Five basic typesetting fixes for self-publishing

I’m currently reading The Cruel Sea, a 1951 novel about the Battle of the Atlantic by Nicholas Monsarrat. A few days ago on Substack I shared a few pictures of the interior of the book, simply but beautifully designed and set in Janson, a readable typeface still in wide use today.

In my note I called this kind of mid-century design “typographical comfort food.” A number of people agreed, noting the “visual delight” of the look of the page and that good typesetting makes it feel “like I can breathe through my eyes” reading it. Another, very much to the point, described the reassurance that comes with good type design: “You know you’re in good hands.”

This last comment is particularly important because at least two others remarked on self-published books in this context. One, an author of sci-fi, said he took this aspect of books for granted until he started publishing his own work, at which point he realized “it really does make a difference!” Another, slightly more dourly, wrote of the need to undo the damage done by desktop publishing.

I don’t know so much about widespread damage, but self-published books very often look bad at the page level. I’ve certainly put books back on the shelf after looking at an unreadable interior. But I’ve been doing desktop publishing of one kind or another as an amateur for thirty years, and—through a lot of trial and error and, crucially, just looking at a lot of books—have learned a lot about what makes the interior of a book look like a book. I’m no expert, but what I hope to offer here are a handful of specific things people designing their own books can do to make sure readers focus on the writing and not on shoddy typography.

Paragraph spacing

A lot of the problems I see with self-published books come from designing the interior of the book in a program like Word. This by itself is not a problem—I’ve laid out all of my books in Word. The problem is leaving Word’s often moronic default settings in place.

Among the worst of these is Word’s automatic insertion of a space between paragraphs. No professionally published book does this, and to a potential reader, even one who doesn’t know much about design or publishing, it won’t look right. Something will feel off.

This setting can be corrected in the paragraph formatting menu. Under the “Spacing” section, you’ll want to make sure that both “spacing before” and “spacing after” are set to zero.

Level up: Word’s default indentation is set to half an inch (.5”). Finished books don’t indent paragraphs this much. Reset it to .2” or .25”.

Line spacing

Manuscripts may be double-spaced, but a finished book should be single-spaced. You may occasionally see a professionally published book fiddle with the line spacing a bit—1.1 or 1.2 between lines, for instance—but the lines will always be closer to single-spaced than otherwise and precisely how this looks on the page will depend somewhat on the typeface or font (about which more below). Again, too much space between the lines won’t look right.

Like paragraph spacing, this is adjustable in the paragraph formatting menu.

Faith through justification

“Alignment” is how the text in a manuscript lines up with the margins. Word’s default is the entirely sensible “left aligned,” meaning the text will be flush with the left margin but not the right. Professionally published books are “justified,” meaning the text reaches all the way to the right margin on every line (except for the last sentence of a paragraph). This used to be a painstaking task for old-fashioned printers, who had a variety of ways to scootch and squish the text to fit the length of a line, but computers adjust the text to fit the margins automatically. Simply highlight the text and, out of the four alignment buttons, click “justify.”

Caveat: publishers do occasionally get artsy and toy with unjustified text with “ragged” edged paragraphs (my CSB Reader’s Bible has unjustified text), but I’ve never met anyone who actually likes this when they see it. Err on the side of traditional standards.

Level up: Be aware that, once you’ve justified the text of your manuscript, you’ll probably want to go through it looking for places where justification has opened huge gaps between the words on a line. You can manually control hyphenation or letter spacing to fine-tune this.

Stay out of the gutter

Even competently designed self-published books sometimes misstep when it comes to setting up the margins of the page. This is not typically a make-or-break aspect of page design but can be off-putting to readers.

Pick up a dozen or so books at random and flip through, looking at the margins, and you’ll see a wide variety of designs and widths. What you won’t see, however, are margins so narrow that they allow the text to stretch all the way across the page, or margins that allow the text dip into the gutter, the middle of the book where the pages join. If the line is too long, it can tiring to the eye and difficult to see into the gutter, and you want your book design to eliminate as many physical obstacles to the act of reading as possible.

This is slightly more relative than some of the other tips I’m giving here, but in a normally sized paperback book (say 5x8”) the outer margin should be about half an inch. This can be the narrowest margin. The top of the page should be a bit wider, the bottom wider still (to accommodate a page number in the footer, for instance), but the inner margin by the gutter should be around half again as wide as the outer.

I’m still unsatisfied with the margins I laid out in my first published novel. My most recent book and the one I’m most pleased with in regard to margins, has an outer and bottom margins of .7”, a top margin of .6”, and an inner “gutter” margin of .9”. When setting this up in the margins menu in Word, be sure to select “mirror margins” to get the facing-page format of a published book.

