I visited Sangorski and Sutcliffe’s shop in Mayfair on my day off yesterday. I was curious because a ‘dummy’ of the Diamond Jubilee Bible – a joint endeavour – has arrived in the office, and we’ve all been admiring it. You can see it here. I wanted to see a few other examples of this legendary bindery’s work.

My husband watched in distinct trepidation as I cooed over bindings and endpapers, but he needn’t have worried – they were beyond even my elastic book budget. I was particularly interested by the varied choice of books on display. There were a number of classics to which Folio has also given a unique treatment – Laurie Lee’s As I walked Out One Midsummer Morning, for example, but also some more unexpected choices – a stunning Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the Savoy Cocktail Book. They are amazing – the way the leather is cut, the onlays fitted – the binding almost makes me want to own a four-volume history of Association Football …

A lot of the books are bound to order – they run a special service offering cloth or leather. When visiting a stately home, I am always fascinated by the libraries, filled with books in wall-to-wall red or tan morocco and gilt. The books were often bought as blocks and then rebound to fit the owner’s chosen colour scheme. Nowadays, those wishing to make their libraries look more impressive can buy ‘vellum dust-jackets’ to recover even a humble paperback – not really quite as desirable!

It made me think about which books I would choose to have rebound… I already know that even if I owned a stately home (about as likely as being able to buy the complete stock of Sangorski and Sutcliffe) I wouldn’t go for matching bindings. I love the different colours, shapes and sizes on my bookshelves – looking at the mixture gives me far more pleasure than a mass of matching leather could do.

But I think I might pick one or two personal favourites to give a bespoke binding treatment: the copy of The Lord of the Rings that I read and reread as a child (complete with biscuit crumbs and fingerprints); Troilus and Criseyde in memory of days curled up in front of the two-bar electric heater at college, and perhaps Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber – the first book I got into a feminist argument about.

But since Folio publishes editions of all of those, I don’t think I’m ever going to justify the idea of a personalised rebinding… My husband can breathe a sigh of relief. The book budget remains safe from the temptations of Sangorski and Sutcliffe for a little longer.

Title page set in Centaur

During my time at Folio I’ve designed and typeset approximately sixty titles. Each time work begins on a new book (such as The Song of Roland shown here) and I have to think about choosing a suitable typeface, the issue of readability rears its legible little head. Given the diverse range of fonts available to us here at Folio it’s vital that we select ones that don’t tire out the eyes of our readers.

Two factors are always present in good typographic design – tracking and kerning. It is imperative to strike the right balance between too little and too much spacing. As I’m sure you would expect, if the space is lacking the characters begin to clash with one another; if you’re over enthusiastic with your s p a c i n g , readers will have trouble determining where one word ends and another starts.

Digitised Bembo, based on a Roman cut from 1495 and a Monotype version from 1929

The human eye doesn’t read letter by letter but in phrases, and it is the shape of words, rather than characters, that determines the speed of reading. Serif faces, in particular, enable the eye to absorb information with ease. As a result they are regarded as more readable, particularly when printed on good old Folio paper. It is, however, worth noting that at smaller sizes there is a risk of the serifs colliding with one another; hence the more common use of sans-serif fonts on the internet. Historically, we are more accustomed to serif faces; they have been used in printed text since the fifteenth-century and after all this time their rudimentary form has remained largely the same, having only been tweaked slightly to keep up with the changing demands of printing technology.

Digital revision of Optima by Hermann Zapf & Akira Kobayashi from Zapf's 1958 orginal

Whilst I hope that you’ve found this instalment informative I trust that it won’t mar your enjoyment of the typography you encounter in your immediate environment; I have not been able to appreciate books, advertisements and, most notably, album covers in the same way as I did in my pre-Folio days, without mentally rating their typographic charm (Gerry Rafferty is very dependable; Barry Manilow, on the other hand, should be ashamed of himself). However if you come across anything particularly striking, whatever the medium, I urge you to inform us so that we can build as clear a picture as possible about what floats your font-based boat and gets your typesetting goat.

