Cover design concept, typography, interior typesetting and production files for a collection of songs and poetry by my father, John Seymour Eldridge, published through Balboa Press after his death.
Published through Balboa Press at 5.5 x 8.5 inches, 200 pages, black and white on creme stock, in perfect-bound softcover and dust jacket hardcover editions
Book Design2014-2015Published through Balboa Press
Book DesignerJohn S. Eldridge, Jr.
Tripping up the Basement Stairs before Dawn is a collection of songs and poetry by my father, John Seymour Eldridge. He died before it was published. I did the cover design concept and typography, set the 200-page interior, and prepared the production files Balboa Press needed to print and distribute it.
Four of us worked on the book, and the division matters. Leah Griffiths, a Washington-based illustrator, drew the cover artwork. Richard Gerber, a guitarist who played with Merrilee Rush and Paul Revere and the Raiders, took the author photograph. Bonnie Masterjohn made the illustrations that run inside the poem "A Dozen Indiscretions." Mine is the typography, the layout, the interior typesetting and the production — not the drawings.
The title carries its own picture: someone moving through a dark transitional space before the world is up. The job was to hold that without illustrating it flatly, and to do it on a self-publishing imprint's fixed templates, in black and white, on creme stock, at 5.5 by 8.5 inches. No spot colour, no foil, no unusual trim. Whatever the cover was going to do, it had to do in greyscale.
I started from photographs. One in particular set the framing — a derelict brick stairwell climbing to a doorway blown out with light, leaves collected on the treads. It has the quality the title needs, which is that the light is at the top and you are not there yet.
The second photograph in this section is not reference for the illustration. It is Richard Gerber's portrait of my father, and it runs on the back cover. I mention it here because it is the only warm image in the entire book, and knowing it was coming changed what the front could be. With a colour photograph of the author on the back, the front was free to stay cold and empty.
Found reference — a derelict brick stairwell climbing toward a blown-out doorway, leaf litter on the treads, the source of the looking-upward framing the studies kept returning to
Author photograph by Richard Gerber — my father on driftwood above a tidal marsh in a flat cap and plaid shirt, the portrait that runs on the back cover and sets the book's only warm note
Before commissioning anything I built a comp to agree the composition, using a watermarked stock photograph as a stand-in. That is all that comp is — a placeholder proving the framing, not a design. Using the photo itself was never an option, and its watermark is a useful reminder of why the drawing had to be commissioned.
My early comp — the arch composition tested with a watermarked stock photograph standing in for artwork that did not exist yet, which is how the framing was agreed before anyone drew anything
Griffiths' studies are below, and they circle two different pictures. Several look straight up a flight toward daylight, following the reference photograph. Others look at an arched opening from inside a dark room, where the stair is something you see rather than something you are on. One study puts a small figure at the head of the stairs.
The arch won, and the figure came out. Looking up the flight puts the reader on the staircase, which sounds right for the title and is actually too much — it fixes the moment and closes the metaphor. The arch keeps the reader in the dark room looking at a way out. And a figure, once you add one, becomes the subject; the poems are the subject. What is left is a stone opening, light pooling on the floor, and the stair rising into shadow.
Griffiths study — the loosest of the set, the arch and treads still being found rather than drawn, most of the sheet given to working out where the dark mass sits
Griffiths study — the arch squared up inside ruled crop marks with a small dark figure standing at the head of the stairs, the one version that puts a person in the frame
Griffiths study — the competing viewpoint, looking straight up a flight toward daylight with heavy charcoal closing in on both sides
Griffiths study — the upward view again, softer and more diffuse, the stair edges left as bare paper so the light does the drawing
Griffiths study — back to the arch and now mostly about tone, the room reduced to a graded wash with the treads holding the only hard marks
Griffiths study, near final — the arched opening resolved, light pooling on the floor and the stair rising into shadow, essentially the drawing that went on the cover
The typography is one classical serif, set light and generously spaced, and no script anywhere. The title steps down the left in five short lines that follow the stair's own diagonal, so the type sits in the drawing's dark side rather than on top of its lit side, and the author's name closes the sequence at the bottom in the same face at a heavier weight. White type on a black field, nothing else on the front — with only greyscale available, the contrast between the type and the charcoal is the entire design, and adding a second typeface would have spent contrast the drawing needed.
I built two production files. The perfect-bound softcover wraps front, .458-inch spine and back as one piece, with the author photograph, biography, Balboa mark and barcode on the back. The dust jacket extends the same artwork to 8.75 inches with 3.25-inch flaps. Both are shown here as the printer's templates, so the trim, bleed and wrap zones are visible, along with the grey boxes marking where the press drops its own caption, logo and barcode. The contributor biographies run down the back flap.
Perfect-bound cover, printer template — Leah Griffiths' charcoal drawing of an arched stone stairwell on the front with the title stepped down it in a light classical serif, the spine at .458 inches, and the back carrying Richard Gerber's author photograph, the biography, the Balboa Press mark and the barcode
Dust jacket layout on the Balboa template — the same front and spine extended to 8.75 inches with 3.25-inch flaps, grey boxes marking where the press drops its own caption, logo and barcode, and the contributor biographies set down the back flap
Inside, the script finally appears, and only for poem titles — the handwritten note against Tisa Pro for the verse. My father's manuscripts were handwritten, and a script title is the one place that can show without becoming a costume.
The device that does the most work is the ghost. Each poem's title repeats at the head of the page, enormous and pale, bleeding off the top edge. It gives a page that may hold only twenty words a piece of structure to sit under, so short poems do not float in a field of white, and it costs nothing on a black-and-white press.
The verse itself is stepped across the measure rather than set flush, because my father wrote in indented, cascading lines and those breaks are part of the poem. Ranging everything left would have been tidier and would have quietly rewritten him.
I set the interior in InDesign at the Balboa trim, 200 pages, black and white on creme, and delivered a print-ready PDF with separate softcover and dust jacket cover files to the press's specification.
Interior page proof — "Awakening" titled in a handwritten script with an oversized pale repeat of the same word bleeding off the head of the page, the poem set in Tisa Pro and stepped across the measure to hold my father's own line breaks
book designcover designtypesettingpoetryself-publishingdust jacketinterior layoutart direction
