Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com>
To: Farah Khan <█████████████████████ >, Mark Ambrose Harris <████████████████████ >, Lauren Wetmore <████████████████████████████████ >
hello dear Mark and Farah,
Thank you so much for all of your incredible work. As the book and website take more concrete form, I have to remind myself what a long and generous process this has been, and how incredibly proud I am of what we are making together, as well as how grateful I am for your work in making this possible.
I am attaching the corrected proof below.
Thanks for your patience as we took an extra week to review the proof.
In the attached document you will see that the majority of the notes are line edits necessary to bring all of the texts into conformity with each other now that we can see them all together. There are also some content-change notes that are either corrections or bringing content up to current day. Aside from those, we have two overarching notes to work through together:
1. Ellipses: There is an inconsistency in their treatment that might have to do with transferring the word docs into the different typefaces. For instance, they do not have a half-space between them in the body text, but do in the graphite text. Ideally there would be a half-space between each dot, and if there is a 4th dot it would have a full space between it and the group of three. This needs to be addressed throughout the majority of the texts – we have tried to mark them all.
2. Graphite monotype treatment: It was great to come to understand the use of the graphite text better over the course of reading this proof – that it is somehow the "voice of the machine of the book" signaling where text is outside of the voice of the authors and rather where what we thought of as the "logic of the book" is speaking. In understanding this design gesture better we have some ideas about how it can be further formalised and used more consistently throughout:
- Denise Ryner interview: It would be great to see the speakers initials and the "laughter" indications in the graphite text.
- Work Becomes Her: The image captions could also use the graphite text
- Block quotes throughout: This felt inconsistent and didn't make sense to us. Having longer quotes in the graphite monotype to us seemed to imply a hierarchy of voice that goes against the logic of the project, and often place a primacy on content that is not as essential as such a design emphasis implies. We would prefer, instead, if these blocks can be treated as in-text quotes.
I hope all this is clear, and we've noted everything in comments on the proof. We'd also be happy to talk it through in person next week. Thank you again for your dedication to this project, and we are both squeeing in anticipation of seeing you next week!
In the attached document you will see that the majority of the notes are line edits necessary to bring all of the texts into conformity with each other now that we can see them all together. There are also some content-change notes that are either corrections or bringing content up to current day. Aside from those, we have two overarching notes to work through together:
1. Ellipses: There is an inconsistency in their treatment that might have to do with transferring the word docs into the different typefaces. For instance, they do not have a half-space between them in the body text, but do in the graphite text. Ideally there would be a half-space between each dot, and if there is a 4th dot it would have a full space between it and the group of three. This needs to be addressed throughout the majority of the texts – we have tried to mark them all.
2. Graphite monotype treatment: It was great to come to understand the use of the graphite text better over the course of reading this proof – that it is somehow the "voice of the machine of the book" signaling where text is outside of the voice of the authors and rather where what we thought of as the "logic of the book" is speaking. In understanding this design gesture better we have some ideas about how it can be further formalised and used more consistently throughout:
- Denise Ryner interview: It would be great to see the speakers initials and the "laughter" indications in the graphite text.
- Work Becomes Her: The image captions could also use the graphite text
- Block quotes throughout: This felt inconsistent and didn't make sense to us. Having longer quotes in the graphite monotype to us seemed to imply a hierarchy of voice that goes against the logic of the project, and often place a primacy on content that is not as essential as such a design emphasis implies. We would prefer, instead, if these blocks can be treated as in-text quotes.
I hope all this is clear, and we've noted everything in comments on the proof. We'd also be happy to talk it through in person next week. Thank you again for your dedication to this project, and we are both squeeing in anticipation of seeing you next week!
the most love!
Josh