So much goes into making a Folio book special, but there’s one feature above all that the reader will connect to – the paper. At the turn of every page, the texture and shading needs to be just right. Which is why we source ours from a small number of European mills which consistently produce the highest quality papers.

Beyond the look and feel of the paper, another factor comes into our selection – now more than ever, Folio books are all produced from Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified paper. FSC certification shows that the paper comes from environmentally and socially responsible sources and is traceable right back to its origins.

The majority of our text papers, the ‘Abbey’ range, are produced at a paper mill in western Sweden which has more eco credentials than I ever knew existed: FSC, PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification), Nordic Swan … the list goes on.

Paper-making requires a lot of water. This mill uses a local source and a system that requires much less water than the industry average. What’s more, less energy is used to heat the water and less water needs to be purified. And while huge machines churn all day and night to produce thousands of tonnes of paper a year on a vast scale, at the end of it is this surprising scene.

These sets of ponds are part of the mill’s water purifying system where the water is returned to the original river from which it is taken. The result is a home to fish, frogs and crustaceans, and the water is fit for human consumption.

When selecting FSC paper for our titles, the actual ingredients of these papers can be quite surprising. The flecked Favini paper used for Matthew Richardson’s striking binding design for The Outsider contains algae harvested annually from the Venice lagoon, which not only helps to prevent the lagoon from clogging up and damaging its fragile ecosystem, it also cuts down on the amount of pulp used to produce
the paper.

Some of the other remarkable ‘eco’ papers in this range contain waste matter from the processing of lemons, apples, oranges and grapes. Maybe it is time for a reissue of Cider with Rosie, or The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps, all bound up in a suitable vintage?

I have been extremely fortunate in the last few months to work with Margaret Atwood on the new Folio edition of her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. And even more so to have the chance to interview her about the book, its illustrations and a few other issues I hope you’ll find interesting. So, here it is…

Firstly, my colleague Johanna gave you a copy of the new Folio edition of The Handmaid’s Tale – what did you think?

This is a truly stunning version. Everyone who has seen it is smitten with it.

Many authors struggle with the stasis of artistic representations of their characters as opposed to the fluid imaginative creations of readers’ responses. Handmaid’s Tale has been visualised many times – in film, opera and now by the Balbussos – do you find this an enjoyable part of your book’s legacy?

Well, it may be a bit soon to start talking about legacies – that word reminds me of the will-reading scenes in Agatha Christie murders – but it’s telling that so many people have given physical shapes to the characters in the book. It means that the narrative resonates with them. We’ve even seen people dressing up as Handmaids in protest demonstrations.

What can an author learn about their characters in their new incarnations and visualisations?

If the incarnations are good, they can open up parts of the text in ways you as the author may not have anticipated. Who could have imagined an operatic aria sung on the theme of the menstrual cycle?

Do you think there is a ‘should’ when it comes to illustrating fiction? Should it be simply decorative? Or atmospheric? Or delve deeper into the artist’s own interpretations?

Like a lot of people my age, I came in contact early with Arthur Rackham illustrations, Arabian Nights illustrations, older Grimms illustrations, Kate Greenaway books, pre-Raphaelite illustrations to such things as Tennyson’s Idylls of the King . . . And I’ve done some illustrating myself, and partnered with artists, most notably Charles Pachter, who did several handprinted books of my poetry. The Journals of Susannah Moodie is particularly amazing.

The Journals of Susannah Moodie

The illustrations have to have their own life. They are what happens when text encounters the artist’s imagination and something is ignited. Unless the artist feels an inner connection with the core of the work, the pictures will be merely decorative and somehow flat. When ‘inspiration’ happens – when the artist “breathes in” the work – then a new being will emerge.

In your new introduction to the Folio edition you wrote that ‘Those who lack power always see more than they say’. Is some (of your) fiction more predisposed to being illustrated?

Novels and stories can have a strong visual element, or not. Some texts are musical rather than visual. But really the illustrations and their strength depend on the artist – not the text.

When we worked together on The Handmaid’s Tale we found some textual discrepancies between various editions. Can you tell us a little about your process of revising manuscripts?

