Introduction, Fall 2006 Catalogue
by Andrew Steeves

Book publishing is first and foremost an activity concerned with presenting ideas to the public. Robert Bringhurst once suggested that if a publishing house is to succeed, the artifact it creates to carry ideas out into the world needs to be every bit as well constructed as a seed capsule. By well constructed, I take Bringhurst to mean the physical aspects of a book – the design, the type, the materials, the binding. Form and function must be in balance. It is a commonly held belief, evidenced in part by the private press movement of the last century, that those publishers least bound by economic considerations, those which are least commercial, are most likely to be the publishers who pay closest attention to the details of the physical book and to honour the traditions of good design, regardless of the cost. But is that really true?

Even the most casual student of publishing quickly discovers that the trade shares at least one concern with the broader manufacturing community: How much (or how little) can be invested in production quality without endangering profit? One needs only to browse the shelves of a local bookstore to discover the present state of investment in the quality of literary books: bland papers run cross-grain; pale pages of poorly-set type, sometimes produced on machines little better than laser printers; unimaginative stock images; bindings that either break or resist opening. In the struggle between quality and profit, the general sense is that profit necessarily wins the day.

Profit, quality and technology combine to make an interesting puzzle. But what do these words mean to a publisher? Profit is the easy one. Profit is what remains after all costs are covered. (In this country, even with the help of grants, literary publishers are usually more familiar with the opposite: loss.) The question of how much profit is necessary on an investment is something you can debate with your accountant, but on the whole, as a society, we’re pretty clear on what profit is and why it might be important. It’s quantitative.

Defining quality is more of a problem. It’s, well, qualitative. It’s subjective. And while most of us would agree that a book that falls apart before you leave the bookstore has a poor quality binding, once we move beyond basic expectations, any discussion of quality becomes complicated. Merits become relative to cost (What did you expect for $10?), to function (It’s just a paperback), to consumer expectations (Why doesn’t this have a colour picture on the cover?), and to a whole slew of other factors. Assessing quality quickly becomes a relative or comparative exercise of better than and worse than and sure it fell apart, but not as quickly as the other one.

The third term, technology, in everyday use usually implies ‘new’ tools and advancements in manufacturing methods. I use it here in a broader context, one that ranges backward as well as forward, to mean all tools, old and new, that can be used to manufacture books. From the outset, the development of new technologies has played a critical part in the struggle to balance quality and profit in manufacturing. As society mechanized and manufacturing centralized, we saw a move away from a generalist mindset (where people manufactured and maintained the things they needed more or less on their own) to a specialist mindset (where specialists produced goods for the whole community). In printing, as in many other trades, this resulted in an evolution from the jigs, tools and simple machines of handwork toward a complex array of specialized technology, where the craftsman lost control over the things which he made and became simply the machine minder. Some would say that quality has necessarily suffered as a result. But need this always be the case?

The earliest printers & publishers sought to reproduce letterforms by mechanical means and borrowed existing technology and know-how from a number of pre-existing fields: calligraphy, goldsmithing, metal working, engraving, wine pressing, and so on. From the outset, the development of the printing press was driven by the need to increase speed, efficiency and profit. Increasing or retaining the quality of the product was a secondary issue, although many printers no doubt savoured the challenge of making sure that the new techniques equalled or surpassed the quality of handwork. In the beginning they had no choice in the matter; the consumer simply demanded that a printed book be as good or better than the manuscripts already available. But this was short-lived.

More than 500 years into the art of printing, I doubt the craving for cheap goods is wholly to blame for the indifference of the modern consumer, who quickly adapts to and ignores the changes presented by new technology, even if the resulting products are clearly inferior to those which were available only yesterday. We have clearly become addicted to novelty and progress for their own sake and are willing to downplay quality lost in order to fulfill our lust for the new. Those selling a new technology will even present these shortcomings as virtues. I think of the display of the auto industy’s marketing skill when it explained that those rear windows that would only roll halfway down in new compact cars (clearly the result of a smaller door) were in fact a safety feature: childproof windows! Design limitations can always be transformed into selling points. The result is that the consumer’s notion of what quality looks like is always in flux, influenced both by marketing and by what’s available in the marketplace. What worries me most is that the general disregard for quality is simply that – a disregard. A publisher, ever worried about his razor-thin profit margins, asks: Why Smyth-sew a paperback book if the average reader can’t see the difference?

For the better part of a decade, I’ve been engaged in what you might call a self-directed study of trade publishing, from within, in an attempt to understand how profit, quality and technology interact with lofty notions like culture and literature. One thing that has vexed me from the outset is the general disregard for the quality of manufacture and design in trade books, in particular in the first-edition trade paperbacks that constitute most new releases of poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction offered by Canada’s literary presses. I wonder how is it that the giant, profit-driven multinational publishers – those publishers, by nature, most distanced from the literary and cultural value of the books they publish – should more often than not field more skillfully- and interestingly-made books than so many of our intimate, mission-driven and heavily subsidized literary publishers? How is it that the multinationals can outdo the little presses, not only at the volume game – where profit rules – but at the quality game too?

Publishers of all sorts and sizes must be as willing to invest in the book as a physical artifact as they are to invest in the text itself; they must not send their author’s ideas into the world in poorly- tailored uniforms or outlandishly trendy and embarrassingly unschooled fashions. Readers who value works of cultural and literary significance would also see the value of quality design and production if we would only offer it to them. After all, the biggest impediment to quality is almost never a financial one; it is rather an imaginative one. So much of publishing is, at heart, about paying attention.