Rendezvous With Clarke
Though I’ve been an avid reader my whole life, I’m not one to pay too much attention to the nuts and bolts of layout and typesetting. I’ll take notice if there’s a note about a particular font, especially if it’s a classic from, say, the 1600s, but otherwise I trust that the folks behind the scenes know their business and execute accordingly. That all changed when, as one of the growing hoard of self-published authors, we had to sign off on the look and feel of the books. At first I pondered doing it myself, but I quickly realized that wasn’t going to happen.
Happily, our editor volunteered to typeset the books and we cut him a check (or a PayPal) and off he went. A few days later he was done. In an email, he said he wanted to emulate the look and feel of Arthur C. Clarke’s classic “Rendezvous with Rama” from 1973. We are very happy with the results.
Here is the first page of Rendezvous.
And here is the first page of “The Sky That Broke the Hills.”
The typeface isn’t the same. Rendezvous is set in Bookman (or something similar) and our book is set in Palatino. The epigraphs at the top of each chapter are treated the same way. And we love epigraphs! But that’s another post…