Appropriate typefaces

Word’s default typeface or “font” all the way through my school and college years was 12-point Times New Roman (single-spaced, I’ll add). At some point when I was in graduate school someone somewhere at Microsoft decided to goof all of this up. They added that automatic line after a paragraph and reset the default font to 11-point Calibri.

The other defaults in this post are mostly basic manuscript format things you’ll need to adjust to make your book look like a book, but these default font settings are mindbogglingly stupid.

The best size for your text is going to depend on a few factors like the length of the book and how that affects the cost of manufacture. Like margins, what looks best is going to be partly a matter of judgment.

What is and is not an appropriate typeface for the text of a book is not. The problem with Word’s Calibri is that it’s sans-serif. (Here’s a quick primer on serifs.) Professionally published books may use a sans-serif typeface for chapter headings or other design elements, but the actual text itself should always be in a serif font for readability.

Fortunately, there are many, many of these available. A few of my personal favorites, what I like about them, and where you might sample them:

• Bembo—a classic old-style typeface with a slightly old-fashioned look and elegant italics. You may see it in older Penguin Classics, religious books from Ignatius Press, or many John Grisham paperbacks.

• Sabon—a modern typeface with well-balanced letters; it is also highly readable at all sizes, even down to footnote sizes like 6 points. Very widely used both for fiction and non-fiction now.

• Dante—nicely balances old-style design with readability. You may see it in the Walt Longmire mysteries, Penguin Modern Classics fiction, or a variety of non-fiction books.

• Minion—a relatively recent but widely used font that is highly readable but, in my opinion, a little bland. Frequently used for non-fiction but you will sometimes see it used for novels—like the Tor Essentials reprint of The Prestige that I read this fall.

• Caslon—a nicely weighted typeface with elegant italics that suggests the old-fashioned printing press (it is often used for books on the American Revolution, and there are some varieties that look artificially weathered, like 300-year old pamphlets).

• Baskerville—another classic, widely used by university presses and fiction publishers a few decades ago. Like Bembo and Caslon, it has as suggestion of class and history about it. You can see it in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

There are plenty of other good typefaces commonly used for professional typesetting, but any one of these will look better than Calibri, Times New Roman, or whatever Word’s default is tomorrow. If these don’t come pre-packaged with your edition of Word, they’re available online in either licensed or free generic versions.

Avoid:

• Sans-serif fonts

• Typewriter fonts like Courier

• Slab-serif fonts, thick, heavy typefaces that are better used for titles or headings than the main body of text

• Fonts designed to look like calligraphy or other handwriting

• Whimsical fonts, of which there are many available

If what you’re after is professionalism and readability, you should pick something unobtrusive and clear.

Level up: With those strictures in mind, experiment with typefaces a bit. A choice of font doesn’t have to be strictly functional, it can suggest tone, add texture, or, like Caslon for those American Revolution books, suggest a time and place.

Conclusion

One of the challenges—or, if you enjoy this stuff like I do, one of the fun things—about self-publishing is that there are always things to fine-tune and improve. Again, the above is a list of basics that, even if they won’t give your self-published book perfect interior and type design, they’ll at least eliminate some of the most obvious mistakes or problems. As that one Substack commenter put it, you want potential readers to feel that they’re “in goods hands” just by looking inside. I hope y’all find it helpful.

Betraying that they’ve never had a friend

Everyone once in a while the benighted YouTube algorithm serves up a winner. Here’s an excellent short video essay that was recommended to me this afternoon. I watched it based on the thumbnail alone. The subject: the deep friendships of great literary characters being interpreted as sexual relationships, a terminal cultural cancer that never fails to annoy me.

The host, of the channel Geeky Stoics, a channel I’ve never previously come across, invokes several examples of this internet-fueled trend* but mostly focuses on two: Frog and Toad,** heroes of Arnold Lobel’s warm, gentle, very funny children’s stories, and Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee of Lord of the Rings. These are apposite choices, since both are great favorites in the Poss household and both have been subjected to this perverted eisegesis for some time now.

From there he advances to latter-day male loneliness and the generally sorry state of friendship in the modern West, topics I care deeply about and that he treats with extraordinary concision and care. It’s a solidly presented, thought-provoking little video, and I strongly recommend it.

But what made this video especially good was the use of CS Lewis’s book The Four Loves to frame the discussion. Just last week on Substack I made the case for The Four Loves as an underrated Lewis book, a late work brimming with his mature thought on the different aspects of love—its forms, objects, and enactments as affection, friendship, eros, and the theological virtue of charity. The video essay begins with a line from the chapter on friendship that I’ve thought about many, many, many times, especially when some smug terminally online type starts not so much insinuating as narrating the imaginary deviance of characters like Frodo and Sam:

“Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.”

— CS Lewis

As I said, I have plenty of occasions to remember this line, but never as a gotcha—what it reveals is too sad for that.

