pitcher, Jodi Foulgar, John Dewey, Kindle, Kittie Calderon, limited edition, Martin Shaw, Nielsen Corporation, Oxford, publishers, Sam&Sam, St Andrews, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, World War I, Ypres | 2 Comments

pre-Announcement announcement

Posted on June 4, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Sam&Sam have embraced Ian Strathcarron’s kind advice to allow three months for marketing my book. The official date of publication, therefore, is 7 September. Shortly before that, a separate web-page and checkout will be available for buying the book online. Unless it arrives from the printer looking less good than we expect, it will cost £30 plus second class postage, which should total £32.95.

However, if you are one of the lucky readers who has been following this blog and therefore knows all about the book already, I can offer it to you for £30 including postage if you would like to contact me through my website http://patrickmileswriter.co.uk/ before 7 September. Payment will preferably be by cheque.

So, hopefully, by the end of this week we shall be able to start sending out review and advance copies, as well as those that have been preordered at the reduced price. Please be patient, as we have a long list to work through! The basic principle of despatching will be alphabetical, and you will certainly receive your copy within six weeks.

I will say more about marketing, sales, advertising, signings, talks, Amazon etc in an Announcement when we have received and checked all the books.

Today is the 103rd anniversary of George Calderon’s death at Gallipoli. I shall mark the occasion at 12.05 p.m., but a number of things have conspired to return me to thinking about the War and its victims generally. I am sure I am not alone in brooding on it as the centenary draws to a close. I will post again about the commemoration before long.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged advance copies, advertising, biographies, biography, Clays Ltd, comments, George Calderon, Ian Strathcarron, Kittie Calderon, Lord Strathcarron, marketing, printers, publishers, reviews, Sam&Sam | Leave a comment

The Editor-in-Chief

Posted on June 1, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Click the image to find this book on Amazon.

It is a truth universally forgotten until too late, that as soon as we call a kettle black we start turning into a pot. I know too much about Constance Garnett, her husband Edward and his father Richard. There are things about them that I don’t like, as Joseph Conrad and George Calderon didn’t. I am sure therefore that, like the good bishop whom I took to task in my penultimate post, I could not write an objective review of this recent biography of Edward Garnett — what I produced wouldn’t be cricket.

However, I have always said that with a couple of exceptions I am not reviewing books on this blog, but discussing them as examples of biography and focussing on the issues they raise. With that hat on, then, perhaps I can avoid becoming a pot.

On the evidence of Helen Smith’s densely researched biography, Edward Garnett was the greatest publisher’s reader of all time. He practically discovered Galsworthy, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Edward Thomas, H.E. Bates and many others. He tirelessly criticised them, encouraged them, found work for them, subsidised them, saved them from depression and helped solve their personal problems. The extent of his altruism in this respect is a complete revelation to me, as is the extraordinary accuracy of his critical judgement. T.E. Lawrence was not exaggerating when he wrote that ‘School of Garnett’ might be ‘the classification of English literature across a quarter of a century’.

But the phenomenon of Edward Garnett raises interesting issues. Dickens, say, or Chekhov, had friends who read their manuscripts and commented on them, but as far as I know these writers were not exposed to a ‘publisher’s reader’, let alone an ‘editor’ who rewrote their prose for them. When Garnett started as a reader for T. Fisher Unwin in 1887 the lowly post already existed in other publishing houses, but as he moved through Unwin, Heinemann and Duckworth to Cape he transformed it into the all-powerful one of today’s Publisher’s Editor (or even Publisher tout court). The reason for this, as Smith meticulously demonstrates, is that most of Garnett’s writers had poor literary taste and hardly any powers of self-criticism. He had to ‘educate’ them. What developed was a symbiotic relationship, often tempestuous, in which Garnett wielded enormous power. In that sense, it seems, today every publisher’s editor is an Edward Garnett. I don’t think this hegemony is beneficial to either writers or publishers.

