Landing the whale: making a book on the web, part 1
I don’t know when it was I started using the text of Moby Dick in my workshops and talks. Likely it dates back to some of my earliest explorations of web typography. Since it’s out of copyright, it’s one those texts you can find online in various forms, and somehow that became one of my standbys. Then at some point my friend Bil let me borrow his 1930’s Rockwell Kent edition and it really captivated me. The typesetting is straightforward, but combined with such wonderful illustrations it just sat there in the back of my brain, waiting, nudging.
Every year, Bil participates in the Annual Moby-Dick Marathon, a live reading of the book held every year at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. After this year’s event we talked about how hard it was to find a good eBook version, which of course led to the idea of A Project. Since I had started working on some experiments in what a book could be like on the web with modern web typography and layout techniques last year, it seemed this might be the perfect fit when the right time came along.
Last week, it seems that time had arrived. In fact it was prompted another friend via his own newsletter. Robin Rendle wrote in his latest Adventures in Typography about how the best way to get better at designing book covers (or typesetting the text of that book on the web) was to do it. And he provided a…
