Introducing J. Mark Bertrand
An interview with a man who has described limp bindings in terms that fall not too short of the Song of Solomon.
J. Mark Bertrand
Novelist, lecturer, typographer
blogging at bibledesignblog.com
instagramin’ @jmarkbertrand
Mark, thank you for taking the time to share some of your thoughts and insights with the our readers. Let me first ask you: why do we interview a novelist and Presbyterian elder named J. Mark Bertrand for a magazine mainly about typography, book design and publishing?
Well, typography was my first love—not to mention my first job. Fresh out of high school I was put to work on a Mergenthaler Linotype machine, which is probably where my love for good design was born. Like everyone else in those days I was soon swept up in the desktop publishing revolution. As a lifelong Scripture reader and bibliophile, I couldn’t help noticing that Bibles weren’t made as well as they had been in the past. Also, the design of Bibles seemed to have stagnated. So I started writing about the design and manufacture of Bibles, and my work resonated with a surprising number of readers.
It isn’t neccessary to spend much time reading through your posts on Bible Design Blog to realise, that you have a soft spot for a certain kind of Bible – the Reader’s edition, preferably a single column novel-like text setting. And it is probably no exaggeration to think, that your impatience with the somehow bloated and over-ambitious bible designs packing too much extra-biblical content around and in between the bible texts itself has been an at least instrumental part in the proliferation of new reader friendly Bible editions coming from the publishers in the recent years. What is it you like so much about this Bible design? Is it the fiction author in you wanting the Bible to resemble a novel?
If there’s one anxiety I hear over and over from pastors and teachers, it’s that, although we buy a lot of Bibles, we do not read them. The West is not just post-Christian, it is in some respects post-literate. That’s the fear, anyway. And the antidote has typically been new translations. If the Bible is difficult to read, we’ll make it simpler, more accessible. Because of my interest in design, though, I always felt there could be a different strategy: Bibles could be designed to look less like reference books and more like the kind of books we read.
Novels fit that mold, but what I’m suggesting is not that the Bible be made to resemble a novel. My first book, Rethinking Worldview (2007), was nonfiction—yet the layout is single column and paragraphed, just like my novels. That format is standard for pretty much any literary work intended for prolonged reading. We expect such books to have one column of text with more-or-less generous margins, and a balanced ratio between column width and text size. When we open books like this, we know how to use them.
Reader-friendly Bibles are not new, of course. A number of attempts to popularize the concept were made throughout the 20th century. The only difference now is that it seems the niche might be here to stay. If I’ve helped make that possible, then all this work has been worthwhile!
I came across another interview with you, in which you in relation to this said, that Bible designs emphasising on the “apparatus” contribute to having “too mediated an experience of the text”. Could you elaborate on what this really cool sentence means?
Reading from a study or reference edition can sometimes feel like watching a movie for the first time with the cast-and-crew commentary turned on. The information is helpful, yes, but it can sure get in the way of the film. I can understand the desire to pack a Bible full of extras. The challenge of designing such a text can be exhilarating. But the easiest way to prevent all the features from getting in the way of Scripture is not to design around them. It is to cut the features. An unmediated—or at least, minimally mediated—design might have just one feature: readability. But that’s a pretty good feature to have.
Speaking of cool sentences: you being a novelist evidently exert yourself in your writing on Bible Design Blog. Do you have an all time favourite sentense, that you want to show off?
I spend a lot more time thinking about my posts than I do writing them. They’re usually first drafts, which is why I’m always grateful to readers who point out my typos. Far from showing off, I’d probably want to tone down some of my purpler prose. I’ve described limp bindings in terms that fall not too short of the Song of Solomon. If my legacy is that I helped make reader-friendly design more sustainable, that’s good. But if what I’m remembered for is having coined the phrase ‘Bible yoga,’ well … I’m not sure how to feel about that!
The content on Bible Design Blog shows a great appreciation from your side on the tacticity and textural qualities of physical objects such as books. Does this mean, that you have totally dismissed digital (bible) reading? And if not, what do you look for, when searching for the digital reading environment best suitable for you?
Bible software—in particular Bible apps—are the best thing to have happened for print editions since desktop publishing. I have five apps on my phone at the moment, and while I prefer print, I would be very sad not to have them.
