The book

The Rivers Nobody Measured

What the evidence says about typography and book design.

White channels running down a justified page are said to strain the eye. We could not find a study that measured it. Serif type is said to read better on paper, and a line of text to have a right number of characters. Some of these rules hold. Others hold only under conditions the rule leaves out, and a few rest on nothing at all.

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These twenty-three essays check each rule against the reading studies, the printers’ own specifications and measurements made for the book. Every claim you could dispute carries a note that names its sources and grades the evidence, from A for direct evidence to E where the sentence is the book’s own argument.

Front cover of The Rivers Nobody Measured: the title and subtitle above a block of justified lines with a white river running down it, traced in red.

What the book found

The 40-character floor and the 75-character error rate are not in Tinker. The Swiss journal cited as proof that serifs read better was set in sans. Reversed type does cost about a tenth of reading speed on paper, but the 0 per cent comprehension figure that made the case against it cannot be traced to a primary source. Counting all 354 graded notes at the end turns those into a pattern: the best-evidenced claims here are the first that will expire, and the worst-evidenced are what has lasted five centuries.

How this book is set

Alegreya, in the text block the ninth-division canon gives a 6 by 9 page: 4 by 6 inches, four ninths of its area, 72 points below the head and 144 above the foot. The canon would put it 48 points from the spine and 96 from the fore-edge; we set it at 60 and 84, after printed proofs where the canon’s outer margin looked wider than the page needed. The essay about that canon finds one tradition citing itself rather than four independent discoveries, and recommends it anyway, with a condition: draw the block by the canon, then check the inside margin against the printer’s own table for the page count you end up with. The 57 figures were drawn by the program that set the type.

Contents

This site carries the opening of each essay. The rest of every essay, with its notes, figures and sources, is in the book.