licentious radio

Thursday, January 23, 2003
[10:07:02 AM]

For page layouts of books, there is a common worship of the Golden Section, which yields tiny inner/back margins. That's lovely and practical with a small number of large pages with a high-quality binding.

But in cheaply bound paperbacks, the Golden Section makes the book harder to read, and practically requires you to stress the binding beyond the limits of most glue.

Consider the example of Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style. The glue is pretty good, but if you don't fold the binding open, the lines of text curve dramatically.

Josef Mueller-Brockman in "Grid Systems/Raster Systeme" devotes some examples and two sentences to the topic:

"In voluminous books the pages become curved when the book is open. The wide back margins are intended to prevent the lines of text becoming difficult to read because of this convexity."

If you want to play Golden Section, why not Golden Section what the *reader* sees when holding the book? That's very different from what you draw on a single flat sheet of paper.

[9:41:16 AM]
There was a lot of fuss when wired.com switched to stylesheets for page layout. The front page I go to is back to tables:

http://www.wired.com/news/nc_index.html

The articles seem to be formatted with tables.

(The lines of text are *too* long! I keep my browser windows *narrow* -- so narrow that a line of text that wraps to the window is reasonably readable. So I can just read the "print" version. I don't understand what they think anybody else is going to do. Maybe you're supposed to buy the magazine....)

The regular front page is still stylesheet layout, though:

http://www.wired.com/