Graphic Design Q re: poety collections

Cafe Society
1

So, as a graphic design challenge I gave myself, I’m going to put together a book of about 50 poems by an author. Now, I have the poems already formatted &c., but the page payout is going to be slightly difficult, although I really don’t have too many issues.

Trying to reach a balance between page count and aesthetically pleasing layout, I wonder if I should

  • put multiple poems to a page (in the even that they’re less than a page total, which most of these are)

  • mess with the spacing between the poems in the case that I have an orphan stanza or two, or should I just let them roll over?

  • What point is it worth starting the poem on a new page? If I can only fit one on the remainder of the page? Will going from (forget Latin terms here) right to left page have any affect?

Hmm, asking questions like this really takes the challenge out of it.

2

A website I recently worked on wanted a “news articles” page.

I put the articles in an Excel spreadsheet and wrote a bit of VBA that generated little HTML files for the articles:

  1. Each article got its own web page.
  2. There was a main page that listed each article’s headline (as a hyperlink to the article’s page) and also provided the first paragraph underneath the hyperlink.

This might be what you’re looking for (replace “article” with “poem”, “headline” with “title”, “paragraph” with “stanza”), your programming skills notwithstanding.

(A further advantage of this is that you can regenerate the stuff at any point with a single click, so simply drop in a new article/poem or remove an old one to keep your site fresh)

3

I presume you’re talking about real, physical pages here :wink: …

I’d put each poem on its own page - even the very short ones. Allowing for a few spreading over onto a second page (don’t split stanzas, unless they’re really lengthy), you’ll probably still be comfortably within a 32-leave binding.

4

If you can find pictures of the original, privately printed first edition of Stephen Crane’s War is Kind, you will be inspired. The book was designed by a man whose name escapes me right now, but it is beautiful in a spare, clean way. Most of his poems are quite brief but the use of the space on the page, with the occasional illustration on an opposite page, renders them beautiful.