Comments on: George F. What?

By: garymar

garymar — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 04:20:10 +0000

Didn’t somebody just scan this into a bitmap, play with it on Paint, and accidentally tap the “paint bucket”, set to background color, over the i? Ah, but then they’ve have to fill in the dot of the i too. Never mind.

Or else it was intentional.

The only thing Will said that I ever agreed with was, “The American people are conservative. They want to conserve the New Deal.”

By: nd

nd — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:43:53 +0000

I would guess that the origins of the missing “i” are the results of character set problems. (1) Some clever typesetter decided to replace the normal “i” with one without a dot (which is a special character in some character sets that allows you to avoid crashes with serifs in situations like this, with the overhanging “W”); (2) at some point this font was replaced with a substitute font that lacked a dotless “i” in its character set, producing a blank space. And no-one noticed before it went to press.

Having seen a book go to press missing its title on the cover I think I’ve seen everything (mercifully that error was not my doing, & since the author, Peter Lombard, has been dead for a few centuries we didn’t get any nasty letters from him).

By: peter

peter — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:45:22 +0000

This is no typo. Mr Will is well-known for his rants against a certain current US President for excessive use of first-person singular pronouns, and, being himself a self-effacing sort of chap, Mr Will decided to set an example by reducing their use.

By: nick s

nick s — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:58:38 +0000

No DTP in 1982, yet.

And American book covers are, to my eye at least, usually quite crap, especially in the politics section, regardless of the time period and technology available to publishers.

By: Jasper Milvain

Jasper Milvain — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:43:50 +0000

I see the hand of a catastrophically misguided Herb Lubalin wannabe. In the 1960s and 70s, when photosetting had made this kind of thing newly possible, competent versions of crunched-up type looked daring and new. By 1982 this is a cliche as well as an ugly, ugly thing. Maybe the designer decided to leave out the i so as to get the kerning even tighter.

By: mcmc

mcmc — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:15:29 +0000

Striking! Could have been worse though—could have been a script font in all-caps.

By: etbnc

etbnc — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:04:36 +0000

Like someone in comments above, I read it as “Wii”. Kind of jarring to try to put the guy into the context of motion-sensing games. Then I thought of his baseball obsession, and I found myself thinking about throwing pitches at a dunk tank target.

That game might be worthwhile if there’s an especially satisfying splash! involved.

By: Benjamin

Benjamin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:32:58 +0000

Gah, it’s not the title and subtitle in different tones, it’s the title material and author. Oh well, my point was just that the coloring difference probably indicates a difference in printings.

By: Benjamin

Benjamin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:53:05 +0000

The publisher, (who may have used Google's scan) reproduces the cover typo at the "Browse Inside" link. I also notice that the misspelled version has a yellow title and white subtitle, while the corrected one is all white type. Biblio.com associates the corrected spelling with the 1997 reprint, so perhaps the hardcover really did ship with the misspelling.

By: politicalfootball

politicalfootball — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:26:54 +0000

What’s the big mystery? He got disemvowelled. About time, I say.

By: Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:33:35 +0000

When I was in the book business, copies of one of our math books started showing up in stores with the title misspelled on the cover—Trigernometry. It turned out that the copies were from a pirated edition. Somebody had gotten a hold of print overruns of the insides of the book and slapped a new cover on them. This sort of thing is commoner than you’d expect. It’s very easy for somebody at the printer to leave the press running just a few minutes longer.

By: soullite

soullite — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:23:43 +0000

Was this really published? You can pick up a lot of vanity-published works on Amazon. Some of it’s good, most of it’s crap. I can guess which category a book by George Will would fit in to.

By: Glen Tomkins

Glen Tomkins — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:56:53 +0000

They had to change the cover

You see, the 1984 edition was by George F. Will, but that author has since died and been replaced in his many TV appearances by a computer generated simulacrum, George F. Wii. You get George F. WII if you capitalize all of the letters of the last name, which I agree is an odd style choice, but is the only thing at all unusual about the cover design. You don’t want to raise misleading expectations about the content with your cover, so a cover that has WII crowding out everything else is probably about right.

If this sounds far-fetched on first consideration, consider further. Have you ever seen this George F. Wii other than on the TV? Hmm? Even allowing him his chosen, one could conjecture, his only possible, setting, his TV appearance on talk shows, does he really seem quite fully human even in this setting? Hmmm? Sure, you could chalk up part of that to the dehumanoidizing effect that TV talk show appearance has even on probable actual humans and human0ids, but I don’t think that rationalization can quite stretch to cover George F. Wii.

By: LFC

LFC — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:44:27 +0000

I remember reading a negative review of SaS by, if I recall correctly, James Fallows, who said, in slightly politer language and at more length, basically what the commenter @12 above says.

By: phoebesmother

phoebesmother — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:43:34 +0000

This post and comments are what I come here for. A thread on 1980s typographic enormities. Book jackets, as well as most magazine titles, were and are often drawn by hand. However, this cover smacks of the letter by letter photographic headline machines common in that era. Although there were indeed no common DTP programs out there, most phototype machines could spew out such atrocities if you carefully or unartfully commanded space reductions between characters. The motto was, “if one can kern, one must kern.” And how pleasant to be reminded of Jan Tschichold.