Helen Smith has very successfully solved the biographer’s basic problem, which is (in Ruth Scurr’s words) to find a narrative form that fits the life in question. Her first chapter tells the story of the Garnett family from 1789 with terrific pace and by page twenty Edward is married to Constance and working at Unwin. The book then gradually settles into a chapter each on Edward’s distinguished literary protegés, whilst never losing continuity or ignoring his wider relationships. If you are irresistibly attracted to the lives of writers, you will love this book. If you are seriously engaged with English literature between the 1890s and 1930s, you must read it.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, Charles Dickens, Constance Garnett, cricket, D.H. Lawrence, Duckworth, editors, Edward Garnett, Edward Thomas, H.E. Bates, Helen Smith, John Galsworthy, Jonathan Cape, Joseph Conrad, kettles, pots, publishers readers, Richard Garnett, T. Fisher Unwin, T.E. Lawrence, William Heinemann | Leave a comment

So a second edition, then…

Posted on May 30, 2018 by Patrick Miles

It would have been almost too dull if there had been no dramas with Clays the printers in the final run-up to production last week, but I must admit I wasn’t expecting basic technical questions to erupt concerning the jacket flaps, the anniversary bellyband, the ribbon marker and the head and tail bands (those funny things at the top and bottom of the spine). I thought I had settled all that long ago.

What precipitated the commotion, I believe, was a reminder from me about receiving PDF proofs from them by a certain date. I suspect they had forgotten that I had ordered such proofs, and paid for them; they had forgotten because hardly anyone asks for them. I am very glad, however, that I did order them, even if we were given less than two days in which to read the text file and delivery date was pushed back by three days as a result. It was extremely reassuring when a member of Team Clays emailed me: ‘I will do everything in my power to ensure you get perfect books on time.’

Before Sam2 and I sat down to tackle the text file, I inquired whether the pre-press checks had identified any problems with our typeset text which we should look out for. The answer came back: ‘Your text file is all correct and ready to print.’ Admittedly we had had the printers’ typographical instructions engraved on our brains, but we were still pretty staggered, and even disbelieving, that we had got everything right, as the text is long, complicated, and we had never typeset a book before!

Flicking through the PDF file the printers set us, we got the impression that they had indeed not changed anything, even our margins. However, to make sure, we decided to check page number, initial and closing phrases for every page, as well as 40 test characters and layout features. I have had the impression from some recent books that it is the specialist fonts/characters (e.g. Greek and letters with diacritics) that get garbled at the press stage and present nonsense in the book. But no, all those were as we had had them.

The unfortunate, but highly useful result of our proofreading was that we discovered five tiny, previously unspotted typographical errors of our own making, and two typos proper (I never have been able to spell ‘baggage’ with two g’s in the middle).

This put us in a quandary. The printers charge £10 per page of correction or ‘dependent on the status [what that?] of the title, supplying a new text file is free of charge’. Whether we paid for the seven pages on which mainly minor corrections should be made, or simply submitted a new complete text file with the corrections installed by ourselves, we ought ideally to see a complete PDF proof back from the printer after that. Could I afford yet another ‘small extra’? Did I want a further delay in production? How long might this go on for if we spotted yet further minor typographical errors in the latest PDF proof?

We had to cut our losses. It seemed to me that Murphy’s Law would guarantee that worse errors would invade the text file if we went through another round of submitting a corrected text, then ordering another PDF from Clays and setting about proofing that. It might put another week onto the delivery date and the expense could get worse and worse, too. Five (noticed) typographical flaws and two typos didn’t seem that serious in a 544-page book that had now gone through five sets of proofs. The beauty of a ‘limited edition’ with a short initial print run is that if there is the demand we can easily produce a second edition with these corrections made…

I suppose my decision could be summarised as ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t mend it’, or ‘go whilst the going is good’. But Sam2 characterised it with a more modern expression, which I had not heard before and which I hope proves right: ‘Don’t spook the thoroughbred.’

