NEWTONS SLEEP, Daniel O'Mahony

I’m always saddened by books like this. Regardless of quality of writing, poor design puts me off picking a book up, let alone reading it. Unfortunately for Newtons Sleep, the unappealing exterior design continues inside, with cramped typesetting and a lack of footers and headers making both reading and navigating the book difficult.

The front cover

My main issue with the cover has to do with its text. There are three pieces of information, which text size and positioning put into this hierarchy: the series/universe title, the book title, and the author’s name. The hierarchy makes sense: the draw card here is the Faction Paradox universe, created by Lawrence Miles. After that, the title is the second most important piece of information and – as is common with shared-universe type publications – the author the least important.

The fonts let the text down. Two distinct, elaborate fonts are used for the series title and book title; by contrast, the serif used for the author name is painfully plain.

On their own, the fonts used for each actually suit the text. The ornate series title is the series logo, and visually connects this book to others in the series. The font used for the title has a cobweb feel to it, which reflects the ‘Sleep’ in the title. Author names are often presented in a simple font, particularly if the focus is meant to be elsewhere on the cover. Unfortunately, these elements, while suitable when separate, combine to make the cover look over-busy.

The part title (left) and title (right) pages

The half title and title pages use the same fonts and hierarchy for the text as on the cover. On the title page, however, the text is squished up to fit in an image below, which only exacerbates the problem of the bad combination of fonts.

The first page of text following the
preliminary material

This page contains the book’s first part title, chapter heading, and body text. The presence of all of these on a single page suggests a desire to save space, which is born out by the size of the body text and the narrow leading and margins. Unfortunately while the technique does indeed keep the page-count down, it does so at the cost of good design. The pages are overburdened with densely-packed text that is difficult to read.

New chapters, rather than beginning on a new page, run on from the end of the previous chapter. This makes the book difficult to navigate, a problem made worse by the absence of a table of contents and the treatment of the headers.

The headers at the top of each page give the page number and either the series title (verso) or the book title (recto) – the chapter number or title is nowhere to be found. If you wanted to look up something in a particular chapter, you would have to flip carefully through the pages until you found a chapter heading – there’s no other way to find it.

Samples collected: 15 May 2012