Arbor ad Folia

Ahh, The Smell of Books

2009-06-13T17:48:00.000-07:00

If you're thinking about a Kindle, and you want to remind yourself of the olden days, look no further.

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

2009-04-03T14:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Finds: Two 19th Century Interlinear Texts

2009-03-24T11:09:00.000-07:00

Chambersburg, PA is really the place to go for interesting book finds. Here are two interlinear translations of Latin authors purchased for a total of $10.00. Both were published by David McKay Company based in Philadelphia.

The first contains Cicero's Four Orations Against Catiline, and was published in 1885. It remains in excellent condition, but unfortunately three leaves appear to have been torn out and placed back in the book unattached. The text block remains sound along with the binding, which is reinforced by headbands. The cover is a kind of flexible hardcover.

The second edition is of the complete works of Virgil, published in 1882. The binding is completely sound and all pages are intact.

Finds: Four Early and Mid-60's Mystery Book Club Editions

2009-03-07T12:52:00.000-08:00

I found three of these at a flea market, and one more at a thrift store. Each of these is a book club edition, hardback octavo. I bought them because of their great covers and thought I'd share them for the same reason. I don't know how good they are, two of them had the front flap bookmarking a page about 100 pages in, if that's any sign.

Die a Little Every Day, by Lawrence Fisher. 1963. Random House Mystery (Book Club Edition). The front flap tells us it's about Virginia Fraley, the "wife of a local bigwig," who couldn't stop after she hit a pedestrian. The cover, designed and drawn by Richard Corson, tells us she proceeds to grab a revolver. I'm not quite sure what the banana leaves are doing there, if that's even what they are.

Philippe Diolé, trans. Peter Green. 1965. Viking. (Book Club Edition). The flaps tell a story of 5 Europeans heading off on an adventure through Africa, four of whom are "bent on helping the Congolese and on rescuing a friend from prision." The fifth, it tells us, is "a tough old African hand" who acts as narrator. This was the first novel of Diolé to be translated into English. Jacket design by James and Ruth McCrea.

Plot it Yourself & Gambit, by Rex Stout. 1959 & 1962. Viking (Book Club Edition). Both of these are in the Nero Wolfe series, which was nominated the Best Mystery Series of the Century at Bouchercon. Design on both is by Bill English.

Hyphenation in the digital age

2009-02-27T17:56:00.000-08:00

if:book looks at the way digital reading devices treat hyphenation, a snippet:

Why don't these reading devices hyphenate their lines if they fully justify them? This isn't, for what it's worth, a problem that affects more than just these devices; plenty of text on the web is fully justified and has no hyphenation. The problem is that hyphenation is trickier than it might initially appear. To properly hyphenate a paragraph, the hyphenator needs to understand at least something about how the language that the paragraph of text is written in works.

Find: Old Oxford Iliad (vol 2)

2009-02-23T20:08:00.000-08:00

This Iliad was found for me at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. This Iliad is in two parts, and I've only got the second, which covers books 13-24. The book consists only of the greek text for the second half of the work and is followed by commentary. I haven't done more than running my eyes over the commentary, but it looks like it is mostly comprised of short glosses of words and hints about construction. There is no critical apparatus at the bottom of the page, and I can't seem to find one in the commentary.

It's quite a handsome volume, inside and out, only a touch bigger than a Loeb. The front cover has a simple stamped-on design. The pages are clean and serious, and the Greek typesetting is standard and clear. It is not stamped with the Oxford Classical Text stamp. There is no introduction, and the small preface is in English, which the OCT seems to have only recently reverted to.

I would be fantastic to have both of these. This one feels nice in the hands, and makes me want to go and translate some of its content.

Details: Oxford, Fourth Edition, Revised, 1968. Ed. D.B. Munro.

The Bilingual Book List

2009-02-19T09:35:00.000-08:00

Bilingual books are often helpful to have and hard to find. We thought we'd create a list of bilingual editions of books, organized by author, to make the process a little easier. We will update as we find more, and you can send suggestions to johnvining@gmail.com. It will start small, but we will be building it up regularly, when time and editions are found.