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, Clays Ltd, comments, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, limited edition, Murphy's Law, PDF proofs, printers, proofreading, publishing, Sam&Sam, Sam2, thoroughbreds, typography, typos | 3 Comments

Is it Cricket?

Posted on May 23, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Click the image to find this book on Amazon.

For years, one of the most pleasurable things about the parish magazine I am sent from my home town has been the monthly book review by a retired bishop. It is about 350 words long and his range of reading is impressive: at one end, shortish religious books for the season, or Justin Welby’s Dethroning Mammon, at the other Len Deighton’s SS-GB, Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, Julian Barnes… The bishop certainly does not shy from the disturbing and visceral.

I have always admired the elegant economy of his reviews. They give you a succinct sense of what the book is about, they are quietly empathetic in that they address how you the reader might find the book, and they administer criticism with perfect manners. In short, they always come across as open-minded and objective.

Until, unfortunately, this month. His review of the above book is the longest I have seen by him, it falls apart, and it is almost entirely subjective. I am quite shocked. Even a cursory glance at the page reveals that the commonest word on it is ‘I’. This is because, although ‘we missed each other in Oxford’, the bishop ‘sat on the same red benches in Westminster’ as Cowdrey, he is ‘of Cowdrey’s generation’, he knows the Kent County Cricket set, and Cowdrey and he had ‘a devotion to cricket only just short of the spiritual’. The first half of his review is full of that kind of thing, rather than telling us about the book.

Then we get down to it:

I have a criticism of the author. It is true that, thanks to the Cowdrey family, he had access to personal diaries of Colin, so there are some fascinating things here [please give us at least one example] which have never been published before. That makes it a worthwhile enterprise in itself. But surprisingly for an English master at a prominent public school there are one or two elementary mistakes [not many, then]. […] As a first class cricketer himself some of the descriptions read like dressing room banter and sometimes like an autobiography of the biographer [rather like this review?]. That may add a light touch but it produces a deficit of depth. The measure of a man is more than the sum of his achievements and certainly Colin Cowdrey, like the rest of us, is an enigma. A really penetrating biographer will attempt to decode that enigma.

What has led the good bishop to this uncharacteristic literary pontification? The answer, I fear, lies in that phrase ‘devotion to cricket only just short of the spiritual’. I cannot help feeling that he has been elegant and restrained in all his previous reviews because there was nothing in those books, even the ‘spiritual’ ones, that he could ever get as worked up about as cricket! But the ‘spiritual’ reasserts itself in the wonderful backhanded compliment of his final sentence following on from my quotation: ‘Andrew Murtagh is probably too nice a man to dare to do that.’ OmG.

There is a serious issue here. In literary terms what the bishop has done isn’t cricket. Literary reviews shouldn’t be autobiographical or self-focussed. That would be boring and unprofitable for the reader. The reviewer’s commitment must be to the book they are reviewing and to the reader who might consider buying it. (Pardon this passing pontification.) If you ask another ‘expert’ in the field to review a book, s/he will probably rubbish it for a variety of purely personal reasons. You don’t want someone with their axe to grind, you want the sense of a well-read, independent, objective judge.

I am sure the bishop will recover his poise in next month’s issue, but I think we all need to keep Richard Steele’s words ringing in our ears: ‘It is great vanity to think anyone will attend to a thing because it is your quarrel.’

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Andrew Murtagh, biographies, biography, bishops, Colin Cowdrey, comments, cricket, Julian Barnes, Justin Welby, Kent County Cricket, Len Deighton, literary reviews, parish magazines, Paul Kalanithi, Paula Hawkins, reviews, Richard Steele | 4 Comments

A ‘funny’ moment

Posted on May 16, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Idly doing my housework, as one does, I suddenly realised that my nylon ‘feather’ duster had whisked over Kittie’s surviving suitcase without my even noticing it. I paused and by reflex put my hand on the case. Why I did this, I don’t know, but I stood there a while touching it, contemplating it, and staring out of the window.

