Book Interiors

For theBookDesigners I typeset the interiors of print books in InDesign: the pages a reader actually reads, not the cover, which theBookDesigners’ Ian designs separately. Each title starts from an approved sample layout, and master pages plus paragraph and character styles carry that design through the full manuscript. The work covers body text, front matter, back matter, and pagination. That’s the full set of pages that turns a manuscript into a finished, readable book.

Saving Civilization went through a wholesale revision after I had already built the layout: the author sent back a Word manuscript with whole chapters restructured. I reconciled the book’s table of contents against that new manuscript entry by entry: 46 additions, 20 deletions, and 17 text changes across chapter and subhead titles, while leaving the existing page-number cross-references untouched. The manuscript also used roughly 500 horizontal-rule dividers for section breaks; those didn’t translate directly into the layout, so I settled on one typographic divider used consistently instead. Several chapter titles were too long to fit on a single line, so I built a short-title pass for the running heads as well.

Each book moves through the same basic shape: an initial full layout from the approved sample and manuscript, then one or more rounds of revisions as feedback comes back through Dino, theBookDesigners’ project manager, who handles all author and client communication. Saving Civilization alone went through three rounds, from the wholesale resync down to a small script-driven pass fixing en dashes. Throughout, I run an automated formatting audit after any change that touches body text, since local italic and bold are the easiest thing to lose by accident in a reflow. Covers are designed separately by Ian at theBookDesigners. My part starts and ends with the interior.