The one point where I think the video misses a potentially fruitful nuance relates to class: while Frog and Toad are quite obviously peers, similarly situated in life, Frodo and Sam are a master and servant—Tolkien explicitly compared them to a British officer of the First World War and his batman. This does not preclude deep genuine friendship, something moderns struggle to understand and that the Peter Jackson movies mostly obscure. Just as we moderns have lost much with our condemnation of exclusivity or discrimination in relationships, so our suspicion of rank, hierarchy, or any other form of “inequality” has closed off whole dimensions of human experience to us.

But that’s a relatively minor point. There’s much more to the video, including more of Lewis’s discussion of the distinctions between friendship—a side-by-sideness oriented toward a common interest or mission—and other forms of love. Check out both Geeky Stoics’ video and The Four Loves, which is even available in a shorter, earlier version narrated by Lewis himself.

* Related: See this recent long video by Hilary Layne on the widespread deleterious effects of fanfic, not the least of which is the “shipping” of often inappropriate combinations of characters. Layne has a companion piece on Substack here.

** Often described by people on social media with the strangely specific phrase “canonically gay.” There is no mention of Frog and Toad being anything other than friends in the stories, the first collection of which is called Frog and Toad are Friends, making me wonder what these illiterates think the adverb canonically means.

Two dangers of colloquialism

Failure to communicate. Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke.

This has been a mad month, and on top of everything else keeping me busy I injured my right hand last week, so all the book reviews and other writing I had hoped to do over Thanksgiving Break came to nothing. For now. I’m glad to say I can type again, at least.

But if I had some enforced inactivity on the writing front over Thanksgiving, that at least gave me time to think. One topic I returned to several times was the danger of idiom, colloquialism, or unpredictable connotation in language. Two incidents—one-sided conversations overheard, really—separated by several years awakened me to two related aspects of the danger and drove home the need for clear and unmistakable meaning to me.

The more recent of the two came from a YouTube true crime channel that provides commentary on recorded police interviews. In one featured interview with a murder suspect, two detectives, a man and a woman, take turns applying pressure. It’s not exactly the good cop/bad cop routine, but the female cannily uses persuasion and emotional leverage while the male presses aggressively and confrontationally. Several times he uses the expression “come to Jesus” in the colloquial sense of a reckoning coming due, i.e. “It’s time to fess up.”

The YouTube narrator, apparently unaware of this common and (to me) obvious idiom, pauses to express outrage that the male detective is introducing religion to his interrogation and suggests his obsession with Jesus is undermining the female detective’s technique. Commenters also showed their ignorance—and, this being the internet, their violent irreligion—in predictable terms. Only one that I saw after scrolling through hundreds pointed out the narrator’s basic misunderstanding.

That’s one danger—in using an idiom or colloquialism, your meaning may be utterly lost, especially to observers or third parties. Take the image at the top of this post, for example. Some of y’all will be able to hear this image in your head. Some will have no idea what it means. It would be a mistake, then, to tie the meaning of this post to repeating a phrase like “Failure to communicate.”

The second, which I witnessed long ago on Facebook, is related but not identical. During an unexpected snowstorm back home in Georgia, a storm that occurred during a school day and threatened to trap students at school, Governor Nathan Deal took to social media to reassure the public that their kids would be taken care during the emergency, that Georgia public school teachers “are adequate to handle this situation.”*

Georgia’s state of preparedness for winter weather became a hot political topic for a few minutes afterward, but that’s not what greatly exercised an old acquaintance on Facebook. No, a guy I went to school with—after the manner of “guys I went to school with” the world over—posted a tantrum about Deal’s description of public school teachers as “adequate.” The problem? The word adequate itself, which this guy took as a negative of the “meets expectations” variety, anything not exceptional being perceived as bad. “We are more than just adequate!” etc etc.

The second, related danger—despite using precise, accurate language (Georgia’s teachers did, in fact, prove adequate to take care of students during the emergency), your audience may supply their own meaning based on purely informal connotation, what a word or expression means to them.

The problem in both cases is informality, a “you know what I mean” attitude toward language. In the first, informal expression from the communicator leads to misunderstanding on the part of a receiver ignorant of that informal expression. In the second, a precise, neutral message from the communicator leads to misunderstanding on the part of a mind that understands the words but, accustomed to informal use of a perfectly acceptable word, imputes false meaning to them.**

Speak colloquially and be misunderstood, or speak precisely and be misunderstood. This is just the nature of communication in a limited, fallen world, I suppose, but it’s frustrating, especially in the second case. You can’t, after all, predict every way your meaning can be misconstrued by someone.