The book is ‘over’, it is at the printer’s, it may arrive in three weeks time.

They seem so far away now, George and Kittie, a hundred years and more. Yet they are not: I still feel their presence as though I could walk into a room and talk to them. Touching the case, I felt ‘connected’. Unlike some professional biographers (that’s to say who engage with one life after another) I don’t think I am ever going to wave them goodbye. That is not, of course, to say that I won’t ‘move on’.

Have I really shown them as they were? Have I done them justice? Curiously, I feel I have with Kittie, but I have nagging doubts about George. This is because Kittie lived longer (she died on my second birthday), I knew far more people who knew her than had known George, and the fact that it transpired my great-aunt and -uncle in Ashford probably met her also drew her closer, whereas there is a lot that it is impossible to verify about George. Was he a manic depressive? Future biographers will probably conclude he was, but the evidence is tenuous; in my view, he suffered from occasional bouts of ‘blue devils’, as he called it, and knew how to fight them. Was he a secret Taoist? Possibly, but can we ever know? Martin Shaw, whom I quote on my flyleaf, refers to George’s knowledge of economics and even calls him an ‘economic propagandist’; but there are only two or three documentary crumbs to corroborate that. What was the real impact on him of witnessing the ‘Khodynka tragedy’ in Moscow as a foreign correspondent, in which 1389 people were trampled to death? He never spoke about it…

There is no better account of the neuroses of the biographer than Susie Boyt’s FT article ‘The experience of writing a biography’. I can’t add to it.

Sam2’s note: The FT article is normally behind a subscriber paywall and the above link will likely not work for non-subscribers to the FT. However, if you type ‘Susie Boyt, The Experience of Writing a Biography’ into Google and click the first link, we have found that still gives the full article without subscribing. (We tried various ingenious ways to make the link above have this magical property, but it turns out really the only surefire way is through manual googling.)

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged aftermath, biographies, biography, comments, depression, economics, George Calderon, housework, Khodynka, Kittie Calderon, Martin Shaw, Moscow, political economy, publishers, publishing, suitcase, Susie Boyt, Taoism | 1 Comment

What I have learned about today’s books

Posted on May 13, 2018 by Patrick Miles

After, in effect, four sets of proofs since March, we uploaded the complete PDF file of the book to the printers (Clays of St Ives) three days ago, five days before the deadline. There will be no celebrating, however, until we have received, read and returned their final proofs of the book, the jacket and the 150th anniversary bellyband. Clays have a fantastic reputation, and their customer care has been wonderful, but I have begun to have nightmares again about the time I took delivery of a book of mine from ‘the best printers in Cambridge’ and found they had left the title page out…

In my own publishing efforts I have been guided since the 1970s by Oliver Simon’s classic Introduction to Typography (Faber & Faber, 1963). I’ve repeatedly consulted it this time round, too, concerning things like margins and the layout of the ‘preliminary pages’. If you want rules, for instance about when to put a number on a page and when not, or whether to start a new section recto or verso, Simon’s your man.

But, of course, things are vastly different in this age of digital printing. Sam2 has more experience of it than me. It’s been a pretty vertical learning curve and rather humbling. For instance, on a mature consideration I decided the Dedication must go centre page, but every time I looked at the proof of that page the Dedication seemed too low, although it had been digitally positioned dead centre. Then I suddenly remembered Mrs Stringer telling us in year three at primary school (1956) that the optical centre is higher…

We have consulted about ten recently published hardback biographies in the course of our decision-making, and it has revealed a fascinating thing: they break the typographical rules all over the place. For instance, a best-selling biography that I have written about on Calderonia hardly has any pages that are ‘bottom-justified’, i.e. the verso and recto end at different levels. This book has lots of short quotations in it, and it looks as though the publisher simply decided to give up on bottom-justifying. Mind you, just as astonishing is the fact that when I read this book I never noticed!