I agree with Robert Bringhurst in What Is Reading For? when he notes that digital books still lack the screen resolution and typographic capability of print, not to mention being tethered to the grid. But they solve two significant challenges: the bulk of the book and the transparency of paper. Because they take up no space, have variable-sized type, and are utterly opaque, digital Bibles have increased the accessibility of Scripture in remarkable ways.
More importantly where print is concerned, a good digital Bible is a superior hypertext to any physical edition ever made. Since the printed Bible from its birth in the mid-fifteenth century has always aspired toward hypertext, which is what study and reference editions really are, the advent of digital frees the print Bible to discover a new telos. It is now free not to be a hypertext.
Scrolling through your personal Instagram-account one could easily dismiss you as a hopeless nostalgic and hard-nosed conservatist. Do you have any intentions of proving that assumption wrong by describing, what you find to be the most important and praiseworthy innovation in bible design in recent years?
I would argue that my nostalgia is hopeful rather than hopeless, and that I am actually soft-nosed. (I’ve just touched my nose to confirm.)
The single most important piece of Bible design in the past decade has been the emergence of good single-column text settings. We went from having none in print to having more choices than even before in the history of the Bible. A second innovation—but let’s call it an innovation-in-progress, because I don’t think we’ve quite arrived yet—has been the effort to recover the kind of opacity seen in old India paper. The thing that will keep print editions viable in the digital age will be finding a way to manufacture thin yet opaque paper comparable to what we see in the best vintage Bibles.
Alternatively, one could also find your Instagram account, to be the inspiring result of a highly developed aesthetic taste and a mind obsessed with well designed objects of high quality. Is this kind of highly developed aesthetic taste a prerequisite for appreciating great bible design?
Not at all. As my wife is quick to point out, I have terrible taste in most things. It is a tribute to her influence that I have any aesthetic wisdom at all. To me, the best design, like the best writing, doesn’t require appreciation—it just works. All the expertise goes into the creation, so that no expertise is required to enjoy the experience.
Of course, the trained eye can discern why something works, and you certainly need such an eye to design things well. My obsession probably stems from a desire to figure things out. I am always designing everything in my mind.
What if I turned that last question the other way around: Having read too much on Bible Design Blog (and in your case even having written the content!) how is it possible to immerse oneself in the (not always perfectly designed) bible text without constantly being interrupted by fake small caps, orphans, widows, rivers and stacking and all the other problems that seem to make our first world fall apart?
The nice thing is, you don’t have to. When I started Bible Design Blog, finding an edition whose design choices didn’t get in the way of the reading experience was a challenge. Now there are options. More are on the way. This is an exciting time for Bible design, which is why I remain hopeful. The prevailing mood when I began writing about Bibles was that everything was in decline, everything was getting worse. From a design standpoint, that narrative has turned around entirely. Things are getting better, much better. The best thing about my writing is that I started by chronicling what looked like twilight, and it turned out to be more of a dawn.
And dear reader, there you have it: Mark Bertrand has changed the path of the sun, turning twilight into dawn. That is no small thing to accomplish. And you’ll probably want to know how he did this. That is why, we, here below, feature a small selection of the beautiful images and profound prose from his Bible Design Blog; the most influental bible design blog on the planet (or, I should rather say, universe).
Thank you, Mark for this conversation, and for letting us share your thoughts and some of the content of your blog with the readers of 2K/STORIES.
On the binding
Whether you want a limp binding on a larger Bible like this is the question. People divide over this point. Some feel that when you’re dealing with a bigger, thicker book block, it’s nice to have some rigidity to the cover for support. If you’re in that camp, edge-lined covers will drive you nuts. They’re about as girdle-like as a stretchy t-shirt.
Consider this, however. A big Bible with a rigid cover is going to function a bit like a dictionary. It’s great for the table-top, but awkward in the hand. With a flexible cover, you can fold back the side of the book you’re not reading for a handier package overall. This is the technique we all used for super-thick mass market paperbacks, which is why all the fantasy and romance novels in the secondhand shops have unsightly creases down their spines. Here’s a tip: you bend the cover, not the spine. This makes the book easier to hold without damaging the binding.
On flat versus rounded spine
Turning our attention to the binding, one thing that really stands out about the NIV Proclamation Bible is the rounded spine. If you ask me, every Bible ought to have one.