The only solutions to this kind of misunderstanding that I can conceive of are erring on the side of precision (and you can be precise even when using idioms and dialect, sometimes even more precise than standard English allows); a commitment by everyone to learn more about English expression and even words and not jump to conclusions (easily the most optimistic idea I’ve ever floated on this blog); and—whether failing or in addition to those two—good faith and charity.

* I’ve tried and failed to find the exact wording of both Governor Deal’s message and the Facebook status referenced here, but the one word that matters most I remember clearly.

** It’s telling that both responded with outrage and an apparent unwillingness to discern whether they had misunderstood, but that’s a topic for another time.

The two basic ways history is going wrong

Last year, when Joel Miller asked me to introduce the subject of historiography over on his Substack, I noted the existence of modern schools of history that “deny even the possibility of Herodotus’s work.” Against this was a countervailing anxiety about “revisionism,” which undermines the discipline of historical understanding.

Last night I finished reading Robert Tracy McKenzie’s book The First Thanksgiving. McKenzie explains the historiography of that event and the broader context of the Pilgrims and post-Reformation Europe excellently, and it got me thinking about those two opposed errors in the approach to history again.

It seems to me there are two basic ways history goes wrong in the present:

The first, which I’ve railed against plenty of times here on the blog, stems from the hermeneutic of suspicion. This could be an ideological postmodernism that regards all historical sources as equally fictional “text,” feminist or postcolonialist or other intersectional assumptions about power and oppression, or—most commonly among the half-educated—a reflexive suspicion based on a cliche like “History is written by the winners.” In its elite form, with cultural cachet including glowing writeups in legacy print and endcap displays at Barnes & Noble, this is The 1619 Project; in its vulgar form, this is the TikTolk explainer that slices and dices to reveal to the viewer the dark forces behind great moments in history or, yet simpler, the Henry Ford or Napoleon attitude: history is “bunk,” history is “lies agreed upon.”

The second basic error is often a reaction to the first, and that’s resistance to any form of “revisionism.” Where the first error stemming from suspicion, whether in New York Times or neckbeard Redditor form, is leftist-coded, this is very much a conservative phenomenon. (It is also much more proportionally popular or vulgar, conservatives and their ilk having less purchase in elite taste-making institutions.) This error seeks to preserve the past in aspic, a complete, uncomplicated display piece. Questioning or correcting even the small details of an historical event as popularly understood—pointing out, for example, that the Pilgrims probably did not eat turkey and certainly did not have bread at the first Thanksgiving—is received as a profanation. That’s because, as with the first error, understanding the past isn’t actually the point for those making the error.

Though seemingly opposites—and you’ll certainly see the people doing this sneering at the others, especially imaginary others—both approach history more as a symbolic extension of themselves, both have a simplifying instinct (“Well, we know what’s actually going on here is…” vs “Just teach the facts!”), and both need a usable past, an instrumental version of history oriented toward achieving some goal. That is, they’re presentists.

McKenzie’s Thanksgiving book is excellent. I hope to review it in full here soon, but as I haven’t finished anything I’ve started writing for over a week, don’t hold your breath—and definitely give thanks for me if I do.

Plot holes in reality

By far the most tedious complaint about any given movie today is that it has “plot holes.” Technically, a plot hole is a contradiction or discrepancy in the actual storytelling that makes some part of the story logically impossible. These are not necessarily insurmountable—plenty of good movies have plot holes. But, in the way that the democratic spread of a technical concept always makes it stupider, the popular understanding of plot holes is that 1) they totally ruin entire movies and 2) consist of any unexplained detail in the story, no matter how minor.

This last point is key. Modern movie audiences both need everything spelled out for them and don’t pay attention, so even leaving out characters traveling between two points is sometimes called out as a plot hole. I wish I were making this up.

It occurred to me this morning while reading comments on the latest episode of an Unsolved Mysteries-type podcast that the plot hole has a close cousin in popular conspiracism—the “anomaly.”

Basic dictionary definitions of anomaly emphasize deviation from norms or expectations. Statisticians and scientists routinely talk about anomalies in their data, i.e, results they didn’t expect or that contradict the findings of similar research. But, as with plot hole, anomaly has a broader, looser, darker popular meaning. Read discussions of any recent event that has a conspiratorial angle on it and “anomalies” will pop up not as outlier data or unexpected details, but as trace elements of coverup, alteration or fabrication by Them, and evidence of hidden truths. This usage of anomaly is not coincidentally well suited to insinuation.

Both plot holes and anomalies may be minor unexplained details. The difference is that plot holes exist within the limited worlds conjured by storytelling or filmmaking and, unless the author invents an explanation as a patch, are simply mistakes or information too unimportant to bother about in the first place. An anomaly—as understood by the internet type scrubbing through footage of, say, the Charlie Kirk assassination one frame at a time—admits of explanation because it occurred in reality, limitless and limitlessly complicated. One only has to do good-faith research.