A more recent biography, published by Jonathan Cape, has such narrow top and spine margins that the text almost looks cramped on the page. Whereas Simon recommends setting the Index in a font two sizes smaller than the text, this book’s Index is set about four times smaller and in three, not the more friendly two, columns. As with almost all the recent biographies I have looked at, it has no blank pages at the end. Books have to be printed in ‘signatures’ of sixteen pages, so if your book ends on page 533 (as ours does) it has to have another eleven blank pages after it to complete the ‘signature’ (to break that up, we have printed a Sam&Sam bibliography on page 535). I conclude, therefore, that publishers are cramming text onto the page, reducing font sizes and starting sections verso rather than recto in order to cut the cost of blank end pages.

Some publishers, I have noticed, now ignore the tradition of avoiding ‘orphans’ (single lines of a new paragraph left at the bottom of a page) and ‘widows’ (the last line of a paragraph carried over to the top of the next page). In Boris Johnson’s The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (Hodder & Stoughton, 2014) there are so many ‘orphans’ that you feel they are a new design fad.

The experience of publishing George Calderon: Edwardian Genius ourselves has also given me insight into features of modern hardbacks that have always mystified me. For instance, it’s not uncommon to see a final ‘f’ fused with a following apostrophe (like that one), or any final letter in italics collapsed upon the roman inverted comma or bracket following it. To rectify this, minute spaces called ‘hair leads’ have to be inserted between the two characters. This is almost hand typesetting, and terribly time-consuming, so it’s not surprising if in many of today’s books the blemish is ignored. Similarly, I can now understand why garbage appears in a printed book for exotic characters that were correct in the proof, or why some Index references are out by precisely a page: (1) you just cannot predict a computer gremlin, (2) if top and bottom justification has to be fine-tuned after the final proofs, the Index is not going to be adjusted accordingly.

A new hardback nicely published by Chatto & Windus, HarperCollins, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, or Faber, has a natural authority. It convinces you that everything about it is meant to be just as it is. However, my experience this year has shown me that it is more of a quantum world in there than a Newtonian one. Increasingly, I think, anything goes. And that really makes me wonder whether printed books will be around forever.

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, Boris Johnson, Chatto & Windus, Clays Ltd, comments, Faber & Faber, geometric centre, George Calderon, hair leads, HarperCollins, Hodder & Stoughton, Index, Jonathan Cape, layout, nightmares, Oliver Simon, optical centre, orphans, printing, publishers, The Dedication, typography, widows | Leave a comment

Word and image

Posted on May 10, 2018 by Patrick Miles

One of the many, many benefits to me of this blog has been what I would go so far as to call the ‘democracy’ of it: the fact that it stands open to feedback and Comment from you, its subscribers, and indeed from whomsoever. That has been very valuable. For instance, I had been assuming for years that the twenty-five illustrations would go into a couple of glossy tranches inside the book, but the majority of followers who responded said they preferred to see them as close as possible to the narrative that they illustrated.

This consensus was very fortunate for me, as I had been baulking at the cost of the glossy illustrations, tending myself to want the images ‘integrated’ with the words, but hesitating because it is still not common in biographies. There exists a belief that black and white images were first dropped into a continuous prose text by W.G. Sebald back in the 1990s (see The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz, etc.). That model rather put me off, in fact, as Sebald’s images are often indistinct and unhelpfully surreal for non-fiction.

Two image print trials and the professional comments on them from three followers of the blog convinced me that the quality the printers could produce on the text paper would be excellent, so I decided to go ahead. Instantly, though, this raised another problem: HOW was I going to ‘integrate’ them into the text, to what extent was this a DESIGN issue, to what extent were we going to IMPROVE the given images, indeed beautify them?

To enlarge, click on this image and next

The more we looked at this challenge, the trickier it became. It’s a juggling act and the factors being juggled kept going round and round like clubs.

