Introduction

The fate of the New Architecture lies in our own hands. It will achieve a place amongst the great architectures, only if we have a set of values which are not entirely materialistic, if we have faith in the Spirit of Mankind, if we have eyes that have learnt the power of discrimination. The age when men are eager about great work is the age when great work itself gets done. It is the impetus that is required: the will to try.

Architecture is not sinks and fitted furniture. When passion so fires the use of inert materials that they touch our deepest feelings – that is architecture.

Those words were written in 1945, and end Ralph Tubbs’s book The Englishman Builds, published by Penguin. They sound faintly ridiculous now, because the ideas they embody – hope and idealism – do not power our life today. But they were very strong in the austere period immediately after the war. Architects and designers, even politicians, were amongst those who saw the future with gleaming eyes.

This book sets out from that period of austerity and dreams. If we consider only the best work – as we must – from the following six decades, we see the emergence of a greater professionalism in the making of books. Tauter and more consistent relationship of pages and, if included, illustrations; skilful and conscientious editing (noticeable only if omitted); clear and elegant diagrams; outstanding botanical and other descriptive illustrations of unprecedented quality; all pictures fully integrated with the text; more and better colour; even, in the last ten years or so, rich black-and-white printing. Much of this was facilitated by the change to offset printing, the more sophisticated use of grids, and more positive use of asymmetric design. But social changes have acted against Ralph Tubbs’s brave future. The visionaries of the 1940s would have been dismayed to see not only a world in which antiques are sought in preference to good modern designs, but also where newspapers devote about a third of their content solely to matters of business and finance.

The unusual conditions of that early period – war, and the end of war – seemed sympathetic to ‘conviction publishing’ by possibly idiosyncratic publishers. They were walking on ice. On the dry land, the larger operations which came into existence, in a world where higher profits, and shareholders, were becoming major considerations, tried to be more business-like, intently scrutinising the prospects of profitability before deciding upon publication. Such divinations have not always been more accurate than the hunches of the earlier small publisher, but they have significantly contributed to changes in the style of British publishing over the last sixty years.

In the 1940s and 1950s there was a willingness – call it a marketing ploy if you like – amongst individualistic publishers to commission eminent artists to illustrate poetry and classic – or even contemporary – novels. In 1950, for instance, Michael Joseph commissioned John Minton to illustrate Old Herbaceous by Reginald Arkell. Eight full-page illustrations, seven small drawings and four decorative chapter openings were all printed in a dark green second colour. An unpretentious little tale was thereby transformed (in spite of, or because of, a modest format) into a most agreeable production. The more corporate-minded firms of today hardly dare think of such a pleasing idea, nor do artists seem willing or able to do it, and such illustrations have almost entirely dropped out of fashion.

Similarly, the practice of financing a potential poor-seller by profits from successful books, as a publisher such as Victor Gollancz would do because he, personally, believed it deserved publishing even if it cost him money, or as university presses considered it their duty to do – behaviour once considered normal practice – has almost disappeared. Allen Lane subsidised the King Penguin series with profits from regular Penguins. Especially after Tschichold took them in hand they were finely produced books. Their quality gave Lane’s firm prestige rather than profits. Unfortunately, it normally costs more to produce books well rather than poorly. Good printing and good paper are generally more expensive than bad. Good design will cost a little more than no design. Careful editing costs a lot in time. If photographs, maps, illustrations or artwork are required, quality has to be paid for. Good bookmaking is hard work and expensive. A book is like an iceberg. There it is, floating calmly in the bookshop, but eighty percent of it – the effort put into getting it ‘bookshape’ – is invisible.

Like any trade, publishing reflects the society in which it operates. Glossy colourful books on antiques, gardening or napkin folding abound in today’s bookshops. Likewise, there is a market today for massive biographies laden with notes and references; publishers fill it and authors ignore Strachey’s dictum to include nothing extraneous and everything relevant (enabling him to deal with four Eminent Victorians in 320 pages). There are books to expose on bookshelves or coffee tables. There is an insatiable demand for guides to The Countryside or The Heritage, lavishly illustrated in full colour. Bookshops prefer publishers to pump up novels to twice or thrice their natural format, regardless of how inconvenient they are to carry around or read at meal times, in order to create apparent ‘value for money’. Bigger formats = bigger cover price = bigger profits. Ever more ambitious exhibitions have resulted in catalogues growing from an eight-page listing plus four black-and-white illustrations in the 1940s to today’s erudite 540-page volumes in full colour throughout: considerably better value than catalogues of the 1960s and 1970s, which had small grey barely-recognisable illustrations. All these market-orientated ploys, one feels, have resulted in some loss of innocence in the publishing world. Strangely, although many publishers today are big businesses, this has not circumvented financial instability. The turnover that kept one man and his dog going is no longer sufficient.