But, in actual practice, calling something an anomaly usually just creates permission to discard valid evidence because it isn’t perfect, to speculate and point fingers, or to venture entirely into a theory the conspiracist has already settled on. X is unexplained or unexpected, therefore A, B, and C.

Just an observation—perhaps more later. The aforementioned podcast episode was disappointingly weak for a generally good show, so this will probably be on my mind for a while. More than usual, anyway.

Addendum: An anomaly in written accounts or eyewitness testimony will usually be called a discrepancy, with almost identical results.

Against director’s cuts

Here’s a very good Substack essay that dares to say something I’ve thought for a long, long time: the theatrical cuts of The Lord of the Rings are better than the extended editions.

The author, Ryan Kunz, offers several good arguments in support of this unpopular opinion, not the least of which are the pacing problems introduced with the extra footage but largely absent from the theatrical cuts. This is what initially disappointed me about the extended editions twenty-odd years ago. In The Fellowship of the Ring’s climactic battle against the Uruk-hai, Howard Shore’s excellent music is chopped and stretched to accommodate additional action and orc blood, leaving seams in the soundtrack that I was never able to ignore. I actually resented the changes for breaking up the music. Fellowship, which is still my favorite and, I think, the best-crafted of the three movies, does not benefit much simply from being longer.

Few movies do. The movies that have actually been improved by a director’s cut are few and far between. Das Boot and Kingdom of Heaven come to mind.

But these are rare exceptions. Most often a director’s cut is a sign of bloat, of creative restlessness, or a studio cash grab. Sometimes a director in the grip of an obsessive spirit of experimentation simply won’t leave a movie alone, as in the multiple competing cuts of Blade Runner and Oliver Stone’s Alexander. Much more commonly, a director’s cut simply offers more movie without actually integrating the extra footage well—quantity over quality, the whole problem with the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings. Apocalypse Now: Redux and the director’s cut of Gettysburg, which has many of the same pacing faults I complained about in Fellowship, also fit the bill. The cheap, vulgar version of this is the spate of unrated DVDs from the early 2000s—especially in the horror genre—which were excuses for a volume of gore and nudity that would have precluded theatrical release.

And yet that spirit is not entirely absent from the Lord of the Rings extended editions. I remember when each came out, year after year, the first two were announced with a breathless promise that they would be not only longer but R-rated. This suggested a prurient interest in gore for its own sake that bothered me at the time. (Remember Peter Jackson’s background.) One almost sensed the disappointment as each extended edition, year after year, was slapped with the same PG-13 as the theatrical cuts.

In addition to bloat and pacing problems, the footage included in director’s cuts often consists of already inferior material. Most of the additional footage in Gettysburg is clunky talk, as when Pickett’s Charge is stopped cold for a monologue from General Trimble, complete with awkwardly looped score. Kunz also notes the cringey, anachronistic humor in The Two Towers. Théoden’s line in the same film, improvised to Jackson’s delight by Bernard Hill, that “No parent should have to bury their child” is similarly cringeworthy. A parent burying their child, not a father burying his? And in what world before our own would this be a reasonable expectation? The filmmakers betray their sentimentalism here. This is a scene that undermines its own sense of the tragic and the tone of the movie.

The ready availability of the director’s cut or extended edition, especially when it becomes expected, can also be a crutch, as I noted regarding Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. This was a disaster of a movie that Scott—notice that he’s popped up three times now—was already asserting would be improved by a longer cut before it even hit theatres.

There is also a fanboy dimension to all of this. As Substacker and fantasy author Eric Falden noted in his restack of Kunz’s essay, there is a certain maximalist “mimetic” quality to some fans’ devotion to the extended editions that feels purely performative. The way this is communicated is usually the giveaway: “Watching The Lord of the Rings again—extended editions, of course.”

That’s off-putting and sets off my anti-joining reflexes, but the artistic considerations have always been most important to me. Jackson, like any good filmmaker, worked really, really hard to make Fellowship, the trial balloon, the best movie it could possibly be, taking the fullest possible advantage of the medium—tight structure, fast-pacing, telling exactly as much story as it needed to in a surprisingly light and economical three hours. Its runaway success led to perceptible slackness in The Two Towers and The Return of the King, a slackness that turned to bloat by piling on additional footage for the extended DVDs.

This may have proven good fanservice, but it is not good filmmaking—or, lest we forget, adaptation. The Lord of the Rings excels as a novel. The movies should excel as movies.

Food for thought. I’m not against director’s cuts per se, of course, and I don’t hate The Lord of the Rings extended editions, but I think director’s cuts have to do much more to justify their existence—and fans’ devotion to them—than simply be longer.

