On his author's desktop, Mike Heppner has provided some fragments from the text of the early version of THE EGG CODE, ones that didn't necessarily make it into the final version of the book, along with a conversation via email that he had with the book's interior designer, Knopf's own Virginia Tan.
You can thus here both get a taste of the content of the book and some of its characters along with getting a sense of the physical object that contains the story -- its design and creation, what fonts and why, and how that design may affect a reader's experience of the novel itself.
A Conversation on Book Design between Mike Heppner and Virginia Tan
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Heppner
Sent: Friday, June 14, 2002 11:03 AM
To: Virginia Tan
Subject: FWD: egg code design
Hi Virginia-
Once again, thank you so much for your beautiful design for "The Egg Code". Now that I have the book in front of me, I feel even more impressed by your work than I was when we met back in December.
One of the book's main characters is, in fact, a book designer, and the novel itself is concerned with the visual nature of the written word.
So, just as an opening volley, I'll say that when writing the book, some of the most difficult things to put across were the various shifts in time and perspective. Most readers, I think, pick up a book with the expectation that the point-of-view is going to remain consistent throughout, and that chronology of events will move forward in a linear fashion. This, for the most part, isn't the case in "The Egg Code". The difficulty lies in letting the reader know that these shifts in time and perspective are intentional, so that he or she never feels lost or mistrustful of the writer. There were some things that I could do to help--laying an added emphasis at the beginnings and ends of chapters, for example--but I feel that your design was one of the more important factors in maintaining the structure of the book. The all-black dividers between the scenes serve as cues for the reader to take a breath, to mentally reorient themselves before going on to the next scene. Without them, the different chapters would collide with one another, and the structural logic would be lost.
Having said that, I'll throw up a few questions to get the conversation started. How did it feel to design a book that, in large part, deals with book design and typography? To what degree did your design work in conjunction with the design of the jacket? Are there any ideas that you'd considered for the design of "The Egg Code" that you later rejected? What is your philosophy about selecting typefaces and design parameters to highlight a certain text? Lastly (for now, I supppose), what special challenges did this book present from a design perspective? Answer as many as you'd like, and if you have any questions for me, I'd be happy to take a crack at them.
Best wishes to you,
Mike Heppner
-----Original Message-----
From: Virginia Tan
Sent: Friday, June 14, 2002 1:20 PM
To: Mike Heppner
Subject: Fwd:RE: egg code design
Hi Mike, it's nice to hear from you again now that the book is finished.
I don't usually have any contact with an author at the design stage other than through his editor. I think I found it more interesting working on a design for and with an author with an educated eye than the story line including a character who was a designer.
I based my design directly on the jacket sketch which we fortunately had before the interior design had started. I felt the typography of the jacket was strong and that it would be right to carry it to the inside. The greatest challenge, as you said, was to find ways of making changes in time and content apparent to the reader. The basic text font I chose was Electra: a "modern" face, designed in the 1930s by Addison Dwiggins, very readable, and quite distinct in its style. It also has one of the more legible italics which was important because there is a great use of italics in the text. The look of Electra meshed well with the jacket font, Square 40, which I picked up for the display font on the title page, part titles and chapter openings.
Within the text there were many font changes to signal the various "places" the reader was in: transcripts were set in a neutral, slab serif font, Courier which arrived with the advent of desktop publishing, a "computer" typeface; website text was set in Times Roman bold to give it an "editorial" look, the boldness setting it off dramatically from the rest of the text; the psychiatrist's report, also in Times Roman but not bold and with comments in italic, clean and clinical; and a paper set in Chandler 42, sort of a dirty-ribbon typewriter look. And, floating around the background on the display pages, GLORIA 21169 set in Eurostyle, a modern, cool, corporate image.
I didn't have any changes of heart on this design. I think because there were so many things to deal with that I agonized over every detail and worked my way through them, each in consideration of the others to get them as distinct as possible. It's really quite hard to get the reader to see that a font has changed. Many people don't notice differences in type design other than serif or non-serif, light or bold, roman or italic. The choices need to be extreme enough to make the reader take notice but stay within the concept of the design. When I design I chose a typeface for its historic relevance to the topic and the "feel" of the font, masculine, feminine, subtle, pushy, comic, dark . . . I'm trying to create an atmosphere that feels right for the content of the book and achieve the most readable page possible for the length desired.
I guess what I'd like to ask you is, did you have an image in your mind of how your book would look? You obviously have some knowledge of design and typography, I can't imagine you didn't have some concept in mind.
