How these books
are set.
A reading edition is a series of small decisions about a page, none of which the reader should have to notice. Here they are anyway.
The measure
A line of text is set to about sixty-five characters, which is the width at which an eye finds the next line without hunting for it. Longer lines look generous and read badly; shorter ones break the sentence into pieces.
The type is a serif face with a large lower case, set with room between the lines. Nothing about it is meant to be admired. It is meant to disappear by the second paragraph.
The chapter opening
Every chapter opens the same way: the ornament of its shelf, the chapter title in small capitals, and a drop capital three lines deep with the first few words carried in small capitals after it. This is an old arrangement and it survives because it works — it tells the eye that something has begun.
The ornament is drawn for the series and used in no other. Nine shelves, nine sets: a reader who has one of our volumes open can tell which shelf it came from without turning to the cover.
The plates
Plates are set full page, never wrapped in text, and they fall where the text has arrived somewhere they belong rather than at a fixed interval. Under each is a single line: the painting, the painter, the year. 32,614 of them across the library, and not one without that line.
A reader who does not care for paintings can turn past every one of them and lose nothing of the book. That is the test a plate has to pass: it may add, but it must not interrupt.
Where you are
Running heads carry the title on one side and the chapter on the other, so a book opened at random says where it is. The contents are linked, the footnotes are where the author put them, and nothing has been added that the author did not write.
Every volume ends with a colophon: what it is, which shelf it stands on, its ISBN, and what belongs to this house — the setting, the ornament, the cover, and the selection and attribution of the plates.
On a screen
These are ebooks, so the page is not fixed: the text reflows to whatever a reader is holding, and the settings above are proportions rather than measurements. The drop capital, the ornament and the full-page plate hold their arrangement at any size; the line length follows the device.
Every book page carries two pages photographed from the finished volume — a chapter opening and a page where a plate falls. Look at one.