Ruritanian notes

A few years ago I realized that, for the most part, I don’t actually like time-travel stories. I, who spend most of my waking life thinking about what it was like in the past! I finally decided it was because a lot of time-travel stories, under the influence of various kinds of nitpicking, get so fixated on the mechanics of time travel and its resulting theoretical problems like the grandfather paradox that actually visiting the past—traveling through time—ceases to be the point.

Something similar is at work in Ruritanian fiction. Ruritania is the imaginary Central European kingdom invented by Sir Anthony Hope for his great adventure novel The Prisoner of Zenda. Hope’s story was so popular that it spawned a long-lasting subgenre of adventure fiction, the “Ruritanian romance.” Note the word romance carefully there. We’ll come back to that.

Last night I finished The Dark Frontier, Eric Ambler’s first novel, published in 1936 when he was 27. It’s at least partly a parody of British spy fiction at the time—including the work of John Buchan—and follows a mild-mannered English physicist who, having revisited some pulpy spy novels on a trip, gets into a car accident and wakes up thinking he’s a spy. He winds up involved in industrial espionage in the Eastern European republic of Ixania, a corrupt state that has just developed the first atomic weapons.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, but despite my love of Ambler I didn’t enjoy it very much. Even as I was reading the climactic action I was wondering why The Dark Frontier and Ixania weren’t working when Ambler’s Judgment on Deltchev and its unnamed, fictional Eastern European state did. Then I started thinking about all the Ruritanias I’ve visited over the last few years, and which ones I enjoyed and which ones I didn’t.

Here are several novels set in fictional countries that worked, and worked well (links will take you to reviews here on the blog):

• The Prisoner of Zenda, by Sir Anthony Hope (1894, Ruritania)

• Castle Gay, by John Buchan (1930, Evallonia)

• Black Mischief, by Evelyn Waugh (1932, Azania)

• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh (1938, Ishmaelia)

• Judgment on Deltchev, by Eric Ambler (1951, unnamed Eastern European country somewhere near Bulgaria)

Here are several that did not work:

• The House of the Four Winds, by John Buchan (1935, Evallonia)

• The Dark Frontier, by Eric Ambler (1936, Ixania)

And here’s an outlier, a novel that I think illustrates both the weaknesses of Ruritanias and how they’re best overcome:

• The Courts of the Morning, by John Buchan (1929, Olifa)

I’ll stipulate here that when I talk about Ruritanias, I mean fictional countries that nevertheless are meant to exist in our world, not a fantasy world or alternate universe. Much of what I lay out below could also be helpful in thinking about fantasy worlds—though I have no time for alternate universes, much less multiverses—but that isn’t the subject here.

In mulling these stories after finishing The Dark Frontier last night, I found something in common between those that actually work. Judgment on Deltchev, the most obvious point of comparison being a later Ambler novel, is an indictment of Soviet show trials and Western acquiescence to the Stalinist takeover of Eastern Europe, all acted out through one confused, put-upon reporter’s moral struggle with the situation he’s been placed in. Ambler doesn’t even name the country in question. In a quite different vein, Black Mischief and Scoop are savage, blistering satires of modern journalism and efforts to “modernize” African nations. Castle Gay, which takes place in Scotland but concerns the upheavals of the faraway Evallonia, is straightforwardly a story of moral transformation through hardship. And the ur-text of the genre, Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda, is an adventure testing a man’s honor, loyalty, physical courage, and moral strength. In all cases, you get just enough detail about the fictional country to make it believable, but the heart of the story are the characters’ moral and ethical conflicts.

In short, the best Ruritanian stories work because Ruritania is not the point—it’s a convenient setting where real-world locations won’t distract and that allows the outworking of moral or character drama and action. Ruritania is a device. The “romance” or adventure comes first. Tellingly, all of these novels work as genre stories: Deltchev is suspenseful, Black Mischief and Scoop are unbelievably funny, Castle Gay and Zenda are fun and exciting.

When Ruritanias don’t work it’s because the nitty-gritty details take over from the characters. Following the climax of The Dark Frontier we get several pages about the events of a peasant revolution in Ixania, including which leaders took control of which government ministries and how many army officers were placed under arrest, and I realized I just didn’t care. And I didn’t care because I was not sufficiently invested in the main characters—physicist-turned-master-spy Professor Barstow and his sidekick American reporter Carey. (The first half of the novel, which is more character-driven, is much more interesting.) Likewise with Buchan’s House of the Four Winds, which has isolated episodes of thrills but mostly staggers along through over-detailed explanations of Evallonia’s tottering interwar government and the uncertain role of its populist movements. Buchan is telling a similar story of moral formation, but that gets lost in the details.

To bring the fantasy genre back in, you might recognize some of what bedevils these novels as “world-building.” This is the danger of making the world you’re building more important than the story, or of having a story too weak to support the world you invent for it to take place in.