A rounded cover doesn’t mean anything. Plenty of rounded covers conceal flat-spined book blocks underneath. What we’re talking about here is the rounding of the book block’s spine, which changes the profile of the block when viewed from top or bottom. Instead of a rectangle with ninety degree corners, both ends curve in the shape of a C. Rounding the spine is an additional step, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a flat spine connotes inferior quality, the rounded spine is one of those bookbinding grace notes I appreciate more and more as the step is increasingly neglected.
On the Allan NIV Proclamation Bible
The Allan NLT (top) is anorexic in comparison to the NIV Proclamation Bible, which falls somewhere between the Crossway Heirloom Legacy (bottom) and the Schuyler Quentel (second from bottom) in terms of girth.
Why would you spend over $200 on this edition when you could pick up the Hodder version for a lot less? If the font size and extra margin aren’t a major draw for you, it’s not an unreasonable question. Here’s the way I see it: an investment like this makes sense when you find the Bible you’re going to be using day in and day out. The aesthetic pleasure we derive from a well-made book isn’t hedonistic self-indulgence. To me it’s akin to the satisfaction a craftsman feels when working with good tools. And this is a good tool. It feels right in your hand, it feels right as you flip the pages and scan down the columns.
On Bible covers and colours
Here I’m having fun! From top to bottom: the Heirloom Legacy in deep brown, the Heirloom Legacy in black, the Heirloom Thinline in brown calfskin, the Omega, the Allan NASB single column in black, the Allan New Classic Reader in marine blue, the Allan NLT in green, and the Schuyler NASB Quentel in firebrick red.
I’m sure it comes as no surprise that I am charmed by the deep brown cover. This is bomber jacket brown, dark enough to read as black in certain light. I hate using the word ‘espresso’ to describe, say, dark brown wood finishes, but this is the term that kept coming up when I showed this Bible off to my wife. It doesn’t help that I’ve experienced an epiphany over the past year where dark browns are concerned, after realizing that I have maybe 20 pairs of shoes in various shades of tan but I’m always hunting for something darker. Dark deep brown leather is versatile, and doesn’t call attention to itself. If black shoes are sober and tan are showy, dark brown manages to convey a stylish sobriety. Obviously leather shoes and leather books aren’t exactly the same, but I think the same principles apply.
On the stiff hinge
An example of the stiff hinge, courtesy of Crossway’s Heirloom Thinline ESV in black goatskin. The mull (3), attached to the book block, is sandwiched between the endpaper (1) and an overlapping tab (2) of the cover’s inner lining. The culprit here is the black mull.
There are two issues related to the black mull: first, its extraordinary stiffness prevents the book from opening flat, a nuisance with thick book blocks like the Schuyler Quentel and a downright menace with lean ones like the Heirloom Thinline pictured above; second, if you pinch the spine along the length of the cover, you may hear a high-pitched squeak pitched somewhere between the creak of a bridle harness and the sound of blue jeans sliding on vinyl upholstery.
The limpness of an edge-lined cover calls extra attention to the stiff hinge. It is the nature of these bindings to languish and swoon in your hands like a aesthete overcome by the sight of some unexpected beauty. The stiffness of the mull slips a starched shirt over the aesthete’s head. He can still swoon, but there’s a crick in his back.
On the Schuyler Quentel ESV
One reason I have relied on Cambridge editions like the Pitt Minion and Clarion as go-to recommendations over the years is that they are consistently fine Bibles available in a variety of major translations. They’re an easy fit for a lot of people, since you don’t have to switch translations to enjoy the format. The Schuyler Quentel is on its way to occupying a similar position as the new ESV Quentel joins the line-up. Now available in two major translations — the ESV and NASB — with the potential for more on the way, the Quentel has been designed from the ground up by 2K/Denmark as the ultimate double-column reference Bible, printed and bound in the Netherlands by Jongbloed, the same printer Cambridge uses.
The ESV Quentel features a slight evolution in the interior use of red ink for emphasis. In addition to red chapter numbers, the ESV Quentel uses red to set off the chapter and verse numbers in the cross references at the bottom of the page, giving them an extra pop without crossing into too-much-of-a-good-thing territory. Up close, the print impression is dark and crisp.
