Background
A couple of decades ago, my dad wrote his autobiography.
Well, a lot of it, the most interesting part of his life, from about age 6 to 31. He experienced growing up barefoot on a farm in rural East Prussia (then Germany, now Poland), working as a 14-year-old in the Heinkel Aircraft Factory, winning an all-paid scholarship to a university, only to be drafted into the German army the day before, spending most of his war years in training or in hospitals, being captured by the British on the French coast, staying in Scottish prisoner-of-war camps until 1948, arriving in bombed-out Hamburg, perusing the love of his life, emigrating to Canada, driving across the country with his new wife in a brand-new VW Beetle to the brand-new town of Kitimat, and starting work at the brand-new aluminum smelter there.
It was time to publish his work as a book. He had written it with an old version of Microsoft Works, with embedded photographs he had scanned in. Fortunately, I was able to convert the files first to Word format, and then import them into InDesign, figures intact -- thankfully!, as I could not find the source photographs for some of his scans.
It was time to publish his work as a book. He had written it with an old version of Microsoft Works, with embedded photographs he had scanned in. Fortunately, I was able to convert the files first to Word format, and then import them into InDesign, figures intact -- thankfully!, as I could not find the source photographs for some of his scans.
Designing the Book
I have 33 years experience in book design, and so I know that the golden rule is to spend as much time as it takes to design the book's layout, establish the styles, and determine the design guidelines. After this, typesetting goes super fast. This is followed by the killer stage of copy proofing, checking, and re-proofing.
I knew I wanted a landscape-oriented book, because that would make it stand out from other books, almost all of which are produced in portrait orientation. As well, most photographs are landscape, and so they would fit the pages of a landscape book better. I borrowed the size of the page -- 10" wide by 7.5" tall -- from the "Abbotsford & Mission: Our History in Photographs" book produced a number of years ago by the Abbotsford Times newspaper.
I have never before typeset a biography. My expertise is in designing and writing technical books about using computer software. A biography needs a softer look. And so for the page layout, I decided I wanted the simplicity of a single font for all text elements, combined with the complexity created by applying a variety of font effects. I picked out my favorite font, Palatino, which reads well and looks elegant, and was first designed in the 1800s. I used no bolding or italics on any of the head styles. Simplicity, folks!
One that thing makes a self-published book look self-published is that the font is too large (often 12pt) and the leading too small (often default). To get away from that look, I choose 9pt font for the body text with 16pt leading, giving the text some breathing room.
To indicate paragraphs, I choose to indent the first line by 0.25", with no blank lines or taller leading between paragraphs. To create visual interest, the first paragraph after a subhead is not indented, and each chapter begins with a dramatic four-line drop cap, with that initial paragraph set in larger 11pt text. Justification is ragged right.
I have 33 years experience in book design, and so I know that the golden rule is to spend as much time as it takes to design the book's layout, establish the styles, and determine the design guidelines. After this, typesetting goes super fast. This is followed by the killer stage of copy proofing, checking, and re-proofing.
I knew I wanted a landscape-oriented book, because that would make it stand out from other books, almost all of which are produced in portrait orientation. As well, most photographs are landscape, and so they would fit the pages of a landscape book better. I borrowed the size of the page -- 10" wide by 7.5" tall -- from the "Abbotsford & Mission: Our History in Photographs" book produced a number of years ago by the Abbotsford Times newspaper.
I have never before typeset a biography. My expertise is in designing and writing technical books about using computer software. A biography needs a softer look. And so for the page layout, I decided I wanted the simplicity of a single font for all text elements, combined with the complexity created by applying a variety of font effects. I picked out my favorite font, Palatino, which reads well and looks elegant, and was first designed in the 1800s. I used no bolding or italics on any of the head styles. Simplicity, folks!
One that thing makes a self-published book look self-published is that the font is too large (often 12pt) and the leading too small (often default). To get away from that look, I choose 9pt font for the body text with 16pt leading, giving the text some breathing room.
To indicate paragraphs, I choose to indent the first line by 0.25", with no blank lines or taller leading between paragraphs. To create visual interest, the first paragraph after a subhead is not indented, and each chapter begins with a dramatic four-line drop cap, with that initial paragraph set in larger 11pt text. Justification is ragged right.
I like my books to have a wide margin on one side of each page, placing the text off-center. So each page has a 2" margin on the left. This white space is then used by several elements of the book. Images begin in that wide margin, and captions are constrained to the margin area. Subheads have 0.5" hanging indents that go into the wide margin. (To maintain the clean look, I have only a single style of subhead: 14pt, with equal spacing before and after.)