The Courts of the Morning, the Buchan novel I suggested straddles the good-bad divide in this genre, is an instructive counterexample. As noted even at the time it was published, it occasionally bogs down in explanations of the geography, industry, and economy of Olifa, the South American republic where it takes place. But it balances this with a strong, intricate plot of great moral weight and redemptive arcs for several characters, all of whom are vividly realized. These mostly work well, and mostly counteract the overwhelming effect of industrial sabotage and train schedules.

This is by no means the last word on such a topic—the novels that don’t work have problems beyond their setting, for instance, and there are plenty of other Ruritanias I haven’t traveled to—but consider this post notes toward a fuller understanding of how best to use a fictional country in a story.

Ambiguous bowdlerization

Last Friday I reviewed Game Without Rules, a great collection of spy stories by Michael Gilbert. Some spoilers ahead for the last story in the book, “A Prince of Abyssinia,” but also an important and vexing question.

Though appearing in most of the eleven stories in the book, Mr Calder’s beloved and intelligent Persian deerhound Rasselas has the spotlight in this story, as evidenced by the title: Rasselas being named after the title character in Dr Johnson’s novella The History of Rasselas: A Prince of Abyssinia.

The plot of this story concerns the return of a former Nazi agent who, captured and tortured by Mr Calder during World War II, wants revenge. In the climax, this agent captures and traps Mr Behrens to prevent him from intervening, then appears disguised at Mr Calder’s cottage. Rasselas senses his intentions and attacks but is killed, and the agent is killed in turn. After a moment in which Mr Calder and Mr Behrens grieve, here’s how the story ends:

Between them they dug a deep grave behind the woodpile, and laid the dog in it and filled it in, and patted the earth into a mound. It was a fine resting place, looking out southward over the feathery tops of the trees, across the Weald of Kent. A resting place for a prince.

Colonel Weinleben they buried later, with a good deal more haste and less ceremony, in the wood.

At least, that’s how my Herald Classics copy from Union Square & Co concluded. But in looking later at Mr Calder and Mr Behrens’s hodgepodge of a Wikipedia article—haphazardly put together even by Wikipedia’s standards—I saw that last paragraph quoted at greater length. I checked the passage on Wikipedia against the recent Penguin paperback published as part of their Modern Classics Crime and Espionage series. Here’s the original last paragraph:

Colonel Weinleben they buried later, with a good deal more haste and less ceremony, in the wood. He was the illegitimate son of a cobbler from Mainz and greatly inferior to the dog, both in birth and breeding.

Odd—not only that the American edition from Union Square omits the concluding sentence of the story—and the entire book!—but that it omits such a thematically important one, explicitly juxtaposing the noble dog with the duplicitous agent, a worthy animal against a scummy, murderous man.

I’m not sure how or why this happened. A copyediting mistake? Carelessness? Or censorship? If the latter, why this sentence? I call this “bowdlerization” in the title of this post but I can’t be sure preventing Gilbert from being mean about a fictional Nazi spy’s parentage is the reason the sentence disappeared. There is no note on the copyright page about changes to the text, no butt-covering editor’s note, nothing in Alex Segura’s introduction or on Union Square’s website—no notice whatsoever that the text is different from what Gilbert originally wrote.

If this is intentional, it would not be the first case of stealth editing, a problem that has already afflicted e-books, often without the knowledge or permission of even living authors.

It also bothers me that I cannot be sure that the cutting of the final sentence is the only such instance in the book. It will take a while to look through and find others, though there is, in fact, at least one other omission at the very beginning. The Union Square edition cuts Gilbert’s dedication:

To Jacques Barzun, of Columbia University, an amateur of detection

Is it significant that a tribute to a famously conservative-leaning historian was deleted? Without any kind of acknowledgment from the publisher that anything at all has been cut, who can know? But whether this was simply editorial sloppiness or intentional cutting—and whether there are more such cuts to the texts of the stories—it is a troubling incident. And here I was daring to be hopeful about publishers rejecting censorship.

I hope I’m wrong. The Penguin Modern Classics edition appears to be unexpurgated, at any rate, and this gives me an excuse to reread these excellent stories soon.

Jones on Scott on the Middle Ages

For the anniversary of Agincourt over the weekend I started reading Dan Jones’s Henry V, a biography released late last year. I’m enjoying it so far, though I am still skeptical of the stylistic decision to write the story in present tense. I may have thoughts about here if and when I review it.

I began reading with some wariness but I came around quickly when, in the introduction, Jones strongly, straightforwardly argued for Henry’s greatness, something he aims to prove in his book, and several chapters in, when Jones dropped this footnote about a high-profile incident of trial-by-combat in France just before Henry’s time:

This case was the basis for the 2021 film The Last Duel, which made the 1386 battle between Carrouges and Le Gris a vehicle for a ponderous meditation on the politics and ethics of twenty-first-century sexual abuse.

