Episode 15.5: Harry Potter and the Dubious Kerning
Material Girls
Rehak Hannah
4.8 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 27 September 2016
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Pull out your rulers, witches, and start measuring your margins, because this episode we’re getting into the nitty and the gritty of book design. Hannah is joined by book designer (and brand new colleague at her brand new job!) Mauve Pagé in a discussion of three different editions of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. We talk about kerning! We talk about x-height! We talk about widows! And as all those exclamation marks indicate, you should be excited!
P.S. Things get visual in this one, so you might want to follow along with the gallery below.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to which please a fortnightly podcast about the Harry Potter world. |
| 0:14.7 | I'm Hannah McGregor and I have promised is going to be a long series of mini sodes as Marcel and I patiently wait for |
| 0:35.2 | J.K. Rolling to write some more books for us. The topic of today's minisode |
| 0:40.5 | is book design. Now I know what you're thinking. We spend a chunk of time on every |
| 0:48.6 | canonical book episode talking about you know the material culture of the print book, but we have consistently done so in a deeply unprofessional way. |
| 0:58.0 | And today, I'm actually joined by a new colleague of mine at my new job in Vancouver, who is actually a professional book designer and teaches book design in the publishing program that I'm working in now and |
| 1:14.7 | she's going to talk to us about you know like how book design actually works and |
| 1:19.8 | maybe give us a bit more sophisticated than |
| 1:23.0 | for talking and thinking about the different editions of Harry Potter. |
| 1:28.0 | Something may be a bit more sophisticated |
| 1:31.0 | than that one time when I was on public radio and said |
| 1:35.2 | fuck tables of contents. I got in trouble. Uh-huh. Yeah, you're not supposed to |
| 1:42.1 | say fuck on public radio as it turns out. |
| 1:44.5 | Can I say fuck now? You sure can we have an explicit radio on iTunes. This is a |
| 1:49.2 | filthy podcast. Okay, so I have done something that will shock nobody. I have acquired three different |
| 1:56.7 | copies of Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone, which we have sitting in between us right now. I have, you know, my original |
| 2:06.2 | copy, my Raincoast books, the classic Harry looking quizzically at the Hogwarts Express, and the Mystery Wizard on the back which |
| 2:14.9 | Marcell and I discussed so many years ago and then I have acquired the new |
| 2:20.8 | Bloomsbury Paperback Edition, partially so we can talk about the new covers, but also because this contains the parrotex that Marcell is so so angry about. |
| 2:32.0 | And I have bought the Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone |
| 2:36.3 | illustrated edition illustrated by Jim K you know because that exists and and so let's talk about it. |
| 2:47.0 | Let's start off with the original raincoast. Can you start by talking a little bit about like as a |
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