Bookshapes

In a spirit of optimistic support for the APBA’s Book Design Awards, publishers entered 233 books for the 1981 competition, the thirtieth to be held. The judges made short work of their hopes. ‘Best book’ awards were made in only two of seven categories – children’s books and the section for best jacket or cover, won by The Frog and the Pelican (Methuen) and Homesickness (Penguin) respectively. Nineteen other books won commendations. The APBA Andrew Fabinyi prize for the book that best solved problems posed by content or production was awarded to Australia in Figures (Penguin). The judges withheld the $1000 Joyce Nicholson Prize for the Best Book of the Year, as a mark of their disappointment at the standard of entries.

The first book of yet another publisher of limited editions deserves our close attention. The cult of the limited edition has many followers in Australian publishing today. Some of them work on the principle that if you limit the edition, you can delimit the price, and that collectors and librarians will not be able to resist, even if there is more ‘Dulux’ than ‘deluxe’ to the style of your production.

A letterpress book, one of the last of the tribe! I picked it up with pleasure. A clean design (title-page a bit subdued, perhaps?); very consistent and even printing, with the pages beautifully backed up; the creamy Burnie MF a pleasant change from the whiter than white offset papers that we live with nowadays; the halftones (printed by offset) unexciting but passable. Pleasure turned to disappointment when I looked closer. The type (10pt Linotype Baskerville) must have been set from a worn old fount, for in most slugs there are fine hairlines of ink between the characters, and there are some characters in the magazine –notably a lowercase ‘e’ – that are out of alignment at their every appearance. Good presswork almost makes up for all this, but the Baskerville fount, which I am sure must have set many an OUP book in its day, is due for retirement. The book has coloured endpapers, to which I am partial, but printed color is no substitute for using a colored stock, as there are sometimes hints of streakiness. 2 picas. 

The New South Wales Prices Commission has been listening to complaints that books are overpriced. I meanwhile have been looking at some of the award-winning and commended books in the Children’s Book Council 1978-79 competition, and I am here to say that whatever may be claimed about some kinds of book, children’s books are cheap. It is amazing.

It has been suggested that ‘picas’ should again be awarded to books discussed in this column, on the scale of excellence of nought to three established by my predecessor, Peter Pica. Well, I will try; but I point out that what I am looking at is the success or otherwise of books in their own field; I am not trying to relate different kinds of books to one immutable standard of design and production, even if it were possible to do so. I am conscious of the fallibility of judgements like these.

I hope to write about the ABPA’s 1979–80 design awards in this issue, but my deadline has arrived and news of the winners has not. From the eligible titles that I have seen, my own choice as Book of the Year is Emily Hope’s The Queen of the Nágas, published in an edition of 500 copies by Nomad Press, of Melbourne, and distributed by William Collins.

The Australian book is by and large a good-looking piece of merchandise. Surveying the pile of Christmas titles that thudded onto my desk right till the end of the year, I am struck by the air of careful grooming that most of them possess. Could one have said that of the Christmas books of 1968? Sophistication and confidence have advanced hand in hand and taken Australian publishing over. However, some books that I have looked at closely have proved disappointing in points of detail. It seems that the abundant skill which is at work in making books is often hard-pressed by the need for high productivity. Too little time, too many slips showing. To distinguish between avoidable carelessness and the unforeseeable mishap is a problem for the reviewer of book production.

At the presentation of the Australian Book Publishers Association design awards for 1977–8 in Sydney last April, during a cocktail party at the association’s annual conference, I was struck by the inattentiveness of the gathering. A representative of the P&O Company, awarding for the first time a prize of $1000 for the book of the year (The Birds of Paradise and Bower Birds, published by William Collins, designed by Derrick I. Stone), could scarcely be heard above the party chatter. It seemed that many publishers who were present did not feel obliged to pay attention, their complacency abetting rudeness. One could almost hear them saying, ‘Well, yes, this was a disaster area up till the sixties, but we’ve fixed it now. Everyone knows that Australian books today are the equal of the world’s best.’