Bookshapes - February/March 1979

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. Stop Laughing, This Is Serious: A social history of Australia in cartoons, by Jonathan King. Cassell Australia. Typeset by Modgraphic; printed in Singapore. Stan Cross’s 1933 cartoon of two dangling ‘skyscrapers’ riggers, one hanging by the trousers of the other, pulled down to his ankles, has my vote for the outstanding dustjacket image of 1978 (as Harry Butler’s In the Wild had it for 1977). But this unforgettable drawing, whose caption has given the editor his title, has not found a place in the book itself. Do the publishers think that the dustjacket is actually part of the book? Most of the drawings have necessarily been reproduced from library copies of the newspapers in which they appeared. The soupiness of some of them suggests that they were shot on tone rather than line film. Haste is evident in the way the book is put together, for captions as well as drawings have been reproduced, and at the reductions required by the layout, some of the print is unreadable without a magnifying glass. The Anzacs, by Patsy Adam-Smith. Nelson. Typeset by Modgraphic; printed in Hong Kong. The commitment of Australian publishing to the illustrated book is strikingly exemplified in Nelson’s treatment of this lengthy narrative, which has been designed in a crown-quarto format, with pictures at nearly every opening. A 29 cm measure in 11 pt Sabon makes a thin grey line, and the feeling of attenuation is heightened by the occasional insertion of marginal illustrations that are a trivial 36 mm wide. How bored one gets with books in which some pictures are at the generous width of the text or the full page, while others, apparently no less important, are tucked into the fore-edge like postage stamps. Verticals, beware! It is your fate to be banished to the margins! I was struck by the muddiness of some of the old War Memorial photographs in this book, and look up Bean and Gullett’s Photographic Record of the War (Angus & Robertson, 1923), in which many of them appear. I have to report that the Hong Kong offset of 1978 has lost a wealth of shadow detail that was captured by the mediocre Australian letterpress of fifty-five years ago. Compare for example, the ‘Bakery on Imbros’ on page 115 of The Anzacs with the illustration no. 165 in Bean and Gullett. Chauvel of the Light Horse, by A.J. Hill. Melbourne University Press. Set by the Dova Type Shop; printed by Wilke. This offset book respects an old letterpress practice: the words on a text stock (Burnie MF), the photographs on separate sections of art paper. There is still something to be said for this way of doing things. As illustration pages are limited, photographs tend to be better chosen, and they gain in brilliance from being printed on art paper. The handful of halftones in this book have more impact than the countless photographs of The Anzacs, or so it seems to me. This is a well-printed book that upholds the high standards to be expected of Wilke. In the copy that came my way, the front-end paper protrudes 1 mm beyond the case, but I consider that an unforeseeable mishap, not avoidable carelessness. One or two blemishes mar an excellent production; the page numbers in the prelims are in different sizes, and the titles of the prelims themselves (Preface, Abbreviation, etc.) vary by up to 8 mm in their drop from the trim. I thought it strange to publish a $25 biography today with a varnished but not laminated dustjacket; still, this seemed to me a well&shy;made, inviting book. Social Sketches of Australia, by Humphrey McQueen. Penguin Books. Printed in Hong Kong. I thought that this big paperback, like many books to be seen today, would have gained in visual appeal if it had been illustrated with more restraint. Photographs and reproductions of old newspaper advertisements compete against the text in a restless, crowded layout. Many of the ads, taken from newspaper broadsheets, are squeezed into the margins at a width of only 20 mm. Political and other portraits appear in the same thumbnail form, and in some cases, for no reason I could discern, there are portrait captions but no portrait. Holt, Gorton, McMahon, and Fraser are among the faceless men, but no prejudice can be inferred from this, as Chifley and Whitlam are also missing, while Menzies is in twice. Correction lines in the text announce themselves in unintended semi-bold, and some of them have been stripped in out of square. An air of haste and inattention surrounds this unlucky production. Some Early Australian Bookmen, by George Ferguson. Australian National University Press. Designed by Adrian Young; printed by Griffin Press. More and more Australian publishers are cultivating the market of the limited edition; this book (72 pages, 1000 copies, $21) is the second such production from ANU Press in about a year. I shall have more to say another time about limited-edition fever, and for the moment will only confess that I find it disturbing, and that I think there must be many whose traditional ideas about limited editions are being challenged by a wilderness of low-quality general books on which an air of valuable scarcity is conferred by a declaration of the print-run. This is a well-designed book, printed by letterpress in Monotype Bembo on Glastonbury Antique, with undistinguished illustrations printed in sepia by offset (the beard of a dim David Scott Mitchell looks like a swarm of bees). I did not care for the reproductions of old title pages that give no indication of the original margins, and I thought it would have been more sympathetic to Bembo to use old-style rather than lining figures. The dark-brown panel on the title page overpowers the names of the author and publisher, which are printed not too legibly in black. But this is a pleasing book, and is worth looking at for its handsome proportions and for the well&shy;judged placement of the text on the page. The spine blocking in two colours on tan canvas is excellent. I now await with interest Melbourne University Press’s Norman Lindsay blockbuster Micomicana (527 copies; $500), which is due in late February, and which is announced in a fine prospectus tarnished only by a prose style reminiscent of the Franklin Mint.

Martin Em

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