BEHIND THE BOOKS: Jesse Pollard on Typesetting

In a very special edition of Behind the Books, apprentice typesetter Jesse Pollard writes about one of his very first typesetting experiences here at Wakefield Press. He also tries to answer a particularly difficult question: what exactly is typesetting?

Post written by Jesse Pollard

In a previous post, I likened my job as a typesetter to designing books. I also said that this description wasn’t quite the case, but that it’s much more succinct than trying to describe what it is my job entails.
Typesetting involves getting the specific measurements, typographic elements, and other relevant specifications prepared for every book that we eventually publish. This mostly involves page measurements and layouts, importing the manuscript, selecting and adjusting typographic elements (fonts, spacing, etc.), formatting and correcting text, and then a coffee break (or several).
If it all sounds a bit overwhelming and/or boring, this is why it’s much easier to simply say I design books.

To give you a better example, let me talk about a book that I worked on-and-off for four to six months last year: In Her Own Name, by Helen Jones.

The first step when creating a book is to convert what we can into a useable digital format. Often, this means taking files such as the manuscript, photos and scans, and converting them into a high quality format. But for older books with no electronic files available, like this one, we take each printed page and scan them individually on the photocopier, the water cooler of printers.
Once the pages have been scanned, they are opened in Adobe Acrobat Pro to use the ‘recognise text’ function. This function scans each page and attempts to copy the text on those scans, creating digital text to be edited for later. Since it’s a machine attempting to recognise every single potential instance of a character, you can end up with a lot of missing or incorrect letters.

It’s important in typesetting to be absolutely sure that everything is correct.

This is doubly so for names, words in other languages, or obscure and archaic words. I had to cross-reference the original content from the pages and add in every single correction from the original 400-page book.
Approximately three months after starting this process, most of the mistakes made by the machine had been amended. The correct characters had been inserted, mangled words had been made comprehensible, and each sentence stopped and started where it did originally.

Next was the methodical process of adjusting the layout of a book.

This includes the size of the book, the ‘margins’ of the text, and how things like decorative text, pictures, and informational tables would fit onto each page. I would argue that the most notable part of typesetting is this process. The new edition of In Her Own Name has plenty of footnotes and in-text citations that were also present in the old edition. I had to ensure that every citation was on the same page as it was in the former version, as recreating an index could take a very long while.
The page layouts are planned and fixed to make sure the text fits neatly onto each page. This involves a lot of checking to make sure the font size, leading (horizontal space between lines), and spacing between the words didn’t make things hard to read or push words onto other pages.

Once the draft of the book was prepared, I had to fix a lot of minor inconsistencies in the text and incompatible elements that would give our printers a hard time.

A smaller part of my job involves making sure each picture is defined correctly and doesn’t use too much or the wrong type of ink. Since most of my work is done on computers, the technology involved needs to read the data as intended; a black and white picture, for example, needs to be properly converted to a greyscale image so the printer doesn’t use more ink than necessary to recreate an image that was slightly green.
Finally, when the book looks ready, we read it thoroughly, to ensure it’ll look exactly as we intended. We’ll print out test pages to see if the text is readable, if the pictures are too big or small, or if the layout needs another adjustment (often to meet a printer’s desired specifications like size). Finally, we get a test book printed, and, once we’re happy with it, the first print run is ordered.
So, to make a long and potentially boring story shorter, the elements of typesetting make for a difficult conversation.

Although I could go on for hours about typesetting and the fun I have, I still prefer to say I design books.

With so many critical details to keep track of, it’s easy to lose time messing around to make something memorable. But, all those small details make the end product that much more satisfying to see finished.

About the book:

In Her Own Name tells the important history of changes, from 1836, documenting how South Australian women moved from subordination towards equality. The achievement of women's suffrage in 1894, after an intensive struggle, was central to their emancipation.
In Her Own Name is a political and legal history interwoven with personalities, issues and events.
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