The Truth About Publishing

I’ve just got round to reading a book I’d been meaning to investigate for a long time, Stanley Unwin’s The Truth about Publishing (1926).

Intended mostly to explain to authors what the publishing business was all about, this is a step-by-step guide to the process of producing a book. Today it’s a superb reminder of all the different crafts involved in typesetting, binding, etc. in those pre-electronic days. We (or at least I) often take books for granted, sometimes moaning about small type or misprints, but not noticing too much about the font or the leading, for instance. As you read Unwin’s book, you start appreciating it as a physical object, noticing the sharpness of the gold lettering on the spine, or the generous margins that help make it a comfortable read.

Looking at books as physical objects rather than just as literary constructs can help place them in their context. For example, Unwin writes about dust jackets (which he doesn’t like very much).

“Wrappers, Jackets, or Dustcovers, as they are sometimes called, have of late years come to be regarded as a necessity…. The cost may be anything from £3 10s for say 1,500 of the plainer variety to £25 for the same number of picture jackets in four colours, such as are frequently used for 7s.6d. novels. This latter figure includes the making of blocks, but not the artist’s fees.”

It would be an interesting exercise to go through the jackets on display at Alan Hewer’s Great War Dust jackets site, and to try and price them, dividing them into categories – plain typographical, one colour pictorial, two colour and four colour, and seeing if this says anything about the publisher’s willingness to invest. My working hypothesis would be that four-colour printing is only found on books aimed at a big mass market, while those likely to have a niche or minority audience got something much plainer.

Maybe I’ll do that when I’ve an hour or two to spare, but today I’m heading north to Yorkshire, for the Books on the Battlefield conference.

The author of The Truth about Publishing is Stanley Unwin the publisher, of course, not the other Stanley Unwin, whose wordplay delighted me when I was young.