Our period saw the rise of the book packager. Often scorned by ‘real’ publishers, they are sometimes asked to handle projects such as complicated illustrated books that a traditional publisher is not equipped for. But they also initiate publishing ideas, or concepts, themselves, and gather together writers, illustrators , cartographers, picture researchers and designers in order to sell ‘the package’ to a publisher, who will market the final book. One of the first and best packagers was George Rainbird, who brought real professionalism into all aspects of bookmaking. Although very much market-orientated, many fine books, excellent by any standard, were produced in this way. The Observer once divided publishers into Gentlemen and Players. Rainbird was certainly a Player. (John Murray was a Gentleman.)

Like the bicycle, the printed book grew out of an earlier model. Derived from hobby horse or manuscript book, they both achieved their definitive form quickly. A few maverick models were produced from time to time, but generally development consisted in refining this or that detail, new and more gears here, neater types and coloured pictures there. Only in the last thirty years have new technology and new demands resulted in serious changes: the Moulton and the mountain bike on the one hand, offset printing and filmsetting on the other. These printing developments allowed improved or quite new concepts in publishing: pictures truly integrated with text, far more and far better colour, and international co-editions. It became common for the typesetting, origination and printing operations to be carried out by different firms, often in different countries; so with the choice of the world for printing, the completed setting or even made-up pages are sent countrywide or worldwide in disk form. This division of the production process, while financially clever, can create problems, and extra work, for the designer. Today, perhaps even more than in the past, an ‘overall guiding intelligence’ (John Lewis’s phrase) is required to ensure the result is a coherent whole.

Businesslike publishing often results in what could be called the committee concept: lavishly-illustrated books for the mass market. They clearly meet a demand, even if many of them end up being remaindered (such a fate is often built into the original budgeting). Large, awkward, beautifully-produced rehashes of Elizabeth David, with full-colour illustrations taken from details of Italian paintings, are gifts for somebody else’s coffee table (and don’t spill the coffee), not for serious culinary use. There is a place for such books just as there is a place for fast food outlets or even, I suppose, building society offices. Despite their pervasive presence, these are omitted from serious books on architecture, and I have almost entirely excluded popular books from this volume. Often heavily-promoted, sometimes tied-in to a TV series, they can be imaginatively conceived and excellently produced, well printed in full colour; but their design is not usually to my taste. They relate more closely to the marketing and advertising world than to mainstream publishing. Or so it seems to me.

Perhaps the most successful mass-market publisher – much of whose output, which is of exceptional quality, has a serious educational intent – is Dorling Kindersley; and because they are so omnipresent, I have spatchcocked a couple of examples into my sequence.

Personal preference has inevitably governed my choice of books, and in fact almost all are off my own bookshelves. If a book is poorly designed and/or poorly produced, I don’t want to own it. And although many types of books are missing, I believe that, by using these examples, I have been able to describe fairly the overall changing patterns of mainstream British publishing. I hope that simplification has resulted in clarification.

I make no claim to take an Olympian overview of my subject. (In the late 1990s, there were over 100,000 new titles published in Britain every year.) Selection and views are those of a designer who learnt the rudiments of his trade in the 1950s. The principles of logic, readability and rather strict organisation, with clear presentation of disparate kinds of information, all parts relating to the whole – simple aims, often surprisingly difficult to achieve – these principles were valid then, and are valid still. I find myself unhappy with the fundamental aspects and decorative detailing of post-modernist typography. (‘Well, I lay it down that a book quite unornamented can look actually and positively beautiful, if it be so to say, architecturally good’ declared William Morris, even if he did not always follow this concept himself.) The twitchy PoMo characteristics: text run around pictures; ill-considered use of dropped capitals; half-tones and possibly every text page boxed around with rules, with sometimes rather fey decorative features and twiddly bits at the corners incorporated; these are a revival of practices long abandoned as impractical, unsightly, and impairing legibility. Unfortunately, designing on a computer screen has made them practical – but no less unsightly and distracting. They are intended, I suppose, to be visually enriching. Personally I find them disturbing: the publishing equivalent of the popular admiration for antiques. The historicist details unconvincingly bolted on to PoMo buildings likewise reflect uneasiness about contemporary life.