One has to recognise that any book is an exercise in design, irrespective of the power or otherwise of its verbal content. One wants to create a book that gives readers pleasure not only to read, but to look at and hold in their hands. The positioning of our images had to be very carefully chosen so as not actually to break the continuity, the size of them was very important (give them space to breathe on the page), and they had to be shown off to their most reader-friendly advantage. Thus one or two have been trimmed, e.g. masses of foliage cut back to concentrate on the human figure; all black edges that come from scanning have been removed; two have actually been rounded at their corners by us; those that are studio shots on rounded card have been cut to their real edges. We have used computer manipulation to get rid of blobs and enhance definition.

At the same time, I wanted to retain some of that feeling of discovered documents. This is not a biography of someone whose life was already known; the whole book is more of a process of first-time discovery. Thus many bald square images, like the one from George’s cartoon book above, have not been framed, but simply laid down in the text where their subjects occur. Similarly, even if it had been possible to remove a water stain over Kittie’s eye on a delightful photograph of her as a young girl, or lift off the heavy foxing on a studio photograph of Manya Ross, I would not have done it. Most outrageously of all, perhaps, we have left a gaping crack on an amateur photograph of George from 1901. I wanted some of these precious images to be as ‘in your face’ as I first experienced them in the attic where they had lain for forty years. My only regret now is that I have not used more than twenty-five of them and that they are rather unevenly scattered through the book.

I think at the end of the day the images in a biography have to remain subordinate to the writing. For that very reason, where a photograph in my biography is rotated by ninety degrees to fill a page, I have kept the running head on that page. It emphasises that the image is an adjunct to the story, even if it is an important one that we must try to display to its best advantage. The word does take precedence. I wanted the images to be as far as possible ‘synchronous’ with the words, with narrative/reading time.

For the finest balance between text and image that I know, buy Andrew Tatham’s A Group Photograph whilst stocks last! I am serious: it is now in its second edition and I doubt whether it will be republished. I would expect it to have sold out by the end of this commemorative year, as it is comparable to the ceramic poppies being sold in their thousands from the ‘Bloodswept Lands and Seas of Red’ installation. Tatham’s book will be a vital part of the permanent legacy of the centenary of World War 1; a book that you will return to again and again. Andrew is a writer and an artist. For me, the most beautiful combination of word, image, layout and colour is that celebrating Louis Arthur Klemantaski between pages 110 and 111. But every section on a soldier and his family is a work of art, and every ‘memorial window’ that Andrew has designed for them is a unique composition of image and subtle colour.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged A Group Photograph, Andrew Tatham, Austerlitz, biographies, biography, Bloodswept Lands and Seas of Red, book illustrations, cartoons, commemoration, comments, design, George Calderon, Kittie Calderon, Lev Tolstoi, Louis Arthur Klementaski, photographs, printers, self-publishing, The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald, World War I | 1 Comment

Tense, moi?

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Patrick Miles

If you sensed unwonted stress at the end of my previous post, you were right. When I decided at the beginning of January that we would bring out the book in six months, I calculated that as ‘the beginning of June’… So actually five months. That in turn meant that we had just over four months in which to deliver the book to the printers. Mad! If I had known all that it would involve, and the pressures it would put Sam&Sam under, I would never have gone there.

The unforeseen challenges have been the complexities of computer typography. It is well known that the period of reading proofs is the most dangerous one for an author, as s/he is so used to the text by then, so I decided to read the first proofs slowly, at about sixty pages a day, which consequently took ten working days. This did not throw up many textual problems, but it revealed four typographic ones: the familiar phenomenon of ‘orphans and widows’, i.e. solitary one-liners at the bottom or top of a page; unsightly elastication of lines of text; repeated non-alignments of the bottom of pages; ‘collapses’ of certain characters, particularly in italic, onto the following character.

