One of the main tasks in my job years ago as a student assistant in the library was shelf reading. And, oh, is that boring, shelf by shelf, checking to make sure every book is in call number order. You’re supposed to just look at the classification numbers but I usually would look at the titles on the spine, also. You had to do something to make the job a little easier.
Later, throughout my library career, like all librarians, I spent a lot of time browsing among the stacks, reading a lot of titles on the spine and not thinking much about how those titles were positioned.
Top down or bottom up?
One of the things I love to do in Buenos Aires is to browse among the many great bookstores in this city. On my first visit to the bookstores here in Argentina I noticed something odd but it took me a minute to figure it out. Then I went home to examine the books in English that I had brought with me from the U.S.: almost all of the Spanish-language books in Buenos Aires have the titles on the book spine printed from the bottom up. All my English-language books are printed with titles from the top down. (I only have about 100 or so English books here but the spines are all consistent).
Honestly, I don’t know if there’s some kind of international standard for this type of thing or if it’s just convention in different countries or publisher preference. (In the library world there seems to be an ANSI standard for just about everything!)
The Impact: browse from left or right
The direction of the title on the spine isn’t that big of a deal but you do notice it when browsing in the bookstore or the library - which way you stand, which way you tilt your head, which way you step from side-to-side or around the customer browsing next to you.
Yet, I have noticed in Spanish-language books that there is a little lack of consistency: 90% of the Spanish-language titles I see have spine titles printed from bottom to top but a few are the opposite.
I took a photo of one of my shelves at home to illustrate. Look at the Saramago books: the English version of The Stone Raft next to the Spanish version of Ensayo sobre la ceguera. But then just a couple of books over is Arqueología de Buenos Aires.
(Click the photo to see a larger size).
Thanks for this. Never would have given it a thought–especially as I’ve not worked for any non-USA publishers. But it’s certainly worth knowing. Now you have me wondering if there are other little idiosyncratic differences in how one lays out different elements of a book’s cover, or its interior pages, outside the US as opposed to inside.
Being an anglophone educated in French thanks to the idiosyncrasies of the Canadian school system, I learned fairly early on in life that almost all French book spines are printed bottom-up, while almost all English book spines are printed top-down. The few German books that I own are also all top-down.
Perhaps we have a germanic vs. latin situation, with English and German going one way, and French and Spanish the other. I’d be curious to know how the Dutch, Italians, Portuguese and Scandinavians do things…
Hi Thomas,
Thanks for the perspective of the French book spines. It does indeed sound like a germanic/latin distinction.
Thanks for pointing out the diff between cultures. Good perspective. Both ways can be designed so that the spine is readable and tastefully done. Leave it up to an American writer with no sense of design to come up with another approach: I had to design a cover with the spine showing the letters vertically, each centered one above the other. Totally unreadable & ugly. But that’s what he wanted. Oh, well.