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This week: research! I have an idea for a chapter in the book all about Trajan’s Column so I need to bury myself in thick typographic tomes with silky paper stock. There’s so much I don’t know about this subject though that it’s sort of overwhelming.

The reason why I’m writing this new chapter for the book is sort of why I wrote anything for CSS-Tricks: sure, there is endless stuff written about this one tiny subject but nothing has quite captured how I feel about it or put things in their correct place historically, typographically. There’s a thousand ways to tell a story but in my dumb romantic brain there is only one correct sequence to a story well told. And Trajan’s Column doesn’t have that story yet; all I can find on the subject of the letters on this stone block in Rome is either too technical or too whimsical. There’s nothing that quite captures how I feel about them, which is a bit more complicated than what I’ve read.

But, look, they are undeniably beautiful:

If one fateful night you find yourself downloading Unity and watching a tutorial about making a loathsome version of Flappy Bird with your cat’s face as the main character, then it’s important to note that this is not how you make a book. In fact, the fastest way not to make a book is to make a videogame instead.

That’s where I found myself this week; diving through the Unity docs and learning how to make assets and slapping music into a project, trying to figure out how GameObjects work and how it can all be tied together with scripts in c#. It reminds me of that first electric time of learning something new like InDesign or when HTML and CSS clicked for me. After a few hours it felt like all the potential things I could make had grown exponentially big chained door labelled MAKE A VIDEO GAME was bolted shut but with a few hours of clicking around and prototyping, the chains snapped right off and the door burst open.

All that’s stopping me from making a video game, I know now, is time and discipline. That’s liberating; the potential of all these connections I’m threading together here.

After I compiled the game and exported it out of Unity, the icon sat calmly on my desktop. I waited a beat before clicking the icon because it felt bigger than publishing a website or an essay or anything else I’ve done before.

Book-making pals!

Last week I asked Marcin somewhere around the two hour mark of the Shift Happens livestream to show us his database; it’s perhaps the second most impressive artifact he’s made after the book itself (which just crossed the $500,000 mark over on Kickstarter with more than 3000 backers). Marcin has poured countless hours into this database archiving images and notes, compiling an enormous hive-mind of keyboard-related ephemera.

Over the years this database has become an artificial co-collaborator so that Marcin can easily cross-reference and draw connections between unlikely things. It’s sort of like having your own personal search engine, a tailor-made wiki built just for you.

Friends!

This here newsletter is about the terrible first drafts, the design slip-ups, the misprints, and all the tiny failures that go into making a beautiful printed book, so it feels somewhat cruel to mention Marcin Wichary’s Shift Happens in the same breath here. Because Marcin has made something wonderful.

Shift Happens is a book full of stories—keyboards, typewriters, and the centuries of weird experiments that went into them—but it’s also a wonderfully researched book filled with gorgeous photographs and material scooped up from dusty archives. Marcin mentions this in a post all about what his book means to him:

You can read my book’s words and completely ignore the photos, and hopefully you’ll have a great time. You can also buy it just for the photos – for yourself or as a gift – and you will enjoy it also. But the best course of action is, of course, doing both.

Friends!

Aza Raskin once said that great design isn’t about thinking outside the box, but finding the right box to think inside of instead. And that’s precisely what I’m trying to find with all the prototypes that I’ve been making lately; what’s the right trim size and how do I want this book to feel? Once the container is set in stone I can make a lot of other decisions much more easily, from the design of the cover, to the writing of each chapter. But now, thankfully, I think I’ve got it.

I’ve found the format for this little book of mine.

A few weeks ago I sent off designs for two prototypes to Lulu and on Friday I got the physical copies back in the mail. One hardcover and one soft, both of them in the new format of 5.83 x 8.27 inches and, well, they’re just perfect. Here’s how they stack up against the other prototypes in order from first to last:

Friends! Barnes and Noble nerds! E-pals!

If you ask most folks who start work on a book they’ll likely say they started on the first draft, then the second, then the third. They’d talk about chapters and word counts. They’d describe things in an ordered way, focusing at first on the text in the book. Whenever I read about how writers or designers tackle their work it’s always very organized like this—there’s a step one, step two...—and everything is ordered and building on the momentum from the day before.

But this isn’t how I work. Every project I work on I find it hard to focus on one thing at a time. I jump from the writing when I get bored to then fixing the CSS of the website, haphazardly then searching for fun domain names, or iterating on the letter spacing of chapter headings, or playing around with the hex values endlessly. There’s a certain point where things click and the text becomes easier to write, but in every project I’ve come to accept a certain degree of faffery at the beginning. I wish things were more ordered! I wish I could focus on the draft of this book! But alas, I get bored and my attention drifts.

So this week I gave in and began exploring ideas for the cover. What’s the visual language? What do we want to tell folks right away? Well, I didn’t treat it like a regular design exercise like I would with my day job. I don’t care for objectives! I don’t care about impact! I just want to sit on my couch, listen to some Fred again.. boiler room sessions, and goof around in Figma.