Sam2 ingeniously solved all these hitches, and is going to write a guest post when the saga is over, about how he did it. It is a fantastic achievement, as there are plenty of commercially published hardback biographies in print that display these very faults!

The vital function of the first proofs was to give us an ‘Extent’, i.e. a text length with (we thought) page numbers set in stone, from which I could insert the page numbers into my already constructed alphabetical list of index terms. Alas, sorting out the orphan/widows and the full page justifications led to some repagination. Not only that, in the first chapter we discovered that a large chunk of text had mysteriously slipped into a slightly smaller font size… So for the second proofs the first chapter and all those misaligned pages had to be re-indexed. Then the whole typeset index had to be proofed and read back to me over three hours, with me following in my master copy, which revealed dozens of transcription mistakes on my part and altogether 110 corrections to be made. I think I understand now why you notice small errors of page numbers in many published indexes! Determined to cure this, I have since carried out massive checks on the typeset Index.

But Sam&Sam’s new-found awareness of line elastication, page misalignment and character collapse meant that we noticed more and more of these glitches in the second proofs, which had themselves taken me another ten days to read. We have decided we have to go for a third proof, but this time in the PDF in which the book has to be delivered. Meanwhile, I have paid the printers up front, as one must, and we are locked into delivery by 15 May… Goodness knows what problems the PDF might throw up, so goodness knows whether, after four months at it, we can deliver to the printers by that date. If we do, the printers offer to deliver in Cambridge on 4 June. Little do they know the Calderonian significance of that date.

Altogether, it has got a bit hot in the kitchen and I feel sure it has led to some ‘character collapse’ on my part, too. Oh for the relaxed, unstressable indifference of Edwardian politician Arthur Balfour: ‘Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.’ But at the end of the day, if we don’t meet this deadline, or if big problems emerge when we receive PDF proofs of the book and jacket from the printers (I have paid extra for these, as too much is at stake to risk gremlins at their end, though I have only two days in which to read them), we will still have some time in hand. The anniversary that this biography synchronises with, the 150th of George’s birth, isn’t until 2 December.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Arthur Balfour, biographies, biography, commemoration, comments, Dardanelles, deadlines, Gallipoli, George Calderon, indexes, orphans, PDF files, pressure, proofreading, proofs, publishing, Sam&Sam, stress, Third Battle of Krithia, typesetting, typography, widows | 1 Comment

DnA

Posted on May 3, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Longer-term followers of Calderonia will be aware of my preoccupation with Edwardian ‘dilettantism’ and ‘amateurism’. Laurence Binyon, Martin Shaw and Percy Lubbock went out of their way to stress that George was not a dilettante, and the word ‘amateur’ was not derogatory in that period. Nevertheless, since the 1920s George has been increasingly disparaged as an amateur and even a dilettante. If you want to know how I resolve this issue in the concept of ‘Edwardian genius’, you will have to read the Afterword of my biography! I think it is a complex subject.

When I wrote in my post about the gender pay gap that a senior figure in an oil company confessed to me in about 1998 that he could not take women seriously in the workplace, I implied that he described them as ‘dilettantes’. On second thoughts, he may have used the softer word ‘amateur’. The words are not interchangeable, but I would claim that their semantic content today is identical (‘unprofessional’) and ‘dilettante’ merely intensifies it to the extreme of pejorativeness — contempt.

It was not always so. Deriving from Italian for ‘delight’, a dilettante was originally someone who took real and sustained pleasure in the fine arts as a consumer. S/he may not have progressed beyond a pretty superficial enjoyment of them, but they did love them (this was the original sense of ‘amateur’ too). An amateur not only loved them as a consumer, but practised them, and seriously; hence originally an amateur was no amateur in the modern sense (i.e. dabbler), let alone a dilettante in the modern sense (i.e. botcher). As far as I can see, in the eighteenth century dilettante and amateur were neutral words describing different types of people, but with an area of overlap in the concept of taking pleasure in or loving.

