So here’s the first in my series of posts about the process of manuscript preparation. Layout is not the first step in the process—actually, it’s pretty much near the end—but I wanted to begin with it because so many new authors seem to think that layout is part of the editing process.
It isn’t.
Here to tell us as much as you’ll ever want to know about the history of layout is my friend and colleague, Dick Margulis, whose blog is one of the best on the internet.
Here’s what he has to say about the history of layout:
Let’s look at the history of printing and publishing a bit. Initially, publishers were printers (or printers were publishers–however you prefer to view it). There was a brief period of turmoil in the fifteenth century when at least a couple of publishers entered into a commercial venture with monastic scriptoria to produce manuscripts in competition with these newfangled printing establishments. It was a snob appeal ploy (you’re too good for that cheap mechanical stuff), but eventually it gave way.
In any case, the printers took responsibility for finding manuscripts they wanted to reproduce, designing and casting the alphabets for them, composing the type, proofreading, printing, and in some cases binding (although that was often done elsewhere, on commission, after the book was sold).
Move forward a few centuries to the American Colonies (Chicago would probably lowercase colonies, wouldn’t they? Too bad.) You’ve been to Williamsburg or Sturbridge or at least seen the Mr. Rogers version, and you know the situation at that stage. Printers are doing the occasional book, but mostly they’re doing job work. The customer comes in with a rough draft. The printer selects fonts and does the layout. The customer gets a chance to look at a proof after the printer makes his own corrections. The job is printed. Books, though, were still published by printers and so it was printers who controlled both page design and editing.
However, compositors were a highly regarded lot. They were among the most respected of craftspeople because of their literacy and their knowledge of the arcane bits of punctuation and grammar. They remained high status workers until the demise of mechanical typesetting and the introduction of desktop publishing in the 1980s.
I think we were probably well into the nineteenth century before authors had enough clout to complain to publishers about the changes made by printers, who by then had evolved into separate operations if not entirely separate companies in all cases. However, layout–for books as well as for job work–was still in the hands of printers and standards were rapidly devolving until, by the end of the nineteenth century, whatever the editorial quality may have been, typography was at its historical nadir. Apparently NOBODY was concerned with layout. Composition was strictly an economic activity, done by the lowest bidder regardless of how well respected its practitioners may have been.
Then along came William Morris in England and the Arts & Crafts movement. Suddenly some artists were taking a serious look at the possibilities for a beautiful printed page, harking back to the Medieval manuscripts and the incunabula. This led to a flowering of the arts of type design and, simultaneously, typography and layout, both in England and the US. This movement crossed over from book design to advertising design and the two fields informed each other in rich ways up to the present.
So I’d say it was the period from about 1896 to 1940 over which publishers took layout decisions away from printers and handed them explicitly to designers (earlier for high-prestige publishers, later in that range for bottom feeders). Prior to that, if editors held any sway over compositors in terms of layout, it was minimal beyond saying how many pages the book was supposed to end up.
Next week I’ll continue “What is Layout?” with some more modern examples and definitions, but I wanted to start you off with Dick’s words. Context is, after all, everything; and modern layout did not spring fully grown from the head of Zeus. Understanding where processes came from is essential to understanding those processes, so do bear with me. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