Thanks again for your compliments,
Virginia Tan
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Heppner
Sent: Saturday, June 15, 2002 3:55 PM
To: Virginia Tan
Subject: FWD:egg code design pt2
Actually, when I envisioned the book, I pictured something quite similar to the finished version. My favorite book covers have always been simple; I'm thinking of those classic Knopf covers from the sixties and seventies, where the jacket just shows the title and the author's name against a solid colored background. The cover of "The Egg Code" comes pretty close to that. It's stark, and places a strong emphasis on the title. The black background, coupled with the orange spine and the image of the baby, give the book a whimsically ominous look, which I like. As far as the interior design goes, I knew that there ought to be a few different typefaces as the voice of the narrative changes, but at the same time, I didn't want the typography to become so schizophrenic that it turned into a novelty. I think that what you've managed to do strikes the perfect balance. I still remember cracking up when you first showed me the "Soul-Spirit Cassidy" coffee mug on page 429; here, as elsewhere, the design actually highlights the humor in the text. Lydia's term paper, for example, is a thousand times funnier when printed in that crazy typeface.
It's become almost de rigeur in contemporary fiction to punctuate the text with some sort of illustration or design motif, whether a drawing or a graph or a table or what have you. There's one diagram in "The Egg Code", but that's about it. I think we easily could've gone over the top with the visual gimmickry, but I'm proud to say that we haven't. This leads me to a question about design. Have you noticed that the prevailing philosophy of what makes a good book design has changed over the years? For instance, a teacher of mine once pointed out that the inclusion of the words "A Novel" on the cover of virtually every new work of fiction was a relatively recent phenomenon, as if readers in the past didn't need prompting as to what category of writing they were dealing with. To put it another way, what would "The Egg Code" have looked like if it were published in 1970? 1950? 1930?
-----Original Message-----
From: Virginia Tan
Sent: Monday, June 17, 2002 12:01 PM
To: Mike Heppner
Subject: Fwd:RE: egg code design pt2
I don't pretend to be a book design historian, but I have seen books from the 30s-50s and recognize that they are quite different in look from books today. I also started as a book designer in the late 60s before the death of hot-metal setting and letterpress printing, two factors that I am aware of which contributed to changes in design.
When we designed for hot-metal composition, we had to use one of about 5-10 typefaces that were available from the typesetter which were deemed useable as text fonts and in the sizes that they were cast in at that source. The choices for display faces were a bit larger, perhaps a hundred, and those, as well as any ornaments (dingbats) had to be in the sizes available. We also had to be concerned about the size of the overall type page (that area occupied by running heads, text and folios) as we paid by the amount of lead (literally) that we used. In other words, if we wanted to have a hanging folio, we paid for all the space below or above the position of that folio fro. the top to the bottom of the page because the typepage had to be a rectangle which was locked into a block on the bed of the printing press. The result was that we were far more limited in what could be done typographically prior to photographically and then computer generated typefaces and offset printing technologies.
We were also limited in our design capability to some extent. The time spent on layouts for "The Egg Code" was considerable, but with the aid of the computer, doable. Before desktop designing I had to do layouts by hand, pasting up xeroxes or photocopies or tracings of type, sometimes cut out letter-by-letter, onto a vellum page layout. None of the text fonts used were unavailable (or very similar faces were) in the 30s-60s, but the time it would have taken to convey the design to the editor and author and typesetter would have been pretty extreme. I probably would have settled for something less back then. The illustration of the Egg Code would have had to have been set and drawn and mechanicaled and made into an etched metal plate to be inserted into the linotype type page. The coffee mug font would have been cost-prohibitive as that, too, would have had to be created as art. Or we might have chosen to illustrate the book as we did with Kobo Abé's novels. As a matter of fact, I used the same Electra text for Abé's books.
Today, we have thousands of choices of fonts and ornaments to choose from and can even produce our own. We can do things with and to type that we couln't do with hot metal. But, we have to be careful not to lose sight of what makes a well-designed book-that it be easy on the eyes and represent the content of the book. With so many choices it's easy to go crazy. Just because there are thousands of fonts doesn't mean they are all good for text or that they combine well with one another.
We also have the ability to "illustrate" with our choices of fonts as you pointed out with the type on the coffee mug. I chose a font that actually looked like it had been scratched on clay. It was kind of roughly hand-drawn and had a shadow that gave it depth. We probably owe a lot to advertising and comic books for our perception of type today.
It may be that novels were illustrated more in the past because it gave them more distictness from each other. It may also be that the illustrations died with the popularity of watching television for entertainment.