It’s so far back I can hardly remember, but in those days editions came out in different countries at different times, and thus went through two editorial processes. The US one was later. I think they found some typos, but also they put in some changes that – when we went over it again – didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Those might have been new typos.

 I think we caught everything this time!

I see you’re closely involved in the campaign to prevent library closures in Canada (an increasingly big issue in the UK also) – can you tell us more about that?

(Long story. Too long for here.) Libraries that make books and newspapers and internet access accessible to the general public are one of the foundations of a functioning participatory democracy.

What are your thoughts on the importance of the book as an object, versus etexts? Are they mutually compatible in the long run?

The neurology is different. We will obviously end up with both. Anything you want to keep should exist in physical form, because one big solar flare or other electromagnetic pulse, and boom – there goes your e-data. A change in technology can quickly make your data inaccessible, too . . . Look at floppy disks.

Finally, what books would you like to see Folio to publish in the future?

Of mine? Oryx and Crake, definitely. I think an illustrator could have a field day with it.

On 7 February Charles Dickens turns 200. This anniversary has already spawned a deluge of television and radio adaptations of his books, exhibitions, numerous articles in the media, reissues and rethinkings of his work as a whole, and stunning new biographies from Claire Tomalin and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. Yet for all that we are reading about Dickens, how much are we still actually reading him, and why?

It isn’t that impossible now, in our celebrity-driven age, to imagine the level of national mourning at Dickens’s relatively early death in 1870, aged 58. The self-styled ‘Inimitable’ had put himself and his social concerns into almost every aspect of his writing: the bright boy removed from school and sent to a factory to support his father’s life in the debtors’ prison became a man constantly in dread of poverty who drove himself punishingly onwards and upwards. From the first, wildly popular novel in serialisation, Pickwick Papers, to the last, hauntingly unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens’s love of theatre, of character, his relish at life itself shine out. Indeed, the fact that he embarked on long sell-out tours where he recreated his most famous characters onstage contributed to his worsening health, as did the mystery at the heart of Dickens’s existence – the generous family man, holding his household in thrall to his image, who nevertheless banished his long-suffering wife when he fell in love with a young actress.

I read recently that every Dickens novel has been adapted for the screen at least twice. But watching some of these superb realisations of the novels always sends me back to the books. We are currently living through a supposed new age of austerity and political unrest – exactly what Dickens was writing about in Bleak House following the so-called ‘Hungry Forties’; and, in an era when we are as consumed by money – or the lack of it – as ever, there can be no more powerful novel of a young man’s aspiration and obsession than Great Expectations, or the looming horror of bankruptcy prevalent in Little Dorrit. Dickens has his detractors. Multiple projects meant that his novels can seem rushed, overloaded with caricature and with weakly developed female roles. Yet his indefatigability and energy, his sense of plot and atmosphere remain intact. ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show,’ is the opening line of Dickens’s most autobiographical novel, David Copperfield. It could be Dickens’s own personal credo.

Illustration by Ben Cain, from The War of the End of the World

When an illustrator interprets a text it is assumed that the end result should match the author’s description. So if the text says that someone’s hair is red you expect to see red hair – it is indeed a major feature of Ben Cain’s illustration from The War of the End of the World.

However, illustrations are not support mechanisms that simply confirm what has been written. The “illustrate what you read” approach works in certain cases, such as in children’s books, where it can be a useful teaching and learning aid. Mature readers do not require such affirmation, and this allows the illustrator to take artistic license . . . within reason.

Of course, there are are instances where it is important that the images do not stray from the text. When dealing with fact-based books, it is important to get such details as accurate as possible: maps, charts, graphs, documents historical/period costume, mathematical and scientific equations.

To achieve accuracy, the illustrator will send in a ‘rough’ (a sketch) to show how they have interpreted the text. For maps, say, prior research would have been done and an extensive brief sent to the cartographer. What is produced is then thoroughly checked by the editor, the author and, occasionally, experts in the field. With more interpretive illustrations, sketches are done and texts re-read to compare against the image prior to approval and proceeding to final artwork.

