Occasionally, a marriage of high tech and age-old craft seems made in heaven. Octavo, a small start-up company in Palo Alto, California, is applying brand-new technology to a very old problem: how to make classic rare books available to the public in a useful format. And they’re doing a good job of it.
In the private libraries and the rare-book rooms of public libraries around the world repose the intellectual artifacts of our cultural history: old books. The oldest and most cherished editions hand made centuries ago, have become scarce and fragile with age. It’s easy to find a paperback reprint of Shakespeare, but how many of us actually get to see a First Folio, with its Renaissance typography and leather binding? The original books may be preserved lovingly, which means keeping them away from excessive light, heat, or damp, and not letting them get handled too much. But in this respectful stasis, they’re not actually being used.
What Octavo has done is take Adobe Acrobat software and use it to make picture-perfect electronic editions of these antique volumes, which you can then display effectively on a computer screen. The Octavo editions are published on CD-ROM, and they come in a variety of resolutions, suitable for different purposes: one at “screen” resolution for browsing, one at a higher resolution for zooming in to a comfortable distance to read the text, another that’s optimized for printing, and a very high resolution they call “Examine,” for zooming way in to study the details of the printed letters or the texture of the paper.
And, most important of all, the entire book is what Octavo calls “live text”: digital text that you can scroll through, copy, and search. This is done by essentially hiding a PageMaker file behind the image on every page, with invisible PostScript type that corresponds to the printed type shown on the page. So you can drag your mouse over a page of Shakespeare, searching for that phrase you half-remember, just as if it was a modern business memo. Cool.
Octavo was started only last October, although the principals had been planning and experimenting for five years. Octavo is a collaborative effort of John Warnock, CEO of Adobe Systems, and Patrick Ames, who had been head of Adobe’s book-publishing arm, Adobe Press. Warnock and Ames have an amiable rivalry about which of them was the first to produce a digital book. Whoever is right, they had both been thinking for a long time about ways to get old books into a handy electronic format. Ames says that when he first saw Adobe Acrobat, he thought right away, “This is it!”
Acrobat was created to make the “paperless office” a real possibility, by reproducing any page layout digitally on a computer screen, in a small, flexible file format with good typography and fully searchable text. The Acrobat technology has since grown to be an important part of the electronic transmission of files in the printing industry. But what Octavo is doing with the format, and with some proprietary software of their own, goes beyond what anyone else is doing yet.
The other piece of the puzzle, says Ames, was the advancement of digital cameras. Octavo has pushed the edges of the technology, and they’ve developed their own techniques for photographing the books. Rare books are, by definition, fragile; you can’t simply plunk them down on a photocopier and make copies The paper degrades with exposure to too much light, and the binding -- especially if a book has been rebound over the intervening centuries -- may be stiff and unwilling to open flat. The folks at Octavo have developed their own “cradle” to hold the books, one that minimizes the wear on the physical object, and their photographic process subjects the books to bright light for as little time as possible Octavo hopes that this will make their process attractive to the owners of other rare books who would like to get them into digital form.
They began by doing books from John Warnock’s own extensive library. The first Octavo production was the first edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, published by bookseller John Benson in 1640. Benson’s book was printed in “small octavo” format, a size suitable for slipping into your pocket. (Ironically says Ames, these “pocket” books are now all locked up in rare-book collections, so it’s up to a modern company named Octavo to re-publish them in a portable format.) The whole book was photographed in two-page spreads so you can see what it looks like open; even the cover and the endpapers with their ink show-through are captured and reproduced. The CD-ROM also includes an essay about the book, and about the history of this particular copy.
The second Octavo book is a classic in the history of science, Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, published in 1665. Hooke was a spirited rival of Isaac Newton’s. The combination of text and illustration, in this as in other books such as Dürer’s Course in the Art of Measurement, brings the high- resolution “Examine” mode into its own. Not only is Hooke’s text lively to read, but you can study his meticulous illustrations or the details of the typography and design. The company has an ambitious and eclectic list of upcoming volumes, including the Book of Mormon, Galileo’s Starry Messenger, and the Kelmscott Chaucer.
For typographic aficionados, the most attractive of Octavo’s early offerings has to be Giambattista Bodoni’s complete Manuale Tipografico, which has been available only in occasional reproductions of a page or two here and there, or in expensive facsimile editions that are already hard to find. So many typefaces have been produced using the Bodoni name or claiming inspiration from Bodoni’s types -- but now it’s possible, at a reasonable price, to see and have Bodoni’s master work complete.
The company is very small: just seven people. But they bring a wealth of experience to their job. E.M. Ginger, the executive editor, was managing editor of Fine Print for several years; before that she worked for Stinehour Press and more recently she opened FontShop San Francisco. She not only chooses the books they publish, but wrestles with the complex questions of what form the electronic text should take, how to represent archaic characters in searchable text, and whether and how to translate extensive passages in Latin.
In many ways we’re republishing each book, says Patrick Ames. Not only do they have to ensure that the visual image of every page is accurate -- and inviting to look at on the computer screen -- but they have all the same questions any publisher has, of accuracy, choice of edition, format, and ancillary material (such as the introductory essay in the Shakespeare).
Octavo’s in-house conservator, Kathleen Orlenko, and photographer, Martha Blegen work together to extract usable images from the pages of the very delicate books. Hans Hansen created and manages the complex production process, and Jocelyn Bergen is editor and producer of the web site. Mario Murphy is the “systems guy,” says Ginger, and John Warnock “writes code when we need it. He devised, for instance, a proprietary “bookworm” program to compensate for a book whose binding is too tight to lie flat.
Detail from Isaac Newton’s Opticks (1704).
The design of Octavo’s own materials is noteworthy, but it’s not the work of one person. In fact, four different designers have worked on aspects of the company’s graphic design, and they’ve all worked without the ego-friction you might expect. “We don’t tell ’em what to do,” says Ginger. “They do their jobs and they do it well.” All four have a deep background in typography. Jack Stauffacher, the proprietor of the Greenwood Press, created the original company logo from handset Walbaum type. Mark van Bronkhorst, who is also the designer of U&lc, designs the CD packaging. Book designer David Bullen is in charge of typography in all the ancillary material on the CD-ROMs. And Jeff Zwerner of Factor Design designed the Octavo web site (www.octavo.com).
The Octavo vision, says Patrick Ames, is to develop the future of electronic books by looking backward, integrating the past of publishing into its present and future. “You know, it’s surprising how little has changed,” he says. Looking at how publishers have solved their problems over the past 500 years is a good way to prepare for the problems of the next 500. No digital file can give you the smell of the leather binding, perhaps, but Octavo’s technology and artistry are making not only the text but the design, the typography and the visual craft available to everyone.