There are pleasures in reading a book aside from content. There is tactile pleasure in both paper and binding. There is aesthetic pleasure in excellent typography and masterful design. There is an intimacy in the act of turning pages that cannot be replicated with digital publishing.
Masterful book design isn’t dead yet. Happily, there is still a market for it, although each year that market is dwindling. There will probably always be a select few who appreciate real books, although, more and more, the business of making beautiful books is becoming a niche market in publishing.
There is little opportunity for individual design in mainstream digital publishing.
It’s hard to impose any sort of different design at all. Words and pictures are dumped into digital bins with nothing but algorithms to decide how they'll look. There is the convenience of speed and wide distribution, but the appearance of what is produced is nearly uniform. Headline, copy, and visuals vary - the look is much the same.
Some will say, “So what”? Book lovers will say, “So a lot”.
Those who enjoy writing that is glamorized with well-designed pages will miss the book as I do - Maybe some future AI program will come up with a way that will allow an easier way for personal decisions about the treatment of copy & image.
Maybe, if that happens, then, digital publications might acquire some of the visual charm of real books, though the tactile charm will still be missing.
Isn’t it interesting that after centuries of scrolls, we moved on to centuries of books, then relapsed back to scrolls - electronic scrolls. We no longer flip through the pages, instead, we scroll up or down.
At least the new electronic scrolls aren’t as awkward to use as the old physical scrolls.
I think of the many books on my many shelves as old friends that have lived with me for many years. I don’t feel the same about the writings stored on my laptop. If I want to revisit any of those, I must search for them, electronically. There is a cold robotic quality to electronic search-and-find that lacks the satisfying pleasure of running my fingers across the volumes on my shelves.
There is an additional pleasure when I discover, and reread, some book I’d nearly forgotten about. That doesn’t happen much with electronic search-and-find.
Digital publication offers advantages of speed and low cost that printed publication cannot compete with, but digital publication cannot compete with the cozy charm of a physical book. Digital publications will never have the romance of producing lavish, beautifully designed, and beautifully bound books that become works of Art.
Often such books lose money for the publisher, even though cherished by posterity.
The J.M. Dent publication of Le Morte D'Arthur by Thomas Malory is just such a book.
Malory compiled his version of the Arthurian legends from various French and English sources around 1470. It was first published 1485 by William Caxton. In 1882, J. M. Dent and Company, of London England, begin publishing high-quality limited editions of literary classics in their Temple Classics series.
In 1893 they produced a state-of-the-Art version of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D'Arthur.
300 copies were printed on Dutch handmade paper with "vellucent" binding, along with gilt tooling applied on top. Cover design and inside illustrations were made by Aubrey Beardsley. The editors of The Twentieth Century Book declared it a monument to decorative book illustration”.
And so it remains.
It was a work of Art rather than a work of commerce.
You and I may be the last generation to know the delights of artfully designed and beautifully produced books – at least as a commonly shared experience.
Digital Publishing is too busy for that sort of thing.
I understand. I just don’t like it.
Le Morte D'Arthur by Thomas Malory
Illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley –
London: J.M. Dent, 1893-1894.