I decided against headers with names of chapters or the book, as they made the pages look crowded. So, I placed just the page numbers above the side margins, with a vertical bar aligned to the margin to add visual interest. Page number 1 begins with the cover, because I couldn't be bothered setting up the book to begin with page 1 at the start of chapter 1, as is the standard.
I did introduce an alternative element (to subheads) for parts of the story line where, at the end of a chapter, my dad recounts what happened years or decades later. I used a single, widely leaded m-dash to indicate the start of the "Years later..." text.
Sometimes my dad wrote text that did not flow with the story, and so I decided to create sidebars from them. Sidebars use the same elements as body text: large drop cap, large-font initial paragraph, unindented second para, and then regular paragraphs following. Sidebars are only one page, and are indicated by being boxed by a 1pt rule.
My dad's story ends in the summer of 1955. At first, I left it there, but then realized readers would want to know what happened next. There are, after all, another fifty years of his history, and his memory can no longer fill in the details. Someone suggested a timeline, so I wrote out -- in his voice -- an afterword of major events that occurred up until him turning 99 in 2023. I boldfaced the year numbers to separate them from the timeline text.
The layout of the timeline
There is no preface, introduction, forward, prelude, or other front matter, as I have always found them un-useful. I did come across in a separate file a dedication my dad had written to his younger brother, Helmut, and so I placed it after the TOC (table of contents).
Chapters and TOC
To create a look of elegance, I centered the 18pt chapter number above a 0.5pt horizontal rule that ran about 50% across the page. Below the rule was the 24pt chapter title in all caps. The chapter title is always broken into two lines. Initially I used the chapter titles as written by my dad, but after a while I added some more information useful to the reader. To the chapter numbers, I added the month and year the events the chapters begin with. To the chapter titles, I added the location of the events.
At first the chapter heads were centered on the page. Then I realized they needed to be centered on the body text, 2" over.
A big oopsie came after I separated a couple of very long chapters into shorter ones. Not until one of my final passes the day the book was due to go to the printers did I notice that I forgot to update some chapter numbers. There were, for instance, two chapters numbered '4'.
Chapters always begin on the facing page in my books, and in this one, too. This lead to a challenge in one chapter when the text came to an end with a fully blank page remaining. I like my chapters to end part way down that final page. I solved this problem by aggressively attacking widows and orphans and rearranging some images. The offending page was banished.
To keep the table of contents simple, I listed just the chapter names and pages numbers, and none of the subheads. Each time the book's pagination changed during typesetting, I updated the TOC manually, as I found using InDesign's automatic updating required me to do too many tweaks to regain the plain look I wanted. Chapter numbers are bold-faced to distinguish them from the text, and I included only the year the chapter represented, not the month.
Chapters always begin on the facing page in my books, and in this one, too. This lead to a challenge in one chapter when the text came to an end with a fully blank page remaining. I like my chapters to end part way down that final page. I solved this problem by aggressively attacking widows and orphans and rearranging some images. The offending page was banished.
To keep the table of contents simple, I listed just the chapter names and pages numbers, and none of the subheads. Each time the book's pagination changed during typesetting, I updated the TOC manually, as I found using InDesign's automatic updating required me to do too many tweaks to regain the plain look I wanted. Chapter numbers are bold-faced to distinguish them from the text, and I included only the year the chapter represented, not the month.
The TOC also holds the disclaimer, which is set in 8pt font, force-justified between the title names and page numbers.
I love colophons (Greek: finishing touch), because they tell the reader how the book was produced. I added a colophon to the last page, the traditional location, which in my book doubles as the copyright page. I snuck in one more set of images.
Front and Back Covers
Only the covers have color photographs, to save on printing cost and because all images inside the book are monochrome anyhow.
For the front cover, I wanted a stark, simple design with a dramatic image of the author. I found one where he is looking pensive in a somewhat darkened corner of his farmhouse. To create visual interest through imbalance, the image is slightly offset from the title of the book, "My Story," and the sub-title and author name.
The cover needed a sub-title that would help explain what "My Story" meant. I played around with a lot of variations, and finally decided on the place and date that the story begins (East Prussia in 1930) and where it ends, Kitimat in 1955. Even there, I was unsure whether to specify Kitimat British Columbia, or Kitimat Canada, and eventually choose Canada, as more people would know where it is located. I used small caps for the author name and italicized text for the sub-title. I even fussed over how many commas to use -- the fewer the better!
