Literature is Immortal, Except When It Comes to Pieces
In the past, hardcover books, especially quality printings, were almost entirely bound in cloth, but by the time I was a child, most printings, even of quality publishing houses, became half-and-half: cloth spine and first third of covers, while the remaining two-thirds are paper (cardboard, really). Now, even quality publishing houses bind most of their books entirely in paper or cardboard, necessitating extremely durable treated jackets to protect their fragile bodies. As time goes by, books are clad in less enduring materials. What’s the deal?
I prefer my books fully cloth-bound, and not just for aesthetic reasons—though I find most modern jacket designs extremely overwrought, and jackets themselves subject to easy tearing, staining and age-related discoloration which looks quite unpleasant on my shelves—but for practical purposes. It seems cardboard and paper covers are sensitive to humidity, pressure, and temperature in a way cloth covers are not: viz., curling of the corners of the covers, warping of the shape of the book, and other problems within months of buying a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, which has acquired this ragged appearance though it has had only one reading and spent the rest of its life on the shelf. Whereas my very venerable cloth-bound copy of William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy—more than fifty years old—is still in near-perfect condition, despite previously being stored in conditions which were not ideal. The text block does not sag, the binding is crisp, the covers slightly faded by light but still pleasant to look upon.
Being a person who buys books in haphazard binges, I’ve noticed a few other trends (which may not exactly fall under the topic of bookbinding, but forgive me, I’m no expert in the terminology of the profession). Older books have much more generous margins, generally larger and more spacious text (including line spacing, font usage, and painstaking justification) and—though you may not believe this, in the era of automatic spelling- and grammar-checking programs—generally fewer typographical and language errors. I’m not claiming this is universally true: there are some fantastic printings out there—whoever designed the latest Vintage paperback release of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler’s novels has my especial praise.
But let us compare, for example, the ancient Houghton Mifflin printings of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to George R.R. Martin’s recently printed A Dance with Dragons from his A Song of Ice and Fire. Fellowship, despite being a 1966 copy, still has square corners and a firm text block, on top of large margins and generally pleasant aesthetics. Dragons, on the other hand, has slowly crushed its own covers under the weight of standing up, and I must now lay the volume on its side to prevent the pages from tearing out of the cover. The binding is so inferior that the pages, no matter how you lay the book, have gaps and striations when viewed from the side. For lack of any other words, the book bulges open. The gold inking on the front design and spine is beginning to flake, even though I’ve never removed the jacket, and inside, at least one main character’s name is misspelled. When I was first making this comparison, I was going to use Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time hardcovers, printed by Tor, as a comparison, but it would have been frankly unfair: it’s a matter of common levity on the internet that these printings’ covers simply fall off the paperbacks and often peel away from the hardbacks without prompting, either. One can make the argument that fantasy and science fiction books often see inferior printers as a matter of course (witness their almost universally awful cover and jacket art), but why not in the past?
I must come to the conclusion that economies of scale, changes mandated by efficiency, and perhaps an increased emphasis on less costly paperback printings over a once-dominant hardcover market, have eaten away at the details of book printing and binding. I have to say I’m surprised at that, however. Can smaller margins, cardboard covers, and frankly bad glues really save a printer and publisher that much on overhead? I would gladly pay an additional markup of one or two dollars for a superior volume that did not require replacement after my usual course of use. It’s not like I’d ask for leather or hand-stitching—just a book that could suffer transport and rereading in less-than-ideal conditions without becoming a rag destined less to be cherished for years than to be pulped on the recycling heap.
I can’t believe I would be the only reader who feels that, and I can’t believe that it would cost that much more to print reliable, useful volumes. After all, hardcover prices, it seems to me, have actually gone up in recent years instead of going down; a first-run hardcover that used to set you back $24.99 is often now $35.99. Amazon and other online booksellers offer some savings that keep new volumes at reasonable prices, but only when using their books as loss leaders for their more profitable other departments. Simple economics would seem to indicate that something is wrong: unless authors are getting better and their new writing more literarily proficient as time goes by (I should think not), books produced with more efficient methods, inferior materials, to greater economies of scale, and outsourced to foreign countries with lower salaries and easier-maintained factories should be going down in price. I don’t think a reasonable person can assert that the attested ebook sales can account for this discrepancy, nor inflation, although both of those probably have something to do with it.
I am a layman in these matters. While I know a good bit about literature, itself, the physical matter in which it’s distributed has always been, to me, incidental. But as I’ve gotten older I’ve noticed this significant change and spent some time on it, and have gotten to the point where I simply must know: what is the deal? Therefore, I’d like to open a dialogue, and invite anyone with in-depth knowledge of bookselling, printing, bookbinding, or print publishing to attempt to explain what great current and confluence of factors conspires to make physical books a worse and worse value for money as time goes by.
