Monday 28 May 2007

typography matters

Spent part of this holiday weekend making up a little pamphlet insert of my five poems in the latest Angel Exhaust magazine. This issue came out a few months ago (dated Autumn 2006), and I am delighted to have work in it for the first time; however, along with one or two other errors, my layouts were somewhat mashed in the typesetting. Some people might consider this merely cosmetic, or even a weakness if it matters that much. I could imagine that at least one of the AE editors might well hold such a view. Not for the first time, 'Pierre Le Saboteur' is acknowledged as 'typographical consultant'. But the issue includes plenty of poems with more or less distinctive layouts (i.e. more than simple vertical divisions between groups of lines) by other contributors including Adrian Clarke, Jesse Glass, Giles Goodland, Marianne Morris, Kevin Nolan, Peter Philpott. (Though I understand that some of these too have been less than perfectly rendered.) Sent a grumpy message to the editors, and received a very nice card back from Charles Bainbridge, apologising and agreeing to distribute my corrections. Pressure of work means it's taken ages to prepare the inserts; however they will be sent off tomorrow, so if anyone owning AE 19 cares to see my poems as they were meant, in a format that fits neatly inside your copy, please apply to Charles (or to me).
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(Just at the end of making up 100 copies, I noticed that I have myself introduced a new minor spacing error ...)

Tuesday 1 May 2007

touching base

I meant to write about the excellent free exhibition recently on at the British Library, on Migrant, the little Press founded in 1957 by Gael Turnbull and Michael Shayer. But I completely failed to do so ... Here's the BL's press release on the subject.