Note: For Greek or Latin books of the classical period, one should check the 500-volume-large Loeb Classical Library first. Because that collection is so extensive, those editions will not be listed here.

Anselm (St.)
Proslogion -- Notre Dame (0268016976)

Catullus
Poems -- California (H 0520253868 S 0520242645); Mosaic (0889628106)

Dante
La Vita Nuova / The New Life -- Dover (0486453499)

Descartes
The Geometry -- Dover (0486600688)
Discourse on Method -- Notre Dame (0268008701)

Horace
Epistles -- FSG (0374528527)
Odes -- FSG (0374525722)

Montaigne
Essais -- St. Martin's Press (Selected Essays and Writings, 0312546351)

Virgil
Georgics -- FSG (0374530319)
Eclogues -- FSG (0374526966)

Publisher Codes: FSG (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Helpful Book Resources

2009-02-08T13:10:00.000-08:00

I believe that in order to properly discuss books, it would help to have a common language. The following site has a nice, alphabetical glossary of common terms used by book collectors and librophiles everywhere. (I love Latin-Greek hybrids.) It remains a work in process, but it will help you tell the difference between folio (a book about 15 inches high) and a sixtyfourmo (a book about 3 inches high, commonly abbreviated as 64mo).

Another gem that I found was a glossary of binding terms. It covers covers pretty exhaustively. (Am I punny or what?)

Finally, no list would be complete without some helpful book care tips. Most are common sense, but it does have some interesting information.

God says: Make it bilingual

2009-02-06T12:45:00.000-08:00

Two men may die because a translation of the Quran appeared in a major Kabul mosque. It was a small book, printed with money gathered for the purpose, that the two men said would be useful for those who did not know Arabic. For me, the most interesting part:

Many clerics rejected the book because it did not include the original Arabic verses alongside the translation. It's a particularly sensitive detail for Muslims, who regard the Arabic Quran as words given directly by God. A translation is not considered a Quran itself, and a mistranslation could warp God's word.

The clerics said Zalmai, a stocky 54-year-old spokesman for the attorney general, was trying to anoint himself as a prophet. They said his book was trying to replace the Quran, not offer a simple translation. Translated editions of the Quran abound in Kabul markets, but they include Arabic verses.

It's interesting that Christianity hasn't had a strong connection to the original language of the Bible, and, in some cases, it has had a strong attachment to The Vulgate, a 5th century translation into the then-vernacular Latin.

Reza Aslan wrote an interesting article for Slate a few months back, with a good overview of the format of the Quran, and some of the unique problems involved in its translation.

Various news and links for the reader

2009-02-04T08:45:00.000-08:00

News
» Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is in $6.7 billion of debt, and it looks like it won't be able to pay it back. HMH has less revenue now that school districts are cutting down on textbook purchases, and credit rating agencies believe that they will default on the loans. Hachette may step up and buy it.

» Borders, in an effort to try to stay afloat, has named a hedge fund executive as its chairman.

» The Guardian chronicles a set of super-bright antiquarian book thieves.

» Searches for "e book" double over the past year.

Links
» Among the vast universe of hyper-expensive Amazon items (ex. a, b, c) lies Chemical Shifts and Coupling Constants for Silicon-29 (Landolt-Bornstein: Numerical Data and Functional Relationships in Science and Technology). Chemical Shifts is a 463 page hardcover which sells for $8,539.00. Luckily, you'll get free super-saver shipping. (via Marginal Revolution)

» The White House website now has some of its content listed as creative commons.

» The Book Cover Archive has added its 1000th book cover. It has also begun filing its covers by the font used on the cover. Check out the pages for Futura and Trade Gothic.

» Should we organize our books at home by original publication date?

