October 22, 2010
Dear Publishers: It’s called a “slipcase”.
I’m thrilled to death that publishers are getting behind fancy private library editions; big, beautiful hardcover tomes for display or general celebration of bookness. We’ve had a particularly meaty month at my bookstores – doorstoppers are coming fast and furious. Northwestern University Press has published an all-in-one edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, translated by the ubiquitous Burton Raffel. Yale’s Autobiography of Mark Twain – volume ONE of THREE – weighs in at about 700 pages. We continue to sell out of copies of Joseph Frank’s 1000-page abridged (from 2500 pages) edition of Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time.
I love big books, I do. I have a probably unhealthy attraction to works that exceed 500 pages; the more the merrier. But if I may – as a bookseller and a collector – make a suggestion? These books look lovely sitting flat on a table, but as time passes they inevitably make their way to shelves where they must stand upright, or into paperback editions where they are nearly as thick as they are tall. They puff-up, tilt and sag. The Pevear and Volokhonsky War and Peace published by Knopf published in 2007 is probably a case in point – in paperback, the book inevitably looks old and used after a mere two weeks on the shelf. It is too big. The binding – especially in paperback – can’t hold shape with so many pages.
This is an easily remedied problem. It’s called a slipcase. You’ve seen them before, a nice cardboard sleeve that hugs two or more volumes together in one tight box. Penguin released a beautiful trade version of The Arabian Nights translated by Lyons & Irwin in 2008 which housed three hardcovers in one slipcase. See how manageable each volume is? No slipping, sliding or flip-flopping around. No puffy, humidity-soaked pages or disintegrating “perfect” binding. And one wide canvas for all your design needs!
You can have your cake and eat it too: all-in-one editions without asking one binding to hold all those pages in one. And wouldn’t it be nice? A 3-volume slipcased edition of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy? Davies’ Deptford Trilogy? Penguin, please, bloody Clarissa? We will all thank you for it.