← Journal12 / 23

Layout

Four Ninths of the Page

·6 min in full, in the book·PagePerfect Journal

Also available as a typeset book

Take a page two units wide and three tall, divide its width and its height into nine, and give the text block six of those units each way. The inner margin is then a ninth of the width and the outer two ninths, the head a ninth of the height and the foot two ninths, and the block covers four ninths of the page.1 The construction is said to be the independent discovery of four scholars, and the means by which a page earns a reader’s trust before a word is read. It is one tradition, and no study we located measures the trust.2

The rest of this essay is in the book

It goes on to cover:

  • The ninths, and what Tschichold said of them
  • Who had read whom
  • Gutenberg held the block and moved the leading
  • Proportion turned into a scale
  • The studies cited for trust
  • What the printer needs at the gutter
  • Checking this book against it
  • Use it, then check it against the table

About the book

Notes

  1. Ford, excerpts from Tschichold, Consistent Correlation Between The Book Page & Type Area (1962): p. 44 (2:3:4:6), p. 45 (ninth division of width and height), p. 51 (twelfth division), p. 57 (eight to twelve words a line). Read through a page-referenced digest of Hajo Hadeler’s translation of The Form of the Book, not the book itself, which is why this is graded B. The area figure is arithmetic from the construction and is certain: six ninths by six ninths is 36 of 81 cells, four-ninths, or 44.4 per cent of the page. Check the page numbers against a copy of the 1991 edition before reprinting them. Evidence B: one credible study, or evidence with limits.
  2. That page proportion has no measured effect on a reader’s judgement is a statement about the registry rather than about the world: no study in it compares canonical margins with arbitrary ones for trust, belief or comprehension. Our argument is that an untested effect should not be asserted, and that a convergence of four scholars cannot stand in for the missing study. Evidence E: the journal’s argument.

Sources

  • Ford, N. (n.d.). The Form of the Book, Digested: page-referenced excerpts from Jan Tschichold, The Form of the Book, trans. H. Hadeler (Hartley & Marks), including the essays On Typography (1952) and Consistent Correlation between Book Page and Type Area (1962). artequalswork.com

Further reading