August 21, 2008

Field Testing

I got my copy of Coudal Partners’s Field-Tested Books a few days ago, which I’ve been patiently waiting for since I ordered it earlier this month (it came a bit late— I blame PayPal). If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s explained in detail on the web site. Money quote: “Maybe it’s possible to determine how a book colors the way we feel about the place where we experience it.”

So, it’s not really a collection of book reviews. Most book reviewers don’t use their location or period in life as the basis for their article, or at least not significantly. Field tests read more like narratives, with the reviewer explaining some period in his or her life in detail and how the book they “test” played a part in it. That sounds like an assignment you’d see out of a high school literature class, but I assure you it’s better than that. Some of my favorite examples are Keith Phipps’s review of Billy Budd by Herman Melville, and Margaret Lyons’s review of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman.

Of course, the fact that the entire contents of the book are available online for free would, for many people, eliminate the need for a print version. It includes no extra stories or “features”, and the edition at Coudal Partners is quite readable for the web. But “quite readable for the web” is different than plain “awesome”. This book is not for people who want one step up from bad; it’s for people who want a few steps up from “pretty good”.

Reading the paperback just feels right: the layout, the way the book size feels in your hand, and, yes, the typefaces (Linotype Electra looks beautiful in ink). There’s a natural flow that comes from reading each story after another continuously, flipping the pages without interruption until you’re just too damned tired to go on. The short length of each test would make clicking on all of them extremely repetitive.

Oh, and getting a hand-written number of which book you have (out of 500 in the printing) is pretty sweet, for what it’s worth.