
The printing of titles on book spines - diodorus
http://cognitionandculture.net/blog/dans-blog/tilting-tilted-titling
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jccalhoun
I have always hated it when an occasional book (english language) puts the
title on the spine the other way. I wonder why that happens. I've never
considered that in other languages it might be normal to do it the other way.
I wonder if books which have the title on the spine the other way are more
likely to be translations?

Most of my paper book are in my office or in boxes so I can't check right now.

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chias
Reminds me of the Monk dvd set:

[http://bilder.stubb.de/bilder/Monk.jpg](http://bilder.stubb.de/bilder/Monk.jpg)

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v64
I would hope given the title character's nature that this was done
intentionally :)

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droithomme
It's easier to find books by title on the shelves of a French bookstore or
library than an English/American one. The titles are justified evenly with the
shelving. So you can scan along the shelf looking for your title once you are
in the right section. With the English system, the title text starts at a
different level, the height of the book. It is less efficient to scan.

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CydeWeys
This seems orthogonal from the top/bottom orientation though, no?

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klez
Nope, because bottom-to-top all titles start roughly at the same height (the
bottom of the spine), while top-to-bottom they start higher on higher books.

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CydeWeys
Still seems orthogonal to me though. Why couldn't all top-to-bottom titles
start at the top of the spine, and similarly be justified?

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klez
Because the words wouldn't _start_ at the same height. The point was that, if
every title starts at the same height it's easier to skim, because you don't
have to move your eyes much when looking at the first few letters.

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CydeWeys
So make them all start at the same height, at the top of the spine? What
exactly about top-to-bottom orientation do you think precludes proper
justification? You're still on about something orthogonal, the justification
along the spine, which isn't affected by the overall orientation.

Also, someone posted photos of French bookshelves showing that their centers
tend to be centered like ours are, so it's not any more readable. If you think
of the spines as advertisements on bookstore shelves then this makes sense.

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adambmedia
There is at least one other distinction of French books, especially in the
anthropology domain: They are almost ALWAYS WHITE!

Spines schmines. A friend of mine is a French anthropology buff and his
library is white, shelf on shelf of whiteness, titles all in this wild
direction. It's madness!!

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dredmorbius
It's fascinating to see what small nudges, path-dependency, local tradition,
and merging cultures do to conventions and practices.

On another book-related topic: I've been trying to sort out when Library of
Congress details started appearing on the Title Page verso of American books.
Seems to be between the 1940s and early 1960s, though the practice wasn't
unversal even by the 1970s (sampling from books around the office).

ISBN (and its precursor SBN) are late 1960s.

(I've become a cataloging / classifications geek.)

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Finnucane
The LOC CIP program, which gives publishers cataloging information in advance
of publication, began in 1971. Before then, I don't think it was usual for
publishers to have more than a catalog card number.

The CIP program mainly exists to make it easier for libraries to acquire and
catalog books. LOC still requires that the data be printed in the book, even
though most libraries now not surprisingly get the information online, either
directly from LOC or from a service like OCLC.

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dredmorbius
Thanks. I'm familiar with OCLC (and Worldcat), as well as
[http://id.loc.gov](http://id.loc.gov).

There's some pretty useful stuff out there these days :)

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userbinator
_True, when a book is put flat with the front cover up, a bottom-to-top spine
title is now upside down, whereas a top-to-bottom title is now upright and
perfectly readable_

If you're actually writing the title onto the spine manually with a pen and
holding the book right-side-up, top-to-bottom becomes the natural consequence.
I wonder if that may have been a factor in creating the top-to-bottom
direction.

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Declanomous
I could imagine machine printing of dust jackets lead to the opposite
convention. If you are printing a dust jacket, the back of the book is on the
left, the front is on the right, and the title is in the middle. Despite
reading order being from left to right, people tend to both proof and layout
the most 'important' information first. This would be the title page.

Once you've laid of the title, the next thing you are going to move to is the
spine. A title printed on a book spine from top-to-bottom would be completely
upside down from the perspective of the front cover, whereas a title printed
from bottom to top would only be 90 degrees off from the front cover. Thus the
layout and proofing of the spine would be more "natural".

I wonder if there was some sort of technology invented between the widespread
adoption of the printing press in Europe, and the adoption of the printing
press in the colonies that made the bottom to top layout less obvious. Maybe
the colonists were too uncultured to use dust jackets.

