As to italics in the dialogue. Hell, the man knew not a thing about typography. They didn’t even know about proper spacing between words, the ancient fools. I am doing Plato the favor of adding italics/bold face for proper dramatic emphasis. When I die and meet him in limbo, with the other noble pagans, I expect to be properly thanked for this.

http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000860.php

So for example, I could see translating “je m’en fous, moi” as “I don’t give a damn” in certain contexts, rather than as “me, I don’t give a damn”. That sort of thing.

I like this. Italics look pretentious: I can cause you to attenuate your vowel sounds, dear reader, right here from the page! And, with but a roll of my wrist from the Ctrl to the I, I can ensure you will envision me solemnly intoning the middle third of this sentence in a declarative voice, because it’s the part I thought was the most thoughtful; the rest is just embellishment. (Here, the italics convey my mock horror!)

Bold words, on the other hand, do not give me this impression (though I suppose Glenn Greenwald is trying his hardest to disabuse me of this naivete).

Please do let this format continue to grow on you. :-)

Yeah, but I think ‘conversations’ would be a bit coy-sounding (why bother to relabel Euthyphro and Meno as conversations, since ‘dialogue’ is obviously a perfectly good translation of ‘dialogoi’, although ‘conversations’ would be as good, linguistically.) And there is a solid sense in which Republic book I is a stand-alone work, although also book 1 of 10. I think I’ll stick with what I’ve got, for lack of a better idea.

Republic Book I is not a dialogue by Plato, it’s one book within the dialogue Republic. So I find Three dialogues by Plato: Euthyphro, Meno, and Republic book I a little jarring. I guess they’re all dialogues in the sense of all being (depictions of) situations in which folks are talking to one another, but then why not something like “Three philosophical conversations by Plato”?

P.S.: Why no comment preview? I like to make sure I haven’t screwed up my HTML tags.

Republic Book I is not a dialogue by Plato, it’s one book within the dialogue Republic. So I find Three dialogues by Plato: Euthyphro, Meno, and Republic book I a little jarring. I guess they’re all dialogues in the sense of all being (depictions of) situations in which folks are talking to one another, but then why not something like “Three philosophical conversations by Plato”?

P.S.: Why no comment preview? I like to make sure I haven’t screwed up my HTML tags.

page 187, 2nd line, “basic arithmeti” sb basic arithmetic
page 190, 2nd line, “these ar” sb these are
page 197, 1st para, “six virtues families” sb six virtue families [? I think]
page 202, there’s an unclosed or unopened quote ( people’ )
page 206, “Galileo, very platonic thinker” sb a very platonic thinker [?]
page 207, there’s an incomplete thought in the last para; “writes disapprovingly of how” etc. is unfinished – can be fixed by changing “of how” to “about”
page 209 – inconsistent use of footnote methodology – I much prefer what you have here for footnote 9, rather than what is sprinkled throughout the rest of the text, which is in parens like (4); I assume this is one of the formatting glitches that your copyeditor will fix.
page 210, several instances (and elsewhere in the text) of quotes placed “thus”. instead of the more conventional “thus.”

If I find any more nits in the next section I will just email you.

As to the bold use of bold. Here’s the explanation of that I gave over at the book site itself (in response to a similar inquiry.)

“There’s a funny story about the font. It’s Hypatia Sans Pro and it doesn’t have an italic version for the odd but sufficient reason that the project just never got done, apparently. The guy who was working on it went on to something else, and whoever is picking up the pieces isn’t done picking. We’ve been waiting a year and a half.

You can read about it here.

http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2007/04/hypatia_sans.html

In comments, folks are banging on their keyboards for italics. You see me in there, way back in July of last year, inquiring when it will be available. I figured for sure it would exist by the time my book came out but we’re still waiting. When the time came I thought about switching to another font but I really like Hypatia Sans and I was worried that italics often don’t look good in screen displays, particularly at small sizes. They can really blind you. Since this work was supposed to have a major e-book life, I just stuck with the bold face option. It’s kinda grown on me.

In a weird way, the fact that pros aren’t using Hypatia Sans yet, because it’s got no italics yet, means that my book has a distictive typographic look. (To reach for the silver lining that way.)”