obstruction. In contrast, informational or reference books—from the telephone book to
the Orbis Pictus to the latest Dorling Kindersley encyclopedia (where a central image or
‘icon’ is wrapped with surrounding information of descending importance towards the
periphery) are invariably multi-track.
The designer’s first task should be to draw a map of all the possible ways in which a
book can be handled in reference use, and how its content may be presented on typical
double-page spreads. Sketch designs are usually prepared for discussion with author
and editor so that questions of structure and sequence, relative importance and location,
can be reviewed before the manuscript and selection of illustration are finalised. The
logic of design enables the signposting of a book to be organised as well as passenger
circulation at an international airport, which is a comparable task.
Once the text has been typeset and all the illustrations assembled, there follows a
‘scissors and paste’ stage where each page is planned and fixed with meticulous
attention to detail. The experienced designer will have an overall programme in mind
which yields that degree of variety within conformity which corresponds to the
pleasurable assimilation of the material in question. For a book of any complexity,
creative input is taking place alongside tedious labour, and the computer can assist with
one but not the other and certainly can’t distinguish between them! This is accordingly
an expensive operation, but the high reputation of many titles and series rests on how well
this hidden design work has been carried out.
Jacket and Binding DesignTypography has always had two distinct tones of voice; a quiet one for the private reader,
and a shout for the proclamation of advertising and news headlines. This is reflected in
the printer’s historical division of typefaces into text and display. These groups were
designed differently to work at contrasted optical distances: 14 pt and below for text to
be read at the normal distance of about thirteen inches; 18 pt and above for those to be
visible from arm’s length to infinity. Text types are self-effacing introverts whereas
display characters draw attention to their own dress and eccentricities. Inside the covers
of a book the latter are admitted in very small numbers if at all—perhaps to provide
titling or a period touch or even a carnival atmosphere where appropriate—but they
really come into their own with the design of book jackets and paperback covers.
The dust wrapper was protective in origin but now exists to get the book into the right
hands, in the bookshop primarily, but also when housed on library, school and domestic
bookshelves. Therefore it is a poster or advertisement for the book, and potentially the
centrepiece of point of sale material for a leading title. The jacket ought to tell instantly
what kind of book it surrounds, and for children in particular it should not promise
more than it will deliver. There are two schools of thought about jacket design: one
states that the book designer must be responsible for the jacket to preserve the unity of
the book; and the other that the jacket is not an integral part of the book and the
purchaser should be encouraged to discard it as soon as possible to reveal the binding
design. In other words: ‘The true clothing of the book is its binding, the dustwrapper is
merely a raincoat’ (Tschichold 1991: 162).
462 THE CONTEXT OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE