An Open Letter to Green Lion Press: Bane of my Existence

Dear Green Lion Press,

I am currently a sophomore at St. John's College, Annapolis. I have
purchased several Green Lion titles, including Euclid's Elements
(paperback), Aristotle's Metaphysics (paperback), and On the Soul
(paperback), and Apollonius' Conics (hardcover). Generally, I have found
the translations to be of fine quality, and the notes are helpful,
especially the use of non-transliterated Greek.

However, I have pretty serious grievances with both the aesthetics and
the construction of your books. I will start with construction, as I
believe that is the more dire issue. I was excited to buy the hardback
Apollonius because it is more attractive on the outside and I assumed it
would last longer than the paperback. I was wrong. My $44 investment now
has a loose hinge for the front cover, the glue for the headbands
failed, and they have become completely detached from the pages. The
signatures are bound together very loosely, making for awkward page
turning, especially when switching from one signature to another.

I have also had a consistent problem with your paperbacks where the
first signature begins to come out of the binding.

I do not know how these issues can be rectified, but they need to be.

Now on to aesthetics. Apollonius' Conics looks nice on the outside, but
I think that's the only one of my Green Lion purchases that I would term
"attractive". Use of garish colors and distorted closeups from Raphael's
"The School of Athens" does not appeal to me.

Inside, your typefaces look like the ones I could find by default in any
word processing application. I applaud your focus on giving the reader
plenty of room for notes and providing clear text, these are two reasons
I have bought your books, but using Arial font is just ugly.

In my opinion, muted, solid colors for covers and new fonts would take
care of the aesthetics.

Thank your for your time, I hope you take my comments and observations
in the spirit they were given: constructive criticism. I also want to
emphasize that I applaud your mission to keep these texts available for
reasonable prices and in a format that allows the reader to really
engage with them. However, these issues have come up with such
consistency that I would not be a repeat customer unless I saw some
improvement.

Thank you again,

Roger Robertson Jr.