Fiction is naturally more open to interpretation. We recently published the Ripley trilogy by Patricia Highsmith with illustrations by Tom Burns, who works in collage. His wonderful images are a juxtaposition of realistic images placed within imaginative settings and moods. Tom needed to be accurate with maps, period costume and language yet remain true to his style.

The illustration below originally showed a telegram written in French. Close to final artwork it was noted that, while Highsmith never specified the language, the telegram should in fact be in Italian. This was corrected and changed, then re-checked. Finally a decision was made to take out the date so as not to show a time and day but rather left for the reader and text to affirm.

Illustrations by Tom Burns, from The Talented Mr Ripley

The artists are helped through the commissioning process by working closely with the Art Director and editors to ensure accuracy. But in the end the illustrator’s job is to enhance the atmosphere which writers like Highsmith so deftly capture through words. 

© Bernard Edmaier

Picture researching The Earth.

Picture research by its very nature takes you on many extraordinary journeys and the research we undertook to illustrate The Earth, An Intimate History was no exception. This is a remarkable book that explores our planet geologically, historically and culturally. The pictures had to match the breadth of the subject matter.

You have to adjust your mind to the vastness of geological time as Richard Fortey’s narrative explains why continental plates shift and vast mountain ranges exist. He plunges us into the icy depths of dark oceans to grub around amongst the ancient debris, the secrets of the sea floor.

© Bernard Edmaier

And he invites us to climb high, as the Victorian smart set once did, to peer into an active volcano…

To do visual justice to this text a wide array of images had to be found. I was amazed when I first saw the work of Bernard Edmaier, who is not only a fantastic photographer but a geologist too – top that! His powerful images were just perfect for this project and they were used throughout the book and to best effect as full-page chapter frontispieces.

I was lucky to be able to work closely with the author, who, along with his wife Jackie were generous with both their time and their address book. This gave access to some of the more obscure scientific research sources.

Professor Deborah Kelley of the Oceanography Department of the University of Seattle duly provided her arresting underwater photograph of a carbonated pinnacle, forming a hydrothermal vent, which is poetically entitled Lost City.

Primary sources worldwide were trawled to find diverse and vital pictures such as the resplendent chieftain’s feather cape from Honolulu Academy of Arts. At Scripps Institution of Oceanography I found a truly amazing scanning electron micrograph of fossilised remains of radiolarian skeletons from the late Miocene age, which was taken at a mere 656 feet underwater and at a mind blowing x600 magnification.

© akg-images

Historical and cultural sources abound including Athanasius Kircher’s stunning seventeenth-century cross section of the earth as he understood it to be.

Included are some revealing portraits of the scientists who fought and argued and painstakingly pieced together the fragments of geological evidence to give us the foundations of our geological understanding today. From the files of the Swiss Federal Institute’s archive ETH – Bibliotek we plucked the most sublime portrait of Albert Heim. It shows him almost embedded in folding rock face, holding tight his tiny geological hammer in one hand.

Next time the earth moves for you it is thanks to him and his ilk that you know why.

Christmas is coming … again, along with all its traditions, for which we can largely thank the Victorians. It was not until a picture appeared of Victoria and Albert, surrounded by family, beside a decorated tree that we all wanted one, big or small, in a corner of our room. And likewise it was that great icon of Victorian literature, Dickens, who gave us so many wonderful Yuletide moments – most obviously, of course, A Christmas Carol. However, in these times of austerity, it is perhaps now, more than ever, that we need our favourite literary Christmas scenes to help get us in the proper festive mood. And so I have been asking my colleagues for theirs.

Johanna Geary, senior editor and aficionado of children’s literature, has chosen the wonderful How the Grinch Stole Christmas! by Dr Seuss. It is a great commentary on what Christmas is really all about – without the soppy stuff – and contains the inimitable line: ‘Then he got an idea! An awful idea! The grinch got a wonderful, awful idea!’

 Editor Alice Brett has chosen The Father Christmas Letters by J. R. R. Tolkien; a beautiful book published a couple of years after Tolkien’s death and containing letters which he’d written to his four children ‘from’ Father Christmas between 1920 and 1943. He updates them on happenings at the North Pole and the antics of his trusty polar-bear chums and elvish staff.

