The book is a machine for reading

Most of what makes a book pleasant has nothing to do with its cover. It is in the margins, the line length, the weight of the paper and whether the thing will lie open on a table without being held.

A designer working on a novel has perhaps a dozen decisions that genuinely matter, and several hundred that do not. The dozen are invisible when they are right: a reader finishes two hundred pages without once noticing the typeface, and that is the whole job done.

These pages collect what we keep relearning. Not rules — the same choice that rescues one book ruins another — but the questions worth asking before the file goes to press.

Where to start

Typography covers the choices that affect reading directly: measure, leading, the face itself. Binding is about how the object behaves in the hand over years. Print is where good intentions meet paper stock, ink spread and the realities of a production run.

What these notes are not

There is no house style here and no preferred typeface. A book about mountaineering and a book of poetry want different things from the same page size, and any rule stated firmly enough will be wrong for one of them. What carries across is the method: decide what the reader is doing, then let that decide the page.