By the Edwardian period, the vital point was that s/he practised the given art not for filthy lucre, not for a livelihood, not as a ‘profession’. Practising the art (e.g. cricket, painting, war) for pure love of it was regarded as superior and the amateur was expected to be every bit as good at their art as the ‘professional’, if not inherently better. Where sport was concerned, George certainly subscribed to this notion of amateur. Where his writing was concerned, contemporaries may have regarded him as an amateur because he appeared to have a private income (Kittie’s!), but actually that was not so: he earned a living wage from his journalism, fiction, plays and translations.

Where the literature and theatre of the Edwardian period were concerned, George preferred to think of himself as an amateur because he wanted to stay outside a literary establishment of ‘professionals’ that he saw as stuck in a Victorian rut. Thus in a TLS review he praised to the skies two ‘amateur’ humorous writers (without knowing that they were women) because they were fresh, creative and writing outside the ‘professional’ (his word) box. Conversely, for a long time the Edwardian/Georgian literary establishment regarded those whom we now call the War Poets as amateurs.

For George, amateur in the arts meant innovative, anti-establishment, genuinely creative, serious. Authentic art of that kind we would be tempted today to call ‘professional’. We all know, for instance, that fringe theatre can be professional in the sense of trained skill, and produce more significant dramatic art than some commercial theatre. On the other hand, the worst feature of fringe theatre is when you have directors and actors who are doing it only for themselves. Unfortunately, this self-gratification amongst fringers and amateurs is quite common. Such people do not understand, as real professionals would, that their skills should be selflessly focussed on the work and their audience.

A writer whom I respect referred to ‘the dreaded D-word’ in a discussion about George Calderon. He was right: despite the fact that in 2018 we ‘multi-task’ and have ‘portfolio’ careers, we dread being thought of as dilettantes or amateurs. The phrase ‘it’s what I do’ is used to dismiss all one’s other paid/unpaid activities and stress that ‘really’ one’s vocation, one’s serious and inalienable role in life, is X. People are not at ease with being thought to ‘spread themselves too thinly’ in a perceived dilettante fashion.

I am experiencing this unease myself over publishing George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. I can assure followers and potential readers that Sam&Sam are tackling the task of producing a quality book with all the professionalism of which we are capable. However, as I have said, one can’t get round the fact that designing, typesetting and printing a long and complex hardback like this, for which one is going to ask £30, is extremely challenging. We are not ‘professional’ (i.e. commercial) book-publishers. I know that I am not ‘really’ a publisher, what I ‘do’ is writing. I fear the dreaded D and A words…

On the other hand, I have had this amateur role thrust upon me. Were I the bitter type, I would holler that the British publishing establishment has let me down and I would excoriate the politics of publishing. But bitterness is toxic. We must just keep buggering on, as Churchill put it. Is that the spirit of the dilettante, the amateur, or the professional?

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged amateurism, biographies, biography, comments, dilettantism, fringe theatre, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Binyon, Martin Shaw, Percy Lubbock, publishers, Sam&Sam, self-publishing, semantic, TLS | Leave a comment

Jacketed!

Posted on April 21, 2018 by Patrick Miles

I herewith post the front and back cover of my book, designed by Dan Mogford, who has been a delight to work with and whose first-rate services are not pricey. The front and back flaps are also ready, but I don’t want to post ‘spoilers’.

At the end of a long day, we felt we had no alternative but to use Hollyer’s 1912 ‘iconic’ photo-portrait of George on the cover, as it is artistically the best image of him and likely to be the only one that potential readers have ever seen. At first glance, perhaps, the front cover is a little funereal or ‘black pot’, but to my astonishment some women have spontaneously told me they find George in this photograph ‘very handsome’!

Is it the eyebrows? A touch of Clooney perhaps, or Connery..?

The title on the front and spine will be in gold, as will the frame of the image on the back: