Comment by hopelite
9 hours ago
It seems you may be making assumptions that the formatting and typesetting of any particular edition were intentional or even deliberate on the part of the author, not any number of people, from editors to printers, who could and would have influenced those things for various reasons.
Something I am rather familiar with is brought out by your mention of the German edition/title; that the continental market seems to generally produce books that are far more densely formatted, i.e., smaller font and typesetting, thinner pages, and leading to overall tighter book formats. I actually appreciate it when, e.g., a book is 1/2 the size and weight, and usually also made far more durably; but it will invariably compromise any author intention related to the arrangement of the lettering.
Maybe you can confirm that based on what seems to be your English and German editions of the same novel.
Well that depends, there are obviously authors that care about these things. I have no idea what Brods intentions were with the book, and if he cared about layout.
The German and Swedish editions I read were similarly typeset, and the first scan I found in English felt similar. What I wanted to know was if there was some thought into it, because the website is nicely designed so striving for a unique typesetting strategy could be a goal.
The formatting they are referring to is not that of the original text but that of the Standard Ebooks project.
> tighter
I found it amusing, considering all those memes about German words with 35 letters each.
And, as I get older, I began to consider letter size relevant to choose a book edition. Gave up buying new books and went for used, older editions with bigger letters.