Pseud's Corner

I am an enormous pseud when it comes to typography. Font selection, layout, justification, kerning and other associated poncing about is something that has me sitting up until the wee small hours, scratching my chin and worrying about the glyph scaling percentages in Adobe InDesign (2% above and below the desired amount, by the way).

As such, my latest book is laid out according to the Van de Graaf canon, a common layout used in the construction of medieval books. It leaves a lot of white space on the page and therefore makes the book longer, eating into an already meagre royalty, but damn, it looks so cool! It’s set in 11pt Centaur. I was going to set it in Dove’s Type, the story of which is very strange. After an argument between the people who created it, the original set of type was thrown into the Thames in 1917 in a fit of pique, and the whole thing was believed lost until some enterprising mudlarks managed to find it and fish it out again a few years back. You can read the story of Dove’s Type here. In the end, all that scrabbling about in the mud means buying the thing was prohibitively expensive, so Centaur it is.

You can read more about the canons of page construction here. It’s very interesting.

Anyway, all that means that adapting the book for an Ebook setup isn’t as easy as just using InDesign’s inbuilt converter because the result is all over the place when adapted for a digital reader. But! I have done it! I have reset the whole bally thing, and now you can buy it in EPUB format, which will work on phones, readers and all that fancy gubbins.

There’s a link below where you can buy a copy of the Ebook, at a reduced price for subscribers. That link will be up for a few days before reverting to a normal price, so grab a copy now if you want one. It’s only three bucks for you lovely people. The price will go back to normal next week.

Have a marvellous weekend!