Tyndale's New Testament

2009-02-01T20:09:00.000-08:00

The Bible speaks to the purpose of this blog in a way that I think few other books do. We all have, in our heads, a pretty standard image of how a Bible should look: thin pages, a nice stately hard-cover (maybe cloth) with an embossed, gold-leafed "HOLY BIBLE" emblazoned across the front. This image, I think, affects the common perception of how we feel the Bible should be read; with an air of quiet dignity. The recent boom of study Bibles targeted towards every conceivable demographic is an unfortunate deviation from this trend. A quick browsing of Amazon's Bible Store should make my point clear. The very least that could be said about traditional Bibles is that they presented a work of immense stature with no frills, instead letting the text dominate. Readability was not a consideration; the Word of God was powerful regardless of font size or page thickness. Most newer study and devotional Bibles come loaded with maps, footnotes, and concordances, which in itself is a good thing; we here at Arbor are always in support of well-placed, helpful editorial content, especially with a work as difficult as The Bible. But in nearly every case, the material is overwhelming, often trite, with a cover that invariably features some combination of sunlight, green meadows, and water, unless it happens to be embarrassing and potentially sacrilegious.

Fortunately, noble publishers, like our friends at Yale University Press, have given us a pristine paperback version of William Tyndale's 1534 translation of the New Testament. His Old Testament translation is also available, but incomplete; Tyndale had only translated up to Chronicles when he was burned at the stake. Tyndale was committed to putting forth a translation of the entire Bible in English from the original Greek and Hebrew (previous English versions had been translated from the Latin Vulgate). A leader in the Protestant reformation, his reasons for translating the Bible into English are summed up nicely by John Foxe:

Master Tyndall happened to be in the company of a learned man, and in communing and disputing with him drove him to that issue, that the learned man said: 'We were better be without God's law than the Pope's.' Master Tyndall, hearing that, answered him: 'I defy the Pope and all his laws'; and said: 'If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.'

David Daniell, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of London, is largely responsible for the publication of this wonderful edition. He has also written a biography on Tyndale, published by Yale Nota Bene. Daniell seems to be the leader in a push to bring Tyndale back to prominence, arguing that he is responsible for most of the phrasing found in the King James translation, which still remains as the standard of English Bible translations. In the introduction to the biography, Daniell states that Tyndale's work with The Bible has had a more profound effect on English vernacular than the work of Shakespeare. Phrases such as "giving up the ghost," and "the salt of the earth," are products of Tyndale's English interpretation of the original language. Daniell says that nine-tenths of the wording in King James comes from Tyndale.

If Daniell is not overstating Tyndale's importance, Yale should be applauded for publishing a book of this quality. It treats the Bible with a dignity acceptable for believers (including this one), while providing necessary materials for study, in both an academic and religious context.

When first encountering the book, the reader will notice that it is abnormally wide. However, it is not a cumbersome volume at all, and fits nicely in any bookshelf. In fact, through continued use, I in some ways prefer the the slightly wider presentation (for the record, Amazon calls the width at 5.9 inches, about an inch off the 5 inch standard). I imagine this decision was made to accommodate Tyndale's margin notes, which differentiate specific passages through a brief title (e.g., 'transfiguration,' 'Jesus walked on the sea'). Tyndale also references other Bible passages dealing with the subject matter at hand. This is especially useful in the Gospels, where fulfilled prophecies are supplemented with the relevant OT passages where the prophecy was written.

And this is the remarkable thing about this volume: Except for the modernized spelling (a necessary edit), Yale has published the text exactly as it appeared in the 1611 'Ploughboy Edition' (so named because of the earlier quote). This leaves some wonderful peculiarities from the original text, my personal favorite being the final page, which contains brief scriptural interpretations under the heading "These things have I added to fill up the leaf withal."

The copy, in the same font as the cover, reads well, and the text is not broken into verses, but presented in paragraphs, split into the usual chapters. A heading in the top corner indicates the verse at the beginning and end of the page. The decision to leave verse numbers out makes referencing slightly difficult, but invites the reader to look at the Bible as a narrative, something I encourage. The centered text on the front cover is a pattern that holds throughout for all headings. It's a minor thing, and I suppose consistency is desirable, but I think there's something to be said for variation. However, the centering looks better when the text is bordered by large margins.

