Crafting Perfect Books
Understanding book design, its core principles, and its impact on reader experience
Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, format, design, and sequence of the various components of a book into a coherent whole. In the words of Jan Tschichold, "Methods and rules that cannot be improved upon have been developed over centuries. To produce perfect books, these rules must be revived and applied." The front matter, or preliminaries, is the first section of a book and typically has the fewest pages. While all pages are counted, page numbers are generally not printed, whether the pages are blank or contain content.
Many books have been written about Silicon Valley and the collection of geniuses, eccentrics, and mavericks who launched the "Digital Revolution"; Robert X. Cringely's Accidental Empires and Michael A. Hiltzik's Dealers of Lightning are just two excellent accounts of the unprecedented explosion of tech entrepreneurs and their game-changing success.
But Walter Isaacson goes them one better: The Innovators, his follow-up to the massive (in both sales and size) Steve Jobs, is probably the widest-ranging and most comprehensive narrative of them all. Don't let the scope or page-count deter you: while Isaacson builds the story from the 19th century—innovator by innovator, just as the players themselves stood atop the achievements of their predecessors—his discipline and era-based structure allows readers to dip in and out of digital history, from Charles Babbage's Difference Engine to Alan Turing.
But Walter Isaacson goes them one better: The Innovators, his follow-up to the massive (in both sales and size) Steve Jobs, is probably the widest-ranging and most comprehensive narrative of them all. Don't let the scope or page-count deter you: while Isaacson builds the story from the 19th century—innovator by innovator, just as the players themselves stood atop the achievements of their predecessors—his discipline and era-based structure allows readers to dip in and out of digital history, from Charles Babbage's Difference Engine to Alan Turing.
The Innovators:
How a Group of Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution