TYPESETTING NARRATIVE

Back in the late-80s my wife's grandfather wrote a short memoir chronicling his family's first year in Canada after immigrating from the Netherlands called Hard Times – Our First Year. Like many of their generation, my wife's grandparents came over to Canada shortly after the Second World War with few possessions and very little money. They started out working at a farm in the middle-of-nowhere Saskatchewan where the farmer and his mother mistreated them and tried to cheat them out of wages. After only a few weeks there they left for Winnipeg, with no prospects, but only a couple of contacts. Eventually, near the end of their first year, my wife's grandfather landed a job working for the Canadian National Railway. It's a good story, told with sometimes surprising detail and the mildly sardonic humour that comes with hard-earned wisdom.

When we were visiting my wife's parents at Christmas the memoir came up. My parents-in-law had typed and printed the memoir when it was originally written (in 1986, I think), but, technology being what it was at the time, the only copies that exist of the memoir were printed on letter-size paper with a dot matrix printer and then spiral-bound. No digital copy exists. Being that it's almost 25 years since Hard Times was written it seemed appropriate that it be digitized and re-printed. So I've taken it upon myself to digitally type set the memoir.

It's interesting work and I'm glad that I have to opportunity to do it.

Typesetting narrative presents unique challenges that I've not yet encountered. What considerations have to be made when trying to match a typeface to the voice of the writer? The voice of the narrative is certainly intelligent, but, since the writer was not a native English speaker, also a little bit broken and formal in the way that a non-native English speaker is formal. For this reason a delicate typeface such as Garamond or Bembo just simply would not do – it would be like a farmer working the fields in a three-piece suit. On the other extreme a face like Akzidenz Grotesk or Franklin would not do, either. Even though these typefaces may be more appropriate in a historical sense, their modern cleanliness just could not express the poignancy of some of the images in the story. I decided on Bulmer, in the end, in part because of its British roots, but also because it's a serif that has a modern feel without the cold formality (and dismal readability) of Bodoni. The shapes of the letters are round and welcoming, and, even though it's still a little bit fancy, there's also something everyday about it.

Trying to describe a typeface is like trying to describe a colour . . .

There are also other tedious considerations as the spaces between small caps for the chapter heads and in-line figures in the text itself (75/1000 em and 25/1000 em, respectively), and changing the quotation marks from straight up-and-down inch marks to the curved quotation marks, and I'm still not sure that I'm happy with the exclamation point provided by Bulmer – I may change that yet.

Micro-details aside, the macro-details also posed a challenge. I typeset a student journal at Dordt in which the pages and the articles are generally small (5.5 × 8.5, less than 20-pages per article) and so I can get away with a small type size and more narrow leading, but in the case of this memoir both the pages and the content are bigger. This means a different shape of text block, a bigger type size and more generous leading – but how big and how generous? What shape? These considerations involve a bit of math, but also a good deal of instinct and trial-and-error. At the end of the day the book simply has to be readable, but something so utilitarian as "readable" does involve a great deal of artful consideration and work by someone somewhere. It's just good that I like doing this so much.

If you're interested in this sort of stuff I would highly recommend that you seek out a copy of The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst, a Canadian writer and typographer. That book is probably one of the greatest typography resource/instructional books that I've yet seen. Plus, I think that it would be a fun read for anyone, not just nerds like me.

Oh, and Happy New Year.