Digital Book Design and Publishing - Review

Douglas Holleley - www.clarellen.com

(Elmira Heights, NY: Clarellen, 2001)

(Rochester, NY: Cary Graphic Arts Press, 2001)

As computers went from wooden housing to plastic casing and eventually acquired a place on the desktop, they extended a promise that individual publishing had made a giant leap from cut and paste on the kitchen table to a more professional production environment. Anyone with aspirations of authorship and a relatively modest budget could acquire the tools necessary to effectively put their thoughts between covers, but titles without ISBN markings have not increased proportionally with the number of computers sold. Digital Book Design and Publishing by Douglas Holleley does provide an indication of sorts as to why externally hosted home pages have proliferated above and beyond personal libraries. Over a period of two years Holleley exclusively wrote, illustrated and designed this book using the very software and methods it covers, and his undertaking provides a wonderful merger of idea and expression to speak of a labor over narrative that contrasts with the instant pre-programmed aesthetic usually promoted by the digital.

Conceived as a practical guide within a conceptual framework, Digital Book Design and Publishing outlines a process of bookmaking that extends over 12 clearly defined chapters. Starting with the very nature of the book and proceeding to address the process of design and typography before setting up the first pages, this book on books then turns to cover the use of applications such as QuarkXPress and Adobe Photoshop before the final chapters bring text and images together in printing and binding. Unlike generic software manuals that are usually focused on the capabilities of the application, this publication approaches each tool with a stated intent, and the workflow from maquette to bound volume is not significantly diverted by the many distractions of the bit-stream. With a specific task at hand and in mind, Holleley maintains his focus throughout by concentrating on what the computer can do instead of getting lost in what it does. As such, Digital Book Design and Publishing will not bore you with the intri cacies of novelty features buried deep in submenus or hidden behind obscure shortcuts, but provide enough information to make you conversant in the principal functions that remain productive for their bookmaking purpose.

Overall, however, there is a bittersweet irony to this title. Digital has exchanged letters for bytes and the usual hardcovers are now replicated in various models of e-book hardware, each gadget battling for its own proprietary format to display texts. Combined with the growing use of PDF in the information flow, our reduced demand for pulp fictions and facts should really have saved dwindling rainforests a long time ago. On one printed page, the traditional book is set to proliferate through desktop publishing, and on the other, lifted from the screen, it appears destined to be replaced by these technologies. Digital Book Design and Publishing carefully circumscribes this threat of erasure in an emerging moment by placing the process of bookmaking in a wider context. Like a literal palimpsest on the digital literati it offers a conventional philosophy of the book on pages displaying new thoughts on writing.

Elements of Black and White Photography: The Making of Twenty Images, by George E. Todd. Amphoto (imprint of Watson-Guptill Publications, 770 Broadway, New York, NY 10003)/128 pp./$29.95 (sb).

Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence, by Peter Burke. Cornell University Press/224 pp./$35.00 (hb).

for nothing changes... yet, photographs by Todd Walker. Nexus Press/26 pp./price unavailable (hb). Gay Freedom and Crossover Stardom: James Dean, Mel Gibson and Keanu Reeves, by Michael De Angelis. Duke University Press/286 pp./price unavailable (sb).

The Geometry of Innocence, by Ken Schies. Hatje Cantz Publishers (available in the U.S. from D.A.P)/128 pp./price unavailable (hb).

COPYRIGHT 2001 Visual Studies Workshop
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group