I am not as picky about damage to my books as my other two colleagues; I truly believe a book has not been read until it has picked up a coffee stain or two. That said, my copy of Tyndale's New Testament has undergone many trials in the short time I've had it, and held up remarkably. Of the paperbacks I own, I would rank this near the top in terms of durability. The sturdy cover and overall density of the book have kept the inside pages pristine in the wake of two different liquid spills on the outside cover. The pages are also thick enough to stand up to rigorous note-taking (an advantage of not printing the Old and New Testaments together). I did develop a crack in the binding early on, which is troublesome. Yet this is really the only issue I have. It definitely ranks at the top of my recent purchases.

It should also be mentioned that YUP has one of the better publisher logos out there:

466pp. ~ 5.9 x 7.9 ~ $22.50 ~ Amazon ~ Publisher

Harvard Book Store bought by techie

2009-01-31T12:13:00.000-08:00

The Boston Globe reports (or, reported, I'm late on this) that the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge has changed hands, and is now owned by Jeff Mayersohn, who previously worked in tech. The Harvard Book Store, which isn't officially affiliated with the College across the street, is a really nice store. I must admit, however, that I go directly to the basement of the store, where all of the used books are kept. It isn't huge, but they tend to have a few books worth checking out. Generally, there is a handful of Loebs and Oxford Classical Texts which are satisfyingly marked down. That is also where I got my rather silly-looking Duckworth edition of Marinone's All the Greek Verbs and a cheap copy of H.G. Wells' Island of Dr. Moreau. The Globe says:

Mayersohn's former career as an Internet pioneer is somewhat ironic, considering that the advent of online retailing - such as Amazon.com - has contributed to the downfall of the independent bookstore.

I've always imagined that smaller bookstores would go all-used, leaving the new books to Amazon, and freeing up shelf-space for the books of Kindlers and the like. It seems to me that used books is really where bricks and mortar matter.

The Divine Comedy: Bollingen Series

2009-01-30T21:56:00.000-08:00

For The Divine Comedy, both John and I read the Bollingen Series Edition, published by Princeton University, from the gates of hell to the divine light of heaven. The Comedy stands out among program books in terms of variety. There are probably six or seven accepted translations, nearly all of them published with a facing-page Italian to go with the English translation. This prose translation is done by Charles S. Singleton, a famous Dante scholar. His translation is described, weirdly, on the back cover of Inferno as being "much the most satisfactory one I know." I had already bought the book when I noticed this ringing endorsement, leaving me mostly baffled with my choice.

What originally drew me to the book was the professional cover design, and the fact that Singleton's extensive commentary was sequestered in a separate volume, leaving me with a text unencumbered by the bulk that such a thorough commentary would bring (I ended up checking out the commentaries from the school library). This commentary, however, would probably be the main reason to invest in the Bollingen series. For my purposes, it was too much - I did not have the time to read 600+ pages of commentary for each book. But for anyone doing a close study, this edition seems the way to go. My comment that the book appears "scholarly" is more than just an artifice. At one point, the texts and commentaries were available together, but these editions are now out of print.

That said, there was some sloppy cover design that kept me from being confident that I had selected the right book. The three books all share the same conceptual design of a gray field with white serif text and white border. The books are differentiated primarily by the color of the bar (which extends, broken by the white border, to the spine and back cover). As Roger's post indicated, differentiating the books through color seems a precarious undertaking, although I think both Inferno and Paradiso were colored in a way that conveyed the mood of the book I was reading - the guiding principle of all good cover art. For Purgatorio, I wasn't so certain, but I don't know what color I would suggest in the place of the purple they chose.

The major issue in the cover design, though, does not fully reveal itself until you place these books on a bookshelf (or lay them out side by side, as pictured above). The two glaring issues are clear:
1) The tone of gray darkens as you move through the books.
2) The colored bars are not evenly aligned.

Both of these mistakes are inexplicable. I could possibly understand the uneven alignment of the bars if they ascended from Inferno to Paradiso, in some way symbolizing the ascent Dante himself makes. But they don't. Purgatorio stands conspicuously above the rest. The darkening gray makes even less sense. These are unfortunate consistencies in what I think is, conceptually, an excellent cover design. I'm not familiar with any other books in the Bollingen Series, but I think Princeton, like all publishers with such high academic standing, puts out good-looking academic works. It's an unfortunate blight.