Edit: I just checked, and I was surprised to learn that every single tilted
title goes the same way on my books. I have a _lot_ of old books that I bought
at used bookstores just because they looked interesting. Regardless of the
binding, age, or field the book was published in, if the title is tilted it
goes from top-to-bottom. Fascinating.

I did discover some of my books were upside down though.

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Finnucane
Printed dust jackets as we have them today didn't really exist in colonial
times; they're basically a 20th-century innovation. As the article points out,
the early convention was for titles to be stamped horizontally. The title
would have been stamped on the binding, and a plain paper wrapper covered it
for protection.

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skookumchuck
I'm always surprised at publishers who print the title on the spine in a
difficult-to-read font/color/size. Don't they want people to be able to find
their books?

The same for CD publishers. When I'm looking through a stack of CDs, I want to
know the artist and album title. These are hard to find on many CDs, some even
cleverly omit one or both entirely!

I just gotta shake my head.

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pasbesoin
I don't know anything about this, specifically. But for consideration:

You know those ads that puzzle you and leave you examining them, trying to
understand what they're saying? They've just grabbed a chunk of your
attention.

(And a lot of ads, these days, are designed to leave a memory of the product,
preferably associated with an emotion, lodged in your sub-conscious. Not to
sell you outright, but to be there, lending familiarity, when you are at the
point of selection and purchase.)

Anyway, I wonder whether the difficult to read spines are more noticeable and
so grab desired attention in certain contexts.

Or, they just have a crappy graphic designer. ;-)

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skookumchuck
I just skip over the unreadable spines and the CDs produced by mystery bands,
especially when confronted with a large selection.

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kleiba
I don't understand why you couldn't just put a book upside down on the shelf
if you want its spine print to face the same way as books that are printed the
other way around. "Don't worry, the letters won't fall out."

Likewise, if it's so important that the spines can be read for a stack of
books in a store, turn all of them to their face except for the top one... oh,
yes, and hope that no-one buys the top one or else someone needs to keep
flipping the new top of the stack.

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saagarjha
I'd wager that many people (such as me) think it feels "wrong" when the book
is upside down. This is especially true if the spine has some sort of artwork.

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animal531
Definitely. When eating packets of chips I never open them from the bottom, it
just feels wrong.

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BrandoElFollito
Disclamer: I am French.

We are wrong. Up to today I thought that the direction was merely a choice,
seeing both books flat made me change my mind.

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blue1
the french system looks bad when the volume is laid on a table, but has
another advantage: in multi-volume sets, the numbers on the spine read in the
natural sequence, left to right and top to bottom.

By the way in Italy, in our usual anarchy, both systems are in use :-)

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samstave
Assume that most people are right-handed.

If you lay a book with the front cover facing up, the top to bottom printing
will be right side up.

If you lay the book with the printing bottom to top, the binding print will be
right-side up, but, assuming a right handed person grabs the book with their
left hand, and turns it as one would so they can open it and turn the pages
with their right hand, then its a natural movement - pull the book with the
left hand, turn to face you, open and flip through with the right hand...

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stevep98
I hate my bookshelves. They are really ugly... a collection of mismatched
colors, styles fonts.

I would pay for a service that would print out new spine stickers for all my
books that cover the existing spines and create a consistent look for all of
them.

Bonus points for an app that I just use to take a picture of my existing shelf
and it figures out the rest.

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saurik
Interesting. For me, I use the color and font and size of the book to rapidly
find it rather than having to actually stare at every book and look at the
title... standardizing all books would make them much more difficult for me to
rapidly find.

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vorg
All my Chinese and Japanese books have the spine text going vertically down.
Some have English text mixed in though, which is (horizontally) downwards. I
can't imagine a book with French text mixed in (horizontally) upwards with the
Chinese (vertically) downwards text would look very natural.

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empath75
Seems like they're might be something akin to spontaneous symmetry breaking
when a sufficient quantity of books choose one convention over the other, by
random chance. The rest of the publishers would just suddenly fall in line.

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aisofteng
Everything in this article was obvious. You don't need to reference Cultural
Attractor Theory, whatever that is. Anyone who's noticed the foreign books
section in a bookstore and has common sense has deduced the explanation.

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vacri
Top-to-bottom isn't inherently better, but since only barbarians stack books
with the front-side down, it has the advantage.