“What are you, little book? Reveal yourself!”

It is late on Monday evening and I’m working on prototype four and five. I want two prototypes to test alongside each other with two paper types, two formats, and two alternative quick cover ideas to compare side-by-side. But, I get to thinking; if the format of this book is entirely up for debate right now then why not everything else? As I set the cover and the spine with Adventures in Typography I begin to hesitate. Is that a good name for this book anymore? I watch my cursor blink up and down and then I realize no, it’s not. It works for the title of a newsletter but it doesn’t feel right for this project and it hasn’t for quite some time. The title is too long and cludgey; thick, like treacle. I want something simpler, something lighter, something without quite so much baggage.

What else could this book be?

I’m rethinking this thanks in part to Delight, a tiny book of tiny essays published in 1949 by the British novelist J.B. Priestly. I’ve been reading this book slowly over the last few days and I’m somewhat obsessed with how lightweight the writing, how it almost feels so easy that the words click-clack together that it feels careless. It’s a book made up of extremely brief chapters, each a description of something that Priestly found delightful in life; fountains and seaside towns and tobacco and tobacco and tobacco. I’ve never read anything of Priestly’s before but this kind of lightness in his writing reminds me of Calvino and Reufle and Douglas Adams. There’s a playfulness in every bit of every page, culminating in that title that’s so simple that it might almost be too simple: Delight.

Book design looks easy, I thought to myself. The year is 2011 and I’m sat in a college lecture hall, ignoring a talk about poetry. Instead I’m reading about book design on my laptop; verso, recto, spread. These spells and incantations look so simple! To make a beautiful book all you have to do is gather the fanciest fonts and colors together, learn a bit of graphic design, select from an elegant platter of paper stocks and then, finally, you just have maniacally emboss every letter on the cover.

That’s book design.

It wasn’t until many years later that what I considered book design was really just cover design. Whereas before I’d walk into a book store, look at the cover designs, and roll my eyes — Amateurs — now I began ignoring the covers, opening up the books to the center and examining the columns of text inside.

Soon after, I realized two things:

Friends!

Yesterday I finished another draft of a chapter and it felt great, fantastic, life-restoring. I closed my laptop as if I had just led a cavalry charge into battle and in my head I began giving a rousing speech to the lads: On this day we have made something, no matter how small! Progress has been taken from the jaws of the abyss! Justice has been restored to this realm!

But then I zoomed out, and, well. I saw a flash of just how much work is left. The full scope of this project dawned on me and all the colors in the room and all the anxieties in my head began to spiral and blur together into a hallucinogenic rainbow tapestry of self loathing. This is so much work! How am I ever going to finish this thing? I’m barely halfway on a tiny, tiny book. Is the writing really any good? How do I know if anyone is going to care about this project?

And, worst of all: is this book even worth finishing?

Book pals! Titans of the publishing industry! Dad!

I humbly apologize for the late entry. Last week I was moving into a new apartment and it was a lot more physically and emotionally draining than I expected. But enough of that for now: the desk is in, the books are on their shelves, and the new place is already feeling cozy and warm, the neighborhood perfect for trekking around and thinking about the book.

So, a few updates. Over the weekend I tidied up the website a little bit. It needs a lot of work still but now at least I’ve archived every post of this newsletter for safe keeping. I think unlike other newsletters I’ve worked on that are very ephemeral, I’m starting to see this project as being mostly an archive for myself, a notebook of why I made decisions and what problems I bumped into. The website still needs a lot of polish, like the the visuals are still half baked, but this is a good reminder that Magnet by Inga Plönnigs is a beautiful typeface and does most of the heavy lifting without any polish required.

On the book front, I’ve had prototype #002 kicking around on my desk for the last couple of weeks. It’s...interesting!

Friends!

The perfect book exists and I have found it. Lost for years in the darkest corner of my bookshelf, it only appeared as I was packing things up in boxes yesterday. It scattered across the floor after it bounced out of my hands full of good cheer, clearly overwhelmed with joy and desperate for attention as it couldn’t wait to be held and read and cared for again. Picking the book up off the floor, I had an incoherent rush of feelings though: the book is easy to hold! It lies flat if you open it up at the center! The pages are woven together like silk!

It is a delicate, beautiful, perfect thing. The format, the size, the margins, everything. Perfect. And it is, of course, Fred Smeijers’ Counterpunch.

Friends!

I was on the hunt for blackletter typefaces this week whilst doing some research for the book and I stumbled upon a Polish collection of mythologies from the 16th century called Prawdziwe wyobrażenie trojga dzieci which Ada Pawlikowska designed for her doctoral dissertation.

I think it’s so very beautiful. Just look at this thing!

This week: editing, editing, editing.

