Writing, Self-Publishing, Book Marketing

The horror of book formatting – House of Leaves

March 20, 2008 at 3:02 pm jennhandy Leave a comment

Had I thought about this morning’s blog a bit sooner, I would have brought in my copy of House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski, to illustrate the epitome of a book designer’s nightmare (kind of apropos, considering the subject matter of the book).

But I didn’t expect to find all the crazy formatting inside (and trust me, the few pages from the book posted on Amazon don’t even begin to show all the craziness).  I mean, you’ve got the basics: quotes on the chapter starts, footnotes, pull quotes within the text.

But there’s actually three styles of footnotes: one from the author of the book within the book, one from the main character researching the book, the house, the film about the house, and one from the publishers—I cannot even begin to describe how convoluted everything is.

Some of the footnotes contain huge lists of, say, architects that continue for pages, then loop back on those pages, upside down, going back to the beginning of the book.  There are text boxes, containing additional citations, smack in the middle of paragraphs of text, the text of the citations continuing on to the left-facing page, within these boxes—but the facing page, on the right, has a mirror image of the text, within the box, from the preceding left facing page.  Have I totally confused you, yet?

Some pages have a single line of text on them.  Or word.  There are appendices that containing no information, ’cause it’s missing, but the index goes on for pages.

Entry filed under: Book Design. Tags: Book Design, danielewski, house of leaves, index, mirrored text, nightmare.