The font that appears on the front is the same one for the text throughout, and I had some trouble with it. It's a little flat, and the thickness makes reading difficult on the eyes. Also, there were parts of the text with faded printings - another sign of sloppiness in the overall publication. I did think the text was well arranged, giving copious note-taking space, and the English followed the Italian so closely that cross-referencing across the page was a breeze.

The decision I made is not one I regret, as the other editions all had equal faults. It's just disappointing that some better design oversight might have made this an edition to savor.

Inf. 392pp. ~ 5.1 x 7.9 ~ $19.95 (c. $40.00) ~ Amazon ~ Publisher
Purg. 392pp. ~ 5 x 7.8 ~ $24.95 (c. $45.00) ~ Amazon ~ Publisher
Par. 389 pp. ~ 5.4 x 8.2 ~ $24.95 (c. $45.00) ~ Amazon ~ Publisher

Oxford's Divine Comedy

2009-01-30T20:38:00.000-08:00

I stuck out from my compatriots and bought the Sinclair translation of Dante Alighieri published by Oxford University Press. The three softcover volumes feature facing pages of the original Italian text and Sinclair's prose translation, with endnotes and a critical essay at the end of each canto (or chapter for the uninitiated). I found the editions to be of solid construction, and very compact for their size (about 450 pages each). The pages were totally a bit thicker that Bible leaf, but were still totally opaque and very smooth, making it pleasing to the touch and no problem for taking notes. The fonts were pleasing in general. The covers were thick laminated paper and allowed the book to lie flat easily and easy to flex for note taking.

While structurally sound, the outer cover designs left a bit to be desired. The front covers all featured Dore illustrations from each of the respective levels, which contrasted sharply with the rather gaudy colors of the binding. The Inferno turned out traffic cone orange, Purgatorio was a brownish yellow, and Paradiso can best be described as plum. OUP's decision to use primarily white text on a black and white image was also not the wisest choice.

In general, I enjoyed both translation and presentation, but be careful to make sure the spines line up, my Paradiso volume is jus a bit offset, which ruins some of the shelf appeal.

450pp. ~ 5.4 x 7.9 ~ $19.99 per volume ~ Amazon ~ Publisher

Doré's illustrations for the Divine Comedy

2009-01-30T20:11:00.000-08:00

Above is Gustave Doré's representation of one of the giants in hell, placing Dante and his guide Virgil on to the ground. Doré's drawings end up on a lot of the covers for the Divine Comedy, since, I presume, they are in the public domain, and completely wonderful. Dover publishes all of the illustrations for the Divine Comedy, in one 9 x 12 inch volume. Below Doré etches the Hypocrites.

Dover, as it usually is, is simple about the book. They put on of the illustrations on the cover (pictured below) with simple text. There are 136 plates, picturing Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso and Dante himself. Illustrations are both horizontal and vertical on the page. Below each one is a title, reference to the passage in the Comedy, and a quotation of a few lines from the Longfellow translation. The book lies flat comfortably and the printing is sharp.
Inferno, when read poorly, seems like an endless list of people who have done things wrong. Because of this, a visual attachment is immensely helpful, and Doré provides a really fantastic set of them. There are 75 drawings for the Inferno, the next 43 are for Purgatorio, and there are only 18 for Paradiso. This is, of course, beacuse the text moves from people endlessly tortured—one Ugolino must gnaw on the face of his enemy for eternity—to ever-increasing quantities of light, which make for less-excited drawings no doubt.

144pp. ~ 9 x 12 softcover ~ $14.95 ~ Amazon ~ Publisher

Arbor ad Folia

2009-01-30T19:54:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Arbor ad Folia, a review of book design from the perspective of the reader. We plan to look into how a book's physical form affects the reader's experience. People will tell you: Don't judge a book by its cover. We'd like to tell you: You haven't the option.

So, welcome to Arbor ad Folia.