Also: I’m not-so-patiently waiting for Prototype 002 to arrive in the mail so I’ve been cranking out as much writing as I can in the time between looking for a new apartment and getting slammed into a pale thin dust by stress. But, after several coffees-worth of reviewing all this, I can see that we have 26 stories in total and a lot of them need a good amount of work.

These large red ❌s here remind me that a story needs my attention…

Words written: 1,052
Designs designed: 4? I dunno man, that’s a dumb metric

What happened this week? A few things!

That’s the first question someone asked me when I told them about this project: “who’s this book for?” And, I have to admit, I didn’t know how to reply. Suddenly the wind was knocked right out of my tiny boy boat sails and I began to spiral...

Welp, I don’t think this book is for anyone?

There’s the obvious answer here—and this might be mistaken for hubris—but, um, this book is just for me! I want this thing to exist because I want to read it and I sort of don’t care if another soul picks up the book. Sure, it would be great to make it onto the New York Times Best Sellers list and wash myself with gold and praise forever and turn this tiny boat boy into a giant motorized catamaran but hey this is a book about fonts we’re making here. We’re not going viral with this thing.

But who’s this book for, besides me? That’s a tough question.

This is Robin, writing to you from a wind-swept, misty cafe, and I have news of the book: a tiny white object appeared on my doorstep last week. It’s a delicate little thing, half written and half designed, but it happens to be the very first prototype of Adventures in Typography, the book that this here newsletter is building towards.

Well, okay. This is just the first prototype and there are many, many sharp edges that have to be sanded down over a dozen or so prototypes in the future. But this moment requires celebration: the project is real! I can point and prod and poke at the details, no matter how embarrassing those details might be. I can show friends and get their initial thoughts, giving myself a launchpad to push off in one direction or another.

It’s a slim volume, just shy of 150 pages which makes it about the size of a novella right now. That’ll expand with time but perhaps only by a dozen pages or so.

A little pause this week. I haven’t had much energy to sit in front of the book and start the next phase of work since I know I’ll need at least a full day of concentration to write the next chunk.

The momentum has most certainly stuttered this week but the book has been in the back of my mind as I’ve been reading The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji. I haven’t finished it yet—no spoilers!—but it has this marvelous thing that I find so very rare: real, honest to goodness speed. I’m drawn into this thing right away, waiting for when the inevitable bomb will go off. Perhaps it won’t! But it all feels like it’s heading somewhere exciting and that’s why I’m turning the pages so quickly.

Thinking of it now, detective novels and murder mysteries are of course entirely dependent on this kind of movement because if you stop and take a breath in the story then the mystery will be obvious, the conclusion less than satisfying. You need that breakneck speed to razzle dazzle the reader, to smoke bomb them in the hopes that you can come up with something amazing just before the smoke clears.

The most important thing in the world is a prototype. It doesn’t matter if you’re making a book, a website, a billion dollar app or a rocket ship, you can sit there and have a calendar full of meetings and pat yourself on the back about how great this detailed plan is, but all that work will turn to nothing without a prototype.

After thinking about the format last week I knew I needed to get something in my hands right away. Yet the great thing about a prototype is that it can be crude, childish, embarrassing but, most important of all, easy to make: the best kind are spun up within a few hours.

So last night I got book angry, hopped out of bed after binge-watching Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (holy shit, what a great show) threw some quick mockups into InDesign, typeset everything in my trusty LfA Aluminia, and on my black and white printer I had it done in a minute flat.

In the kitchen, and in the dark, I rush-cut the pages down to the right size and here they were: all the problems with margins and typography and my kinda half-baked writing…

Books about typography are giant, table-sized behemoths. They take up all the space in the room—the attention is on them—so that you can see the letters close-up and zoom in to the smallest details. Big illustrations and graphics are then required and so these books are mostly dense tomes rich with information.

Jaroslav Benda: Typographic Designs and Letterforms is one such magical thing. It consumes your whole field of view with details about this man’s work.

“A book can be inspired by nearly anything,” writes Naomi Huffman in How To Make A Book, “...a seemingly stray thought you can’t shake, a lyric, an overheard conversation, another book. Whatever it is, turn it over again and again and again in your mind. Watch it. Listen to it. Be skeptical of it. Let it bother you. Most importantly, take notes.”

In that post, Naomi gathers a few prolific writers to ask them what the secret is to writing a book—and a lot of the advice is great! But one thing I’ve always felt that’s missing in all this advice about books and publishing is what not to do: where are the fuck ups along the way? What chapters did they cut out altogether? Where are the arguments with the book designer, the anxiety around release dates and online marketing and the book tour?

In short: where’s the drama?

That’s what this newsletter is for. I’m going to write a book and along the way you’ll see everything: the first draft, the sketches and diagrams, the bad prototypes. And because I’m not a book designer by trade then this newsletter is where I’ll learn an awful lot about books and make an awful lot of mistakes. At any time you can hit reply and give me feedback, advice, thoughts, kind words of encouragement, or a brutal, devastating critique if I so happen to choose the wrong paper stock. But please be kind.