Illustration by Katherine Streeter, from 'Oscar and Lucinda'

Our Publisher, Catherine Taylor, has opted for Susan Cooper’s brooding, atmospheric The Dark is Rising, the second book in her acclaimed series. The novel describes how Will Stanton, seventh son of a seventh son, finds himself embroiled in a battle between the light and the dark which takes place in the dying days of the old year.

James Matthews, non-fiction editor, has chosen a scene from Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda in which a demonic Christmas pudding results in a wallop for Oscar: ‘His father said the pudding was the fruit of Satan. But Oscar had tasted the pudding. It did not taste like the fruit of Satan.’

Christmas would not be complete without a good mystery, and editor Mandy Kirkby has suggested the festive Sherlock Holmes short story ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’. A classic piece of detective work finally leads Holmes to uncover the missing jewel (the titular blue carbuncle) in the crop of a Christmas goose.

My own personal favourite is a scene in the marvellous Wind in the Willows where some field-mice with ‘red worsted comforters round their throats, their fore-paws thrust deep into their pockets, their feet jigging for warmth’ arrive to sing carols to Mole and Ratty before being ushered in to partake of a festive feast.

And finally Neil Titman, our Managing Editor, notes that there is still debate as to whether or not the timing of Christmas is in fact derived from the Roman Saturnalia, the December festival which involved extensive feasting and the temporary freedom of slaves. In his 18th Epistle the dramatist and Stoic philosopher Seneca describes the carousing of the masses with indignation, and advises his addressee, Lucilius, that ‘It shows much courage to remain dry and sober when the mob is drunk and vomiting.’ He even goes so far as to say, ‘Once December was a month; now it is a year.’ Sound familiar?

But these are clearly just glimpses of the scenes which make the editorial team smile, which amuse and remind us of the festive season. But the question we all wish to ask is: What are your favourite literary Christmas moments?

What is it about Christmas – traditionally the haven of goodwill, togetherness, charity and abundance – that makes us turn to the supernatural? Is it because the shortest day has passed, and in the Christian calendar the bitter penitence of Advent has turned to joyous celebration? T. S. Eliot touched obliquely on this complexity in his poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’, where a witness to the birth of Jesus Christ, in a symbolic foretelling of the Crucifixion to come, soberly likens the whole event to a kind of death.

Illustration by Abigail Rorer, from 'Dracula'

The Winter Solstice, or Yule, which falls this year on 22 December, is one of the oldest winter celebrations, and is a hinge of the year, between this and other worlds. So it is appropriate that as the days grow increasingly shorter, the season is ripe for horror tales. In a paradoxical way we ward off the darkness by scaring ourselves silly.

The Victorians were especially good at this setup, having practically invented the kind of Christmas we know today, complete with fir tree, log fire, plum pudding and party games. Charles Dickens, who, with A Christmas Carol, penned perhaps the most famous Christmas ghost story ever, liked nothing better than to organise huge convivial gatherings laced with spooky tales. Here at the Folio Society we’ve been exploring this theme for several years.

M. R. James, provost of King’s College, Cambridge, is now far better known for his ghost stories than for his academic work, a writer who put unease into everyday occurrences; Bram Stoker’s Dracula is highly melodramatic, violent and lustful as well as heart-poundingly, intricately plotted.

Illustration by Finn Campbell-Notman, from 'In a Glass Darkly'

His fellow Dubliner, Sheridan Le Fanu, preceded Stoker’s better-known vampire tale with his own, the languid ‘Carmilla’, written some twenty years before Dracula – a story which appears in In A Glass Darkly, this year’s terror offering from Folio.

The blandness of the Twilight brand aside, it seems we can’t get enough of vampire tales, and for Christmas 2012, Folio will be publishing the first ‘proper’ vampire story ever written, together with some masterpieces of Gothic short fiction. But my preferred spine-chiller for any Christmas past, present and future, best taken with a snifter of port and lemon, is Henry James’s psychological novella The Turn of the Screw, in which the ambiguous narrator, a young, isolated governess, is, according to interpretation, either subject to hallucinations or is herself possessed. A work that shows the late Victorians’ deep interest in psychical research and, to quote James himself, communicates his idea of a ghost story as ‘the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy’. Its cool menace lingers disturbingly in the mind – whatever time of year you happen to read it.

There are books that remain perpetually of the moment in every year in their different ways – The Bhagavad Gita, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying – or that come into focus some years more than others – perhaps Fahrenheit 451 this year; perhaps Carl von Clausewitz’s On War next (or will that be Bleak House?).

Most books are consumed in the reading; achieving effects that can be described, without much distortion, in a sentence or two. Only a very few of the nearly 200,000 books published in English around the world in any year will defy such compression; in fact, they will go on expanding in one’s mind after reading, sometimes becoming more like places that we visit, and re-visit, than fleeting experiences.What follows is a selection of some of the books that, in my estimation, belong in the second category, with little more than a couple of adjectives to give you the general idea and nothing much in the way of description of what they are ‘about’.

2011 was a very strong year for fiction with many superb books including: Ali Smith’s seriously funny, engaging There but for the, Richard Beard’s brilliantly ingenious Lazarus Is Dead, Anne Enright’s angular and gripping The Forgotten Waltz and Belinda McKeon’s quiet, lyrical debut of gathering power, Solace.

Foster by Claire Keegan is a haunting long story from a writer with incomparable powers of noticing. If a classic is a book, to adapt Italo Calvino’s observation, that is unlikely to finish saying what it has to say, then Foster, it seems to me, is already a classic.

The same could be said of Lydia Davis whose witty, penetrating stories have a totally convincing, expanding apprehension of human realities even in their smallest compass.

Illustration by Anna & Elena Balbusso, from 'The Song of Roland'

John Burnside (who introduced Folio’s edition of The Song of Roland) produced two of the year’s best books, a dark, mythic, and yet strangely limpid novel, A Summer of Drowning, and Black Cat Bone, what could be a properly great book of poems (it is, of course, too soon to tell).

Teju Cole’s Open City is a seriously beautiful performance in language of memory and place; a renewing occasion for us to think deeply and compassionately about ourselves and others.

One could trace the deep heritage behind Blake Butler’s There Is No Year through American letters as far back as Charles Brockden Brown, through Poe, to William Gass and Brian Evenson, but it is itself and no other’s; an indelibly eerie, gnawing, subcutaneous fiction.

Hope Mirrlees

If I could I would happily take a year off from all other forms of reading and read only poetry. Two collections, both by young poets, that I read and admired this year were: Sidereal by Rachael Boast, lucid, graceful and robust poetry, and the fabulous music of Timothy Thornton’s pamphlet Jocund Day. Hope Mirrlees was a friend of Virginia Woolf’s and a probable influence on T. S. Eliot. A new Collected Poems has recovered this complex and fascinating poet for new readers.

A book from last year that I returned to throughout 2011 was Creaturely and Other Essays by Devin Johnston; essays that are journeys into the everyday where culture and nature converse, in which he gives depth and lustre to the ordinary in a way that will be familiar to readers of Hazlitt, Thoreau and Montaigne.

Even though I count this as a golden age for historical writing I tend more often now to read and re-read established works in order to choose books for Folio members – recently, for instance, Keith Thomas’s masterwork Religion and the Decline of Magic which we’re publishing next year with an introduction by Hilary Mantel. I did, however, finally read A Monarchy Transformed, Mark Kishlansky’s fine, convincing and multi-layered account of Britain’s revolutionary century.

Waiting to be read is the latest book by one of the most talented historians working today, Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape – an original and fascinating-looking exploration of changing notions and experiences of place and the sacred in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.

Also tempting me is Marina Warner’s new book Stranger Magic and, as good books on London are always a pleasure, there is also Craig Taylor’s Londoners.

I’ve more than run out of room and have yet to mention whole favourite categories such as children’s books – a new, wonderful Maurice Sendak, Bumble-Ardy – or art books – Turtle Fur by Amy Cutler.

And what’s more there’s another year in books only a few short days away…