For a long time, I didn't know what to put on the back cover, until it dawned on me that the text of his biography could go there. I used an image found by my designer daughter Katrina of my dad appearing to sing loudly while in a rowboat. Unusual, as my dad doesn't sing. The colors and emotion of this image contrast wildly with the cover image. Again, I was very careful with how the white space was arranged.
I decided to keep the spine blank, for at 146 pages, the spine is narrow, and having text on the spine takes away from the simplicity. Also, I have experienced spines having incorrect text, which is worse than having no text at all.
The inside front and back (IFC and IBC) cover pages also are blank.
Images and Maps
I had a treasure trove of photographs from my parents going back to the 1920s. The ones I used for the book I scanned at 400dpi gray scale.
I knew I wanted all images to start in the 2"-margin, but played around with their size and position. First, I had them centered vertically on the page, starting at the left margin. Eventually I hit upon a 60% rule: landscape images would be sized to 60% of the width between horizontal margins, portrait ones 60% of the vertical margin distance. The master pages contain guidelines to show me the 60%-limit. All pictures begin in the upper left corner of the page, and to avoid clutter there would be one image per two-page spread.
An exception was made for non-photographic images, such as maps, which were placed on the facing page. Another exception came about when I wanted to show more images than my one-per-spread rule allowed. Eventually, I came up with a two-page spread idea, done in sidebar style, in which I placed three images with bundled captions.
To keep text away from images, I placed a 0.25" wrap on each one, although here I had some problems, as InDesign seems to use relative wrap distances scaled to the scale of the image. If I had scaled an image to 25%, then I found I needed to specify a 1" wrap distance to get my 0.25" spacing.
To create a dramatic effect that contrasted with the small 60% images, I placed an image facing the start of each chapter full-bleed.
For the caption text, I used italicized text with default leading, which was constrained to the area of the 2" margin underneath each image. Captions are also protected by the 0.25" wrap, and the top line of each caption is lined up with the adjacent line of body text -- this one in particular was picky work! Captions for the full-bleed images were placed on the page before, in the wide margin, with the initial text, "On the next page:." All captions are full sentences.
I realized that it might be handy for readers to see the many places where my dad went, and so I created maps for several chapters.
Text Conventions
I wrote out all numbers in full, unless they were decimals (such as 8.8) or times, such as 8:00am.
I used abbreviated titles with no period, such as Rev Sturhahn.
Any place my dad used a non-English word (mostly German, one in Gaelic), I italicized the first occurrence and added the translation in brackets. Since East Prussia was given to Poland following WWII, I did the same for place names: in German, with the current Polish name in brackets on each initial occurrence. I added a sidebar describing the German-Polish place names.
I copy edited the book's text three times, as I know it takes at least that many times to catch most errors. It works best to copy-edit in different formats from the InDesign screen, such as on paper or from a PDF. The change in venue makes it harder for my eyes to inadvertently skip over lines of text and miss mistkaes.
Copy editing is followed by layout scanning. This is where I look at each spread full-size in a PDF, checking for mis-positioned elements. Each time I complete a pass with corrections, I generate a new PDF and begin all over again. At times, I still found copy errors. For instance, I found an 's' missing in bridesmaids during my 7th pass. Even as I write this article, I found a few positioning errors. Oh, well!
At the end of each day, I double backed-up my work: once to a second hard drive on my computer, and then again to pCloud.
Paper
The final PDF was 27MB, and so the printer asked me to send the file to him through a service called WeTransfer. You upload the large (up to 2GB) file to their Web site, add appropriate email addresses, and then WeTransfer lets recipients know a file is waiting, which they download. This gets past the problem that most email systems limit the size of the largest file to about 15MB.
I despise glossy paper and so choose a flat paper stock. The cover is 100# smooth white, while the pages are 80# smooth white. I choose pages of somewhat thicker than regular weight to give a bit more heft to the book. The printing was done by Globe Printers of Abbotsford, a local firm, so that I would not have to pay for shipping. Fifty copies were produced at $23 each.
The job took me three weeks.
Interesting story, both your Dad's life and the production of the book. Are you going to publish digitally?
Posted by: RobiNZ | Apr 13, 2023 at 02:29 AM
I could release the PDF, as I don't intend to sell the book, but give it to friends and family who have expressed an interest in it. Everyone on the list prefers a printed book over an ephemeral PDF.
Here is a link to downloading it (27MB): https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZTNJKVZ86kli4Ti0RHQEsT3Je7RSXUcyoh7
Posted by: Ralph Grabowski | Apr 13, 2023 at 08:27 AM
Thanks Ralph, much appreciated
Posted by: RobiNZ | Apr 14, 2023 at 12:08 AM