Phew. Well, thank you all for putting up with my little week-long babble on book design. I know I got a little, um, carried away with it all considering that I really don’t intend to ever go into self-publishing, but…well, you see, book design is something of a passion of mine, and I never really get to talk about it with anybody.
Something you need to understand about me: I love books. It’s not just that I love reading, though I love that too. I love the physical presence of books. Hell, I love the physical presence of words in general – a properly-formatted hard copy manuscript makes me happy – but books are the most beautiful presentation of words out there.
This love of mine explains a lot of my eccentric nature. It explains why I happily walk down to the Barnes & Noble once a week just to stand in the teen fiction section and daydream. It explains why I resent e-books and really hate it when people try to defend their presence by saying that a book’s physicality doesn’t matter. It explains why the first thing I do upon starting a new manuscript is standardize the formatting on the file. Hell, it even explains why I didn’t get into Dungeons & Dragons until 4th Edition came out. (Long story short: 3.5’s design is very intimidating, whereas 4th ed’s is inviting.) It’s a big part of who I am.
Again, it’s not that I think the design is more important than the story. Obviously, it’s not. But it is a beautiful thing that deserves to be thought about and admired. Good book designers deserve to be recognized. They’re as much artists as any writer.
So please, if you ever feel the need to gush about the design of a book, come to me. Twitter me. Post a comment here. Stalk my facebook. Whatever. This is something that I really, really love; and I can’t talk about it enough.
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