Everything we read is coloured by its typeface. And humans read a lot, so font choices probably affect more people than any other field of design.

In our daily lives, we rarely appreciate how much work goes into good type decisions, and how much energy we spend accommodating bad ones.

Every day, by choice or otherwise, we read messages, posters, menus, documents, web pages, and, of course, books. Not only did someone design their layout, but someone designed the fonts in that layout. Every single letter was painstakingly designed. And every letterform has a personality: it’s trying to make you feel something, just like Comic Sans feels like silliness, and Times New Roman feels like school.

In this episode, Arthur talks to type designer Thomas Jockin. Thomas is the founder of TypeThursday, a worldwide community of type designers, and a lecturer in design and philosophy. They discuss how type decisions are made, how type designers work on new and existing typefaces, how fonts can make it easier for people to understand what they read, and what technological advances mean for type design, for reading, and for society.

Links from the show:

• The End of Print: the Graphic Design of David Carson by Lewis Blackwell
• Lexend
• Readex Pro on Google Fonts
• Quicksand on Google Fonts
• TypeThursday
• Exploring Hangul with Aaron Bell
• Digital Transformation in Design: Processes and Practices, edited by Laura S. Scherling
• Electric Book Works

There is no place more universally loved than a good bookstore. For its owner, achieving that is not as simple as it seems.

The best book shops are much more than books on shelves and a coffee bar. Behind the tranquillity, its tiny team is buzzing for twelve hours a day, liaising with publishers, distributors, authors, literacy projects, landlords, even local government, trying to build a community of people who’ll buy books and help others to buy books.

No one exemplifies this energy and broad-mindedness better than Griffin Shea, our guest in this episode. Born in Louisiana, USA, and once a journalist with AFP, Griffin now runs Bridge Books in Johannesburg, and the incredible African Book Trust, a non-profit that gives African books to libraries and schools across South Africa. He and Arthur talk about sourcing and pricing books, working across languages, connecting booksellers, the highs and lows of running a business in the inner city, and judging South Africa’s most prestigious non-fiction award.

Links from the show:

• Bridge Books
• The Golden Rhino by Griffin Shea
• Bridge Books Underground Booksellers Walking Tour
• The African Book Trust on forgood
• Griffin Shea and Ekow Duker in the Sunday Times, on chairing the judging panels at the 2022 Sunday Times Literary Award
• ‘“Star Wars” locations that actually exist’ by Griffin Shea for CNN, annotated by Mark Hamill
• Electric Book Works

Behind every great author is a host of unsung editors. By convention, they don’t get their names on books. What are they doing behind the scenes?

A good book needs hundreds of decisions made and pieces organised. For this there are commissioning editors, development editors, production editors, copy editors, permissions editors, assistant editors, and proofreaders. Many books have ghostwriters, too. They’re all focused on making books better.

Arthur speaks to editor and writer Tim Phillips about what editors do, and how they work with authors and publishers. We also get an insider’s view on the world of ghostwriting, and Tim’s advice for making your own writing clear and effective.

Links from the show:

• Tim Phillips’ website
• CORE Econ
• The Economy
• Economics for the Common Good
• Talk Normal
• Electric Book Works

Creative communities can be a powerful force for good. Online, they grow around tools that let people be creative together. What comes first, the tools or the community?

Two acclaimed book-making platforms with vibrant communities are LibriVox and Pressbooks, both created by Hugh McGuire. On LibriVox, thousands of people have helped to create audiobooks that anyone can download. On Pressbooks, teachers around the world are producing open textbooks for colleges and universities. In this episode, Arthur finds out how they came to be, and what we can learn from Hugh’s experience. What does it take to build tools that creative people will gather around?

Links from the show:

• Pressbooks
• LibriVox
• Rebus Foundation
• Rebus Community
• Electric Book Works

We take for granted that books contain no mistakes, but the absence of mistakes is no small achievement. It takes care, commitment, and very, very good processes.

In publishing, even a small mistake can spell disaster. Luckily, there are people who spend careers helping us avoid those disasters, by giving us the words and the tools to care about the details. Their work is not glamorous, but it is fascinating. Much of that work is about metadata: the information about books that makes up the circulatory system of the book industry.

In this episode, Arthur talks to one of the smartest people in the field: Emma Barnes, the founder of the publishing-management system Consonance, and the managing director of indie publisher Snowbooks. She’s also a university lecturer, and the creator of the online platform Make Our Book, which schools use for their kids to make beautiful books from their own stories.

Links from the show:

• Consonance
• Snowbooks
• Make Our Book
• A video of Emma Barnes speaking about publishing a thousand children’s stories on Make Our Book, innovation in the publishing industry, and the future of publishing.
• Book Machine’s interview with Emma Barnes, where she speaks about ‘not working for the man’.
• Article on Publishing Perspectives about Emma’s journey in coding and publishing.
• Electric Book Works

Would you believe that the entire ebook marketplace – including Kindle, iBooks, and thousands of ebook stores – depends on the volunteer work of about a dozen people?

There are millions of ebooks for sale online, and thousands more every day. How could any human bookseller check that they even work, and that they don’t contain malicious code? The ebook marketplace can only exist because there are rules for how an ebook is made, and an official, automatic way to check that it follows them.

The people who create those rules, called standards, are volunteers. Dave Cramer is one of them. He’s been contributing to web and ebook standards, making books, and designing software that makes books, for over thirty years, mostly at Hachette USA. He talks to Arthur about creating standards, how ebooks are made, using CSS for print layout, and the ongoing push and pull between digital-first and InDesign-based publishing.

Links from the show:

• ‘Wiring for Change’, Dave’s talk with Brian O’Leary at the BISG in March 2024
• The EPUB 3.3 specification
• EPUBCheck
• The W3C CSS Working Group
• Ace by DAISY, for checking epub accessibility
• Electric Book Works

Why are book clubs so transformative, and can they change the world?

When we read a book we love, no matter how outlandish or challenging it is, we recognise in it the way we believe the world works. And that is profoundly affirming. It reassures you that your life has a place, no matter what mangled shape it’s in. And if you can share that with others, and talk about what that book means for each of you, you step back into the real world a little renewed, a little stronger, and a little more equipped to change it.

Arthur’s guest in this episode has seen this often, first-hand, as bibliotherapy: Dr Anderson P. Smith works with book clubs and writers who are in or have been in prison, and has studied the profound effect that reading circles can have on people who are rebuilding their lives. And his insights on reading, reflection, and action extend to anyone in the business of making books or changing minds.

Good agents are the fairy grandparents of page and screen. They get writers; and they get writers paid.

Most jobs in publishing are done by humans flying solo – writers and freelancers working from home, running their own show. That can be lonely work. Especially as a writer, it's just not possible, on your own, to know everything and everyone you need to know to turn your talent into a viable business. For that, most writers need an agent. What does an agent do? And how do you get one?

Aoife Lennon-Ritchie is the founder of the Lennon-Ritchie Agency, which works in commercial book publishing, and the managing director of Torchwood, which represents writers in film and TV. She joins Arthur to talk about being and getting an agent, negotiating contracts, and writing for TV and film.

Links from the show:

• The Lennon-Ritchie Agency
• Torchwood Literary & Scouting Agency
• Screen Daily article about the launch of Torchwood.
• Publisher’s Weekly article on the 2022 Sharjah Book Fair, quoting Aoife.
• Sharjah International Book Fair
• ‘Behind the Scenes: African Filmmakers and Writers on Interplay and Adaptation’ – a panel discussion including Aoife.