For Book Nerds

If you are a dinosaur or dinosaurette who still reads paperbacks, or even hardbacks (and, yes, I do read on my phone and laptop occasionally), you may have often noticed that as you get to the center of the book, the inner margins get a bit tight. 

You have to push down on the book's spine to read it. You have to torture your book. (What do authors think about this, I wonder?)
 

Pages 168 and 169 of "The October Country" from 1996. Look
how nice and airy the inner margins are. (Katy Buchanan photo)

This book pictured, (I've posted previously, it's one of my very favorites, a soft-cover of Ray Bradbury's "The October Country") actually looks to have been well planned. It's a Del Rey Book, part of the Ballantine Publishing Group (part of Random House, part of Penguin, yada yada, which, come to think of it, should be a publisher, too).

There is a thing in book binding called, I think, 'creep' which means that pages laid out flat, with identical margins, do not end up even once the book is bound. The center pages have lots of space on the outer edges and very little at the spine.

But here is this book. At 338 pages, it has a lot of room for page creep. But at the very middle, the spread of pages 168 and 169, the inner margins leave the reader plenty of comfort to read without squashing down (torturing) the spine.

The margins are the same throughout the book. It has a very comfortable feel for a book of such strange tales.

I would love to know who was behind the production of this  October 1996 book. The text design was by Holly Johnson. For a mass market paperback, it's pretty neat. 

Happy reading.