How a book is made here
This is a look at how a book gets made here, from the first decision to the last proof. None of it is quick, and most of it is unglamorous. A finished edition hides all of it, so this is the one place the seams show.
Choosing the book
Every book starts as a choice, and the choice is half the work. A book earns a place here if it has fallen into the public domain and is still worth the trouble, or if it exists in English only in a translation that has gone stiff with age.
Knights of the Cross was both. Sienkiewicz has been out of copyright for over a century, and the one English version most readers meet is Jeremiah Curtin's from 1900, faithful and airless in equal measure. The gap between a living book and a tired translation of it is where the work begins.
The translation
A first draft is a sparring partner, not a result. The house style stays plain by default. It keeps ordinary sentences ordinary and saves the high notes for the moments that have earned them, because a translation that sings on every line is really just shouting.
Most of the labour is subtraction. Out come the little flourishes a translator reaches for when the plain word would have done, the stock phrases, the modern turn that would never have crossed the author's mind. There is a running list of these habits, carried from one book to the next, so the same reflexes get caught a bit earlier each time.
Setting the type
Then the book is set by hand. A long novel gets a proper interior: a title page, a contents, running heads, and footnotes wherever a modern reader needs a hand with a place, a weapon, or a saint's day nobody keeps anymore.
All Quiet on the Western Front keeps its author's own punctuation, down to the hundreds of dashes that other editions quietly tidy away. They are his breathing. Taking them out would be editing the man rather than typesetting him.
Baking the cover
The cover is a single made surface, the way a printed jacket is. The title is set into the artwork itself and the whole thing is rendered as one image, not floated over a photograph in a browser and called finished.
The art comes from collections that have released their holdings into the public domain, the open-access archives the large museums now keep. Every plate is logged with its source and its licence, so a finished book can stand out in the open without a lawyer wincing.
The proof
Last, the book is read on the thing people will actually read it on. A file that looks right in a design tool can come apart on a small screen held in bed at midnight, so the final proof happens there, on the device, cover and all.
If it reads badly at that hour it goes back. Most of them go back at least once.
Everything on the shelf came through these same five rooms, in the same
order. It is a slow way to make books. It is meant to be.
Back to the shelf