A spot of nostalgia today: another little sheet dug up among all the old paperwork. After desktop publishing came out, the technology wasn’t good enough for everyone to have access to it, so some elements were still contracted out of house. This would have been one of the last times, done by one of […]
Read More… from One of the last times we went out-of-house for typesetting
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four joins A Farewell to Arms among our fiction titles at Libriz today. We’ll only sell it where the title has entered the public domain, so principally our edition’s for the UK market. Fully reset, it is arguably easier to read for contemporary eyes. Being a newer title than A Farewell […]
We’ll soon make a proper announcement about our first fiction title under our JY&A Media imprint: Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. I was drawn to this title, more than any other that had recently entered the public domain. This one has a difference: we’ve restored all of Hemingway’s words, so it appears as […]
Read More… from Publishing A Farewell to Arms, in the form Hemingway intended
With the French edition of Lucire KSA now out, we’ve been hard at work on the second issue. The first was typeset by our colleagues in Cairo (with the copy subbed by me), but this time it falls on us, and I had to do a lot of research on French composition. There are […]
Read More… from Spacing in French: figuring out how to punctuate professionally
This was the back of Mum’s 1985 tax assessment slip from the IRD. Helvetica, in metal. The bold looks a bit narrow: a condensed cut, or just a compromised version because of the machinery used? Not often seen, since by this time phototypesetting was the norm, though one reason Car magazine was a good […]
I thought I could be archaic on a few things—I still use diphthongs in text in our publications (æsthetic, Cæsar), the trio of inst., ult. and prox. in written correspondence, and even fuel economy occasionally in mpg (Imperial) because I am useless at ℓ/100 km and too few countries use km/ℓ. However, even I had […]
Read More… from When you let amateurs like Rees-Mogg write style guides
There was an Epson bag hanging from the back of my bedroom door, hidden by larger bags. I opened it up to discover brochures from my visit to a computer fair in 1989 (imaginatively titled Computing ’89), and that the bag must have been untouched for decades. I’ve no reason to keep its contents […]
Read More… from A three-decade time capsule hanging on my door
A friend had his Gmail hacked, and, much like an Atlantic article I read in the print edition a few months ago, the hackers deleted his entire mailbox. Google says these hacks only happen a few thousand times daily. I’m concerned for him because he has to deal with the Google forums, and we […]
Read More… from History has already shown us the better way, so why ape an outmoded market leader?