Most of the books I illustrate are British. Two or three foreign ones are included to show the disciplined approach which later affected British designs. Although benefiting greatly from the work of German designers – Jan Tschichold and Hans Schmoller – the style of British books has little in common with those of the Continent (just as French books differ from Italian, and Italian from German). American books, whose designers feel obliged to give their clients conspicuous value for money, can be recognised at a glance. Even in books intended to be published as international co-editions, the national characteristics and preferences of the originating country will always be evident. No generalised pattern in publishing can be extrapolated from one nation’s story; as I try to show, all sorts of historical and social factors determine the results.

Many finely produced books will not be found here. Often, their real significance cannot be appreciated in reproduction, so, for instance, I do not show a typical Phaidon book of the 1940s (large-format monograph, coarse cloth binding, extensive plate section in brownish photogravure divorced from the text, staidly laid-out), nor a 1990s book (lavishly-illustrated, full colour, integrated, high reproduction standards, varied – often quite daring – cleanly-structured design) from this happily-resurrected firm. In their different ways, the books of both periods have strong identities, and their characteristics epitomise the comprehensive change in publishing over the last fifty years. But as so often, one needs to see the books themselves. How do you convey that a book is good to hold, has a nice format conveniently judged in relation to its bulk, has sympathetic paper, has an especially pleasant print quality, even an attractive smell? How do you indicate in two or three spreads that every detail, title page, copyright page, list of contents, headings, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, has been carefully considered not only in itself but in relation to the whole? When I tell people I design books they think I mean just the jackets. That is not what I mean.

The careful work of the 1950s sometimes seems little appreciated. The achievements – meticulous detailing by Schmoller and others, or formal developments such as a more sophisticated use of grids – must not be allowed to decay by default. As the philosophic basis of Modernism developed, so did opportunities for William Morris’s ‘architecturally good’ books; for, ever since the 1920s (in Germany and Holland), and the 1940s (in Britain), the principles behind architecture and typography have had much in common. Both have practical and functional needs that must be respected. While imagination is desirable, and original thinking transforming, designers’ egos should be kept subordinate to the requirements of the brief. Such self-denial is often strangely difficult to accept, as I know only too well, especially as the dividing line between originality and egotism is not always easy to recognise. This conflict can be seen in many over-designed books and buildings today. Formally, there is a common concern with space, structure, logic, asymmetry, alignments, grids, purity, simplicity. Plain (often white) surfaces with rectangular holes (windows, entrances) punched through them relate to white pages with rectangular shapes (pictures, columns of text) carefully placed on them. Architecture has spatial progression as one walks through; books have linear and temporal progression as one turns over pages. In both cases, what happened at the beginning affects (should affect) what happens later – and vice versa. Although the wilder Bauhaus typographers (Joost Schmidt for instance) were influenced by painters, the more practical typographer – especially the book typographer – is much closer to an architect than to a painter, even an abstract painter, even Mondrian. Max Bill, one of the most influential Swiss typographers, was an abstract painter (and a sculptor). But he was also an architect. So was Herbert Bayer.

It is easy enough to find incompetently-designed books today, but the best work has more structure, is more ‘architectural’, than books of the 1940s. And most illustrated books, even those whose design suffers from modish tricks, are better – often far better – printed. Books of straightforward text are another matter. Unfortunately, many publishers today, good publishers who publish worthwhile books, are unable to see the difference between a well-set readable text and a badly-set (but still readable) text. They have learnt only half their trade. Discomfort, even, sometimes, unreadability, displaces pleasure.

There is nothing mysterious about the requirements of good bookmaking. Good typesetting, a decent standard of printing, readability, comprehensible structure, thorough cross-referencing where helpful (especially to illustrations, if included, which need to be provided with adequate captions), consistency in editorial and visual detailing, clear signposting. These basics – all pretty obvious stuff – should be the prime aims of editor and designer working together. Although easier to list than to achieve, their lack – and in some books, despite credits to an editorial and design team, all are lacking – reveals the unprofessional publisher.

Generally, I have chosen to show good work rather than bad. Who wants to look at a lot of bad work, even if it is instructive?