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Heppner
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2002 4:15 PM
To: Virginia Tan
Subject: FWD:egg code design pt3
You mention something interesting about television, because just as television had an influence on the way that books are designed, so does the Internet, which is something that "The Egg Code" deals with. Not to give myself too much credit--because "The Egg Code" is only one of many contemporary novels reflecting the same trend (Danielewski's "House of Leaves" is perhaps another)--but a book like "The Egg Code" is a good example of how the Internet has changed the way we view all media, including literature. Surely the radical shifts in time and perspective seem a lot less strange to us, having grown accustomed to clicking all around the Information Superhighway. I wonder if you've had any experience designing for electronic media-- Hypertext, for example--and if so, if you liked the experience or found it different in any way from conventional publishing. Are there some types that work best on a computer screen, as opposed to the printed page?
What do you see happening in book design over the next twenty years? Lastly (and I guess I'll let you get back to work now, Virginia), what are your favorite fonts? Least favorite? You know a hell of a lot more about it than I do, but my favorite display font is Frankfurter (of Dunkin Donuts fame); in fact, a friend of mine at Columbia and I used to joke about turning in our theses, set entirely in Frankfurter. I guess that's what they call grad-school humor (or maybe sophomoric).
-----Original Message-----
From: Virginia Tan
Sent: Wednesday, June 19, 2002 10:14 AM
To: Mike Heppner
Subject: Fwd:RE: egg code design pt3
Unfortunately, I haven't had any experience with Hypertext or preparing for electronic media. My surfing experience has mostly been limited to shopping; when I have searched for information I've come to realize there's an art to it that I haven't mastered as yet. I get there eventually if I want it enough, but it's painful.
We've had some philosophical discussions among the designers about where books are going and the state of typography today. It often looks like anarchy but with the way technology changes so quickly, we try to put aside iron-clad viewpoints and allow that the way future generations "see" may not be much like our present experience and good or bad visually will change along with everything else. If magazine and web sites are any indication, it looks as though people are able to take things in in a far more multilayered way than we've been used to. I find it hard to read any type (let alone tiny type) over textured backgrounds, but I see it all the time in magazines. What we used to consider subliminal flashes on the screen are pretty normal viewing time today when reaction times are sharpened by fast-action video games. Books may become like web sites, allowing the reader to chose areas of interest within them and side trips to other books or media while "reading."
I hate to get into favorite or least favorite fonts-there always seems to be a perfect fit for a font you thought was so awful it shouldn't exist. That was true when we had only a hundred or so choices and it's proven true today over and over again. I also have a new favorite font almost daily. I look at type as a medium like oil paint or charcoal. When I design a book I flip through our 600-page font library for just the right font like a chef in a spice shop.
Do you actually like the look of Frankfurter or really the name? I had an author who insisted we set his entire book in 9/14 Univers caps with open letterspacing. To me it seemed hard to keep your eye from jumping lines as there was nearly the same word space as the space between lines (it looked a lot like those find-a-word puzzles in the papaers) but, perhaps that was his intention?
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Heppner
Sent: Thursday, June 20, 2002 1:40 PM
To: Virginia Tan
Subject: egg code design pt4
I do like the look of Frankfurter, along with the name--but then again, I tend to have a somewhat juvenille view of the world. I don't know the names of a lot of my favorite fonts, but I'm sure that I could point them out to you in your big book (which sounds like a lot of fun). There's a font that I associate with psychedelic album covers from the sixties and seventies; it sort of looks like the letters are dripping across the page. HeadShop-14, perhaps?
When I was researching "The Egg Code", I came upon many interesting anecdotes about the development of various typefaces. One of my favorites was about a font called Civilite, which was intended by its designer, Robert Granjon, to serve as the national typeface for France, supplanting the more popular Roman fonts. Unfortunately, Civilite just wasn't legible enough for this purpose, though it remains in use today as a display font. A good text font, it seems, must be self-effacing, and never distracting from the words themselves. Another story dealt with William Morris, famed leader of the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late nineteenth century. Morris' design for his edition of The Canterbury Tales was so elaborate that, in reproductions, you can barely make out the text amidst all the filligree and illustration. And yet, in its own way, Morris' The Canterbury Tales is a beautiful book.
On that note, I'll make one last observation--that while the author and the designer of a book often have very little contact with each other, it's really a very intimate collaboration--in this case, between my words and the beautiful way in which you've framed them. Thank you for collaborating with me, Virginia, and thank you for participating in this discussion.
-----Original Message-----
From: Virginia Tan
Sent: Thursday, June 20, 2002 2:22 PM
To: Mike Heppner
Subject: Fwd:RE: egg code design pt4
Thank you again for the compliment and for this dialogue; it was fun. Re. the Canterbury Tales-sometimes the art of the book is so wonderful in and of itself that it can be forgiven if it isn't exactly readable. And, what else were folk to do in those days but read?
