Bookshapes - August 1979

Northam, an Avon Valley History, by Donald S. Garden. Oxford University Press. Designed by Alison Forbes. Printed by Brown Prior Anderson.

A letterpress book, one of the last of the tribe! I picked it up with pleasure. A clean design (title-page a bit subdued, perhaps?); very consistent and even printing, with the pages beautifully backed up; the creamy Burnie MF a pleasant change from the whiter than white offset papers that we live with nowadays; the halftones (printed by offset) unexciting but passable. Pleasure turned to disappointment when I looked closer. The type (10pt Linotype Baskerville) must have been set from a worn old fount, for in most slugs there are fine hairlines of ink between the characters, and there are some characters in the magazine –notably a lowercase ‘e’ – that are out of alignment at their every appearance. Good presswork almost makes up for all this, but the Baskerville fount, which I am sure must have set many an OUP book in its day, is due for retirement. The book has coloured endpapers, to which I am partial, but printed colour is no substitute for using a coloured stock, as there are sometimes hints of streakiness. 2 picas.

Harry Seidler; Australian Embassy. Ambassade d’Australie Paris, by Peter Blake. Horwitz Group Books. Designed by Harry Williamson. Printed by Dai Nippon, Hong Kong.

This fifty-six-page, paper-bound tribute to Seidler’s Paris embassy is worth looking at for several reasons: the superb photographs of Max Dupain; the beautifully sharp and tonally rich printing of rocksteady negatives (praise to the heavy tripod as well as to the Hasselblad); and Williamson’s bold cover design, which reproduces a glimpse of sky, tree branches, and a concave facade of the building at 90 degrees from the vertical – a completely satisfying picture which proves that the enjoyment of form is not tied to a single way of looking at things: Two points I was not so happy about: the full-page bleeds of different photographs running into one another across the gutter, which I personally dislike; and the towering format (364 x 216 mm), which I thought inappropriate for a book about a low building – the Paris authorities limited the embassy to 31 metres. 2 picas.