At the end of a long day, I joined other members of the production team, for a spot of clubbing – Galley Clubbing to be exact. What do you expect from people who take their books far too seriously? For the uninitiated, once a month people throughout the book publishing industry come together to socialise and talk shop under the banner of The Galley Club. The most recent gathering took place at a central London watering hole during which we were privileged to receive the insights of Just My Type author, Simon Garfield. As speakers go his talk was a breath of fresh air: there was no limit to the diverse and disparate range of his subject matter. This included everything from man’s ‘best friend’, type faces and the album sleeve to The Beach Boys’ 1966 album Pet Sounds.

One of the things that left a lasting impression on me was Garfield’s take on a font that must be a serious contender for the title of ‘the friendliest typeface ever’, Cooper Black.

Cooper Black has been available to typographers for nearly a hundred years. It has been used for the closing credits of the 1960–70s TV comedy Dad’s Army and much more recently for the colourful logo of easyJet, though the jury is still out on its suitability for use in Folio books.

If you wanted to criticise, you could mention the fact that it is quite devoid of variation but, with those blunt and rounded forms, slanted counters and large x-height. it has a comely appearance and provides one with a sense of comfort and warmth usually found in sans serifs. As for Garfield, he sums up Cooper Black as ‘the sort of font the oils in a lava lamp would form if smashed to the floor’.

With its warm, fuzzy, and reassuring character, it’s hardly surprising that easyJet took such a shine to Cooper Black. But then this is no coincidence. Its creator Oswald Bruce Cooper designed this face for advertising, to fit the needs of ‘far-sighted printers with near-sighted customers’.

Despite its ongoing popularity, here in Production we really struggle to use such a soft cuddly font in our precisely defined character set. With its lack of contrast, Cooper Black is more suited to short bursts of information rather than continuous text. Viewed better from afar, it flies in the face of the very notion of settling down in your favourite chair with a good book.

If you can think of an example of Cooper Black ever having been used in a Folio book, please blog away!

And just before I sign off, I have just heard that we were awarded the runner-up prize at the PrintStars 2011 ceremony in Stuttgart. Our own lovely Kate Grimwade, Limited Editions Production Manager, is on the right and the magnificent Sharpe’s Birds of Paradise is on the left with the team from Beltz in between.

An odd side-effect of being an editor at Folio is our garnering of incidental obsessions. We work, solely, on wonderful books, so this is hardly surprising. To be fiction editor, well . . . as I see it, my job is to immerse myself as thoroughly as possible in the text we intend to publish. The immersion can at times go too far: after working on my ninth Patrick O’Brian seafaring novel in a row, I ended up living on a boat, in sympathy with Jack and Stephen (we’re now very much on first-name terms). Fortunately things don’t usually reach that stage (particularly as the last novels I’ve been working on have been by Mario Vargas Llosa and Margaret Atwood – apocalyptic and dystopic in turn). But the process – familiar I suspect to most Folio readers – does throw up some unlikely fixations. Ryszard Kapuściński certainly had that effect.

Travels with Herodotus is a hard to define volume which interweaves the great Polish journalist’s stories with those of the ancient Greek historian, Herodotus. It was Kapuściński’s last, most personal book, massively wide-ranging in time, theme and geography. But how to illustrate it – how to make of it the finest edition available? Various illustrator’s names were mentioned, but none felt quite right.

Then one of our designers, Karolina Maroszek, passed me a book of photographs taken by Kapuściński. These astonishing pictures which mix reportage with private revelation, an understanding of crowds and of individuals, eventually led us to the Green Gallery in Warsaw where his photos are lovingly held, and on an obsessive pursuit through his archive – some published, some not seen before outside his family.

We were trying to find images which somehow expressed the tone and atmosphere of a book which intermingles the eras of Kapuściński and Herodotus.  Could the expression on Darius’ face as he faced the Scythian hordes across the plains be the same as that of a Rwandan fighter in the midst of civil war? It seemed to me that Kapuściński was asking this same question throughout the book. Most importantly perhaps, this also appeared to be the central concern of his photography.

He was, above all, a portraitist – he understood individuals and what drove them – he befriended them, and listened to their stories  both in his books and, it seems, with his 35mm Zorca. Herodotus, we are told, had the same impulse, and it is this that links the great men; this that allows us to feel the kinship of common concern across the centuries. I leave it to you readers to decide whether the obsession paid off, but I for one am excited about the prospect of seeing the book finally in print early in the new year.

PS  fascinating lecture by James Daunt aired last night, rather corroborating earlier views on this blog re the mutual compatibility of e-readers and ‘real’ books.

 All photographs in this article © Ryszard Kapuściński, Estate

Forthcoming publications are keeping the Production team busy, and a particular favourite this month is The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood – a book that cried out for a commission from the talented Balbusso twins, Anna and Elena. After the beautiful illustrations they produced for Ivan Turgenev’s First Love and the great chivalric poem The Song of Roland they have yet again delivered stunning artwork. Confirmation that we made the right decision came from the author herself – Margaret Atwood described them as ‘terrific’ and went on to write in her introduction to our edition that ‘[they] echo both the feel and the colour palette of the thirties and forties, the age of the rise of the major dictatorships – and the signage and branding, as it were, of the future Gilead.’

There has been considerable discussion here about the twins’ unusual method of working in tandem and we sought to learn more about their unique relationship and illustrative process. You can click here to read the full interview.

As we await the delivery of The Handmaid’s Tale – and the other new titles coming in December and January – Limited Edition Production Manager, Kate Grimwade and I are setting off for Germany today to attend the PrintStars 2011 awards ceremony in Stuttgart. One of our printers, Beltz, entered with Sharpe’s Birds of Paradise and was, to our considerable delight, shortlisted. Let’s hope the judges share introducer David Attenborough’s enthusiasm for the edition. Update from the winner’s circle – hopefully – to follow.

V.S. Pritchett

The alleged e-books versus traditional printed matter debate looks set to run and run ­ and the point here is the word versus. It doesn’t have to be an either/or situation, although the idea of conflict produces plenty of column inches. Any savvy book enthusiast knows that the two can happily co-exist, from the ease of portability which an e-reader provides, to the deep satisfaction of holding what is the equivalent of a bespoke piece of publishing in your hands. Recently two of the great independent publishing houses have launched digital out-of-print classics publishing streams – Faber Finds is going strong and the Bloomsbury Reader promises to rejeuvenate out-of-circulation authors from Edith Sitwell to V.S. Pritchett. (Although I sincerely hope they overlook Edith Sitwell’s only novel, 1937’s I Live Under A Black Sun – the true definition of unreadable, or perhaps experimental is a kinder word).

Illustration by Clifford Harper from The Camberwell Beauty and Other Stories

While Bloomsbury states that ‘digital gives you a way to bring books back to life … which, for whatever reason, are out of print’ , this is of course what Folio does with many hardcover editions. The mention of V.S Pritchett in particular caught my eye because we have just published our own edition of his stories, selected by William Trevor, unquestionably another master short-story writer. So, while my 81-year-old mother (who loves the 16-point font size on her Kindle because it means she can actually see the words) will be downloading at the rate of knots, she’ll also have a copy of the real thing to browse through, to keep, to treasure, to pass on.

This concept of the book as beautiful object is something that this year’s Booker winner Julian Barnes recognised in his acceptance speech a couple of weeks ago and has been much quoted – although he must be satisfied that while the hardback editions of The Sense of an Ending set it all off, the parallel digital sales have far exceeded them. You can, it seems, have it all.