Deborah Cooke: Author

I was going to call these posts “Collisions of Technology” but I have a hard time thinking of a typewriter as technology – even though, it must surely be. These posts are about publishing, about the past shaping the present, and about the long cold shadow cast by the typewriter. You might be skeptical, but read on…

Once upon a time, authors delivered book manuscripts that had been typed on typewriters. If you think about it, the introduction of the typewriter – and its accessibility as a tool for Everyman – must have had an enormous impact on the lives of writers. No one needed to fret about penmanship anymore. It was comparatively easy to tell how long a book would be, easier than trying to guess the published length of a handwritten novel. There was no more hiding out, insisting that you were working when you weren’t – the silence of the typewriter would “out” you!

There were logistical problems, too. Imagine the retyping. (Ewwwwwww.) If you wanted to add a sentence on page 5 of your work in progress, you’d have to retype not just page 5 but every page following page 5 at least until the end of a chapter. And you’d have to wrestle with carbon paper in order to have a second copy of your manuscript when you sent the first (clean, beautiful) copy to the publisher. Xerox machines weren’t invented or not that accessible in the high times of the typewriter. Imagine if your book was lost in the mail, or damaged at the published, or simply waylaid. What if they asked for your back-up copy? Would you retype it to ensure that you had one copy yourself? There’s a whole lot of busywork there – or work for hired typists.

But still, the typewriter set a number of standards that persist today, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today and tomorrow.

First of all, the typewriter dictates format of unpublished manuscripts. Even when an author delivers digitally – which is more and more frequently the expectation – the work will be set in Courier 12 point over 24. (That’s double-spaced.) If you don’t deliver it that way, the first thing the editor will do is Select All and change it. Why? Because Courier is the closest digital version of the font that typewriters use, one that is believed to be more legible and easy on the eyes. It persists as a standard for this reason and a couple of others.

Courier is also a font in which all of the characters are the same width. This is called the pitch of the font, and it’s characteristic of typewriter fonts to have each character be the same width – that’s called “fixed pitch”. In real typesetting, of course, the characters are different widths – for example, the w is wider than the i – and that’s called “variable pitch”. In typesetting, the letters can be nestled together to look better – “kerning” is when the typesetter deliberately removes space between the letters to improve the look. (For example, any lower case letter without an ascender, like an ‘a’ or an ‘o’ or an ‘r’, which follows a capital ‘T’ will be tucked a little closer under the sheltering arm of the T. Kerning is done manually and done less and less all the time.)

The critical thing that falls out of fixed pitch Courier being the standard for book manuscripts is the fact that you know how many characters fit on each line. No matter what the words are, each line of the same length has the same number of characters – even the spaces are the same width as each character.

So, if you type your book manuscript on a typewriter, on 8.5″ x 11″ paper, with margins of one inch on the left side and the right side, and margins of 1.25″ at the top and the bottom, and double space the work, each page will have 25 lines of approximately 10 words each. Each page will have roughly 250 words.

That would all be very interesting and not particularly relevant except that production managers have always used that handy fact for estimating the number of typeset pages in the finished book. Of course, this is dependent upon the format of the book – a hardcover has larger pages than a mass market paperback, for example, thus each page will “hold” more words – but the standard remains.

So, the second legacy from typewriters is the notion of word count, which is not the actual number of words in the book.

Huh? If you type that book manuscript, each page will have on average 250 words, or more accurately, the text on that page will take up the space required for 250 words. If you write short paragraphs, or lots of dialogue, there will be less than 250 words on that page, but there will still be 25 lines. Alternatively, if your page is filled with text, one big whack of a descriptive paragraph, it will have 250 words. BUT it will take the same amount of space to print the typeset version of both sets of copy, so one page “counts” as 250 words when estimating the page count of the finished book.

And what this means is that when a print publisher stipulates that submitted book manuscripts be 100,000 words, they don’t really care how many actual words are in the book. What they mean is that there are 400 pages in the manuscript (that’s 100,000 divided by 250) when it is set up as if it had been typed. Because then they know how many pages will be in the finished book, which tells them how many sheets of paper they’ll need to use, which tells them how much it will cost to print each copy of the book.

For example, if you deliver a book manuscript formatted as described above which is 400 ms pages in length, it might have 90,000 words. It might have 106,000 words. The actual word count will depend upon the density of your prose. But that book manuscript, independent of the actual word count, will become a mass market paperback of about 325 pages if set in 10 point Times Roman with typical margins. Honest and true. A 420 page manuscript might be squeezed into the same 325 book pages by making the margins narrower, by putting the lines closer together (decreasing the leading) or using a smaller font like 9.5 point. Or the house might print the longer ms the same way, letting the book run closer to 340 book pages. Those are the sorts of choices made in the Production department, but the data they use to make their decision is the page count of the manuscript, based upon a familiar format.

(And why does this matter? Well, it’s a legacy from the printing press and printing technology. Book pages aren’t printed individually. They’re printed in groups that are called “signatures”. If you take a sheet of paper, it can carry two pages of copy: one on the front and one on the back. Fold it in half crosswise and it’s four pages. Fold it crosswise again and it’s eight. Again, it’s 16; one more time and it’s 32 pages. If you hold it by the last biggest fold (that’ll be the spine) and trim the other three edges so that you can separate the pages, that would become 32 tiny book pages. That’s a 32 page signature, except that real book signatures are printed on much bigger sheets of paper. So, if a book manuscript is 390 pages, or about 97,000 words, it will probably set to 310 book pages. That means with title pages and acknowledgements, front matter, and ads at the back, the book could be set on 10 32 page signatures.

If the book is slightly longer, however, requiring 330 finished book pages, that means adding another signature, or a half signature. That adds cost, both in paper and printing, binding and folding. It might even require the spine to be a bit wider to accommodate an increment more paper. That’s why 100,000 words is kind of a break point on word count for book manuscripts – it’s kind of a break point in production costs. And that’s why there are often ads in the back of mass market paperbacks – rather than the waste the extra pages in the signature and throw them out, the house puts them to work promoting the rest of the list.

But I digress…)

So, the standard persists – or the shadow of the typewriter stretches long – even though we can all change the fonts of our digital files, and word processors will all generate a hard word count for the file or even selected text within that file. That data, which is the actual word count of the book, is useless in terms of estimating the number of pages in the finished book.

I’ll give you a day to wrap your mind around that, and tomorrow we’ll talk about other font fun that is a legacy of typewriters.