I don’t discuss book design or production too much here. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say about it, it’s just that I, along with every bookseller I know, am too opinionated on the topic.
Designing books is a hell of a job, not least because the professionals behind it have to take notes from whole rooms full of people with no taste at all. It’s not surprising then that more designers don’t seek out our opinions. That’s probably the last thing they need: more input. But we know when a book jacket is good, when it’s effective, when it’s overworked or prone to tearing and fingerprints or when it uses the exact same bit of stock photography as another book, from another publisher, that came out just a month earlier*. I don’t really know how wide a gutter should be when proofs are sent in, but I know when it’s too damn narrow.
All of this, apart from being a plea to designers (let us help!) I mean as a sort of lame bloggy bona fide before I mention some of the beautiful work the folks over at Open Letter have been doing this year. I’m partial to their recent title by Merce Rodoreda (look for my staff pick of it this month), but all of their books are unflaggingly lovely, with a great sense of color, good font work and a perfect trim size. The books are particularly striking, however, because Open Letter is one of the only publishers out there who’ve tossed out the silly dust jackets in favor of paper-over-board, with great results. The books are colorful and comfortable and just feel durable. Not to mention that they’re extremely cheap for hardcovers. Rodoreda’s book is only $14.95, for instance.
Paper-over-board is exactly what it sounds like. The books are bound just like any other hardcover book, but the finish for the boards becomes the book jacket itself, complete with illustration and blurbs and everything. It’s a great idea, and it thrilled me that Open Letter was giving it a shot. Well, according to Chad Post in this piece, they’ve had their fun with it and decided that, for a few reasons, it’s unworkable. They’ll be publishing upcoming books in paperback format alone. Open Letter’s paperbacks are as lovely as they come. Their first Jakov Lind, for instance, looks great (A second by Lind, also in paperback, comes out in January. I’ve only read his The Stove, but it suggests all of his work to be excellent. Also, you really have to go to the Open letter page to see a photo of the man. It makes me want to be an author when I grow up.) Ahem. Stupid interruptive parentheses. But it’s a shame to see the paper-over-board go, not only because it was pretty and cheap, but because it was a very rare bit of innovation in this stultifying business.
And the worst part is that we, McNally Jackson, are as much to blame as anyone. Everyone on our staff are admirers of Chad’s project with Open Letter: to make great works of contemporary literature in translation available, and enticing, to a wider audience. Even those of us who haven’t read any of the titles coming out of Rochester liked the look of the things. Our problem, and of course it’s a ridiculous one, was just where to put them. The books are hardcover, so we ordered them and featured them like all new works of literature we receive. Unlike most new fiction, however, the paper-over-board Open Letter titles were only published in this hardcover format, with no following paperback. This meant that when the titles had spent an appropriate amount of time with our new fiction hardcovers, we returned leftovers and stopped carrying them. We could have simply stocked one on the shelves with our paperbacks, I suppose. The prices are certainly similar enough, and anyhow we carry some goddamned expensive paperbacks. Instead, we cut off the possibility of backlist sales for Open Letter. These would have been only a small percentage of their sales, but in a business already struggling for its very viability their loss, if it happened across the country, could be very frustrating indeed.
The problem was also much bigger than us, of course. We’re not grossly incompetent, only a little thoughtless sometimes. It’s just that the book industry makes no sense. That is, things are never as straightforward as they might be. There is no real reason that books need go through a hardcover printing, then be repackaged and released as paperbacks. That’s an artifact of who-knows-what strange business decisions** from decades ago. And yet we are designed to work on that same model, to such an extent that efforts to simplify things, like Open Letter’s, in fact provide us with great difficulties, even with something as seemingly simple as the height given to each of our shelves – carefully tweaked to fit a narrow range of trim sizes.
And so however much we hand-sold these lovely, uniformly interesting Open Letter titles (again, check out Death in Spring. It’s like Shirley Jackson decided to flesh out a George Trakl poem – terrifying and beautiful.) once they passed a certain date we pitched them down the oubliette. Not out of rancor, only because that’s how the business works. But a switch to paperback-only is nothing like a “solution” to the way the system is built. When Open Letter’s next season of books reach us in paperback we’ll try to give them as much attention as we did their hardcover siblings, and of course we’ll fail. The market for really interesting paperback originals is even more crowded than for hardcovers, precisely because they can be cheaper to manufacture. We’ll feature the books on our frontlist table for a few weeks then send them back to our literature shelves where, chances are, they’ll be thumbed through a few times by our more curious customers, maybe even purchased now and again, before they too are returned. In effect, the switch to paperback will have traded visibility and tactile grace for a few extra months hidden on our shelves.
But Chad already knows all of this. And his calculation is a very simple one; which format will put these very interesting books in the hands of the most readers? Maybe it will be the paperbacks, but I, and not a few other booksellers around here, will be sad to see the paper-over-board go.
*I’d link to examples of all of these, but I have to work with those same people, you know?
**Seriously, who knows? Tell me if you do, I’m curious.
Dustin, you continue to have extraordinarily good taste.
Open Letter’s next Lind book, ERGO, is probably the best of his novels–get seriously excited.