Teeny-weeny tiny print!
March 26, 2013 by SusieAs I might have mentioned a while back, I’m in the middle of developing this cookbook-rating app, which means that I’ve been going through the backlist and re-examining cookbooks from about the last 12 years (as well as some up-to-the-minute ones).
One of the many criteria I tabulate is the size of the print, because although – as we all know – the size of the print has no bearing on the quality of the recipes, the fact is that a book with teeny-tiny print oftentimes gets mysteriously set aside and eventually forgotten. It’s just too much work.
Over the years it’s seemed as though the print’s been shrinking, but I thought it was my imagination until I spent the last two weeks neck-deep in books. Yes! the print is actually, really getting smaller. If you look at the 1997 Joy of Cooking, which has small serif type, you can see that it’s still bigger than the 2006 75th anniversary Joy (tiny, sans-serif).
This last week I received a batch of Anness series cookbooks (Recipes from my …. Kitchen). Adorable! I thought. Then I opened them, to discover a dizzying miniature world of print in which each individual character was smaller than a grain of raw couscous – I actually checked.
Now much of this can be easily explained. It’s expensive to print books in a world that gets its content online. The bigger the typeface, the more pages you use, the more expensive the book. Fair enough. But often what we see is tiny print on a sea of white in a little slender book with no more than 75 recipes: say, The Gourmet Cookie Book. My point is, that’s a style choice.
Production departments, take heed! Read the customer reviews! I thank my stars for the publishers who still appreciate a restful page of text – Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Harvard Common Press, Clarkson Potter, just to pick a few examples. The demise of print may be imminent, but let’s not hasten matters, shall we?
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