The Last Duel was a Ridley Scott movie, of course, which means that it was only ostensibly, superficially historical. And “ponderous” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Don’t take my word for it.

I love many of Scott’s movies but this presentism afflicts every one of his historical stories except, perhaps, his first feature, The Duellists, where the point is very much the look and technical perfection of the visuals. Style over substance may be Scott’s other besetting sin, but when he caves into that temptation there at least he’s not indulging in middlebrow navelgazing. I first wrote about this here with regard to Kingdom of Heaven way back in 2019 and—more recently and specifically on Scott’s cavalier disregard for history—before the release of the disastrous Napoleon. And of course I wrote about The Last Duel here. In the years since I saw it, my positive impressions have faded a great deal but my misgivings remain.

It’s just nice to see such succinct confirmation of the problem. Jones knows how to use a footnote.

Young Washington trailer reaction

“COLD DEAD HANDS!” William Franklyn-Mille in Young Washington (2026)

Let me start with a favorite passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing in 1858, less than sixty years after George Washington’s death:

“Did anybody ever see Washington nude? It is inconceivable. He had no nakedness, but I imagine he was born with his clothes on, and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world.”

This is not only funny—and I love the reactions it gets from students—it succinctly gets at a problem with iconic historical figures. Some are so important, so mythic, that a version of them with ordinary human qualities stripped, planed, and sanded away supplants them in our historical imaginations. In American history this may be more true of George Washington than anyone else. Tellingly, even in commenting on this phenomenon Hawthorne gets something wrong: Washington didn’t wear powdered wigs.

Last week a new trailer for an Angel Studios release called Young Washington came to my attention—fortuitously as I was pulling up a video for my US History I class. The film appears to cover George Washington’s experiences during the first couple years of the French and Indian War, from the ill-fated patrol in which, as the 21-year old commander of a small force of Virginia militia, he accidentally precipitated a global war, through the Battle of the Monongahela, in which a British force was cut apart and nearly annihilated and where, as a volunteer aide-de-camp to the fatally wounded British General Edward Braddock, Washington helped save what was left of the army.

Here are Variety and The Hollywood Reporter with more details.

As it happens, this is one of my favorite stories to tell in class, and I’ve long thought it would make a great movie. So discovering a trailer for Young Washington has gotten me both excited and anxious.

If you want to get at the person beneath the mythology and iconography—especially of great and consequential leaders like Washington—it requires deep interest and long, purposeful study. Most people can manage perhaps one of these, more often neither. For them, a good historical movie can untangle the bundle of traits and props that make up the imaginary versions of historical figures, presenting them with a real human being perhaps for the first time. But the movie has to be good. The damage of a false movie portrait can be permanent.

What follows are rough impressions and questions based on this early trailer for Young Washington:

• This teaser is heavy on battle scenes—not that I’m complaining. I’m pleased to see throughout the representation of regulars (paid, uniformed professionals), militia in a wide variety of clothing, and allied Indians on both sides. I doubt Young Washington will nail this the way The Last of the Mohicans did but that this complexity is so clearly visible even in this trailer is heartening.

• Ben Kingsley plays Lieutenant Governor of Virginia Robert Dinwiddie. Dinwiddie was Scottish and twenty years younger than Kingsley when the French and Indian War broke out.

• The Angel logo appears over what looks like Braddock’s expedition, which set out into the wilderness of western Pennsylvania with a long wagon train and no road. Great atmosphere in this shot.

• Washington’s leather-looking coat at approx. 0:20 is a good spot to talk about uniforms and costumes. I’m not a mid-18th century guy but beyond the basic red-for-British/white-for-French the uniforms don’t look right to me. The leather coat is of a piece with modern Hollywood’s tendency to give the star slightly more contemporary-looking costumes, e.g. Orlando Bloom’s boot-cut hose in Kingdom of Heaven. The Revolutionary War spy series “Turn” gave Abraham Woodhull similar modern takes on 18th-century clothing: leather when everyone else is in wool, hipster toboggan, bad boy scowl. At least our young Washington isn’t constantly glowering.

• Scenes of Washington surveying the Virginia wilderness: A+ for effort. Can’t comment on 18th-century surveying equipment but the outdoor clothing looks better than the uniforms and the landscape looks exactly right. People tend to forget Washington’s work as a surveyor (and his chance to get a look at what’s out there right before it became available to speculators) so it’s good to see him working his day job.

• The film provides Jane Austen fans with a ball. Washington is accurately shown not wearing a wig but inaccurately—unless this is an accident of low light and color grading—as a brunette. Washington had red hair. He was also 6’2” at a time when that placed him head and shoulders above most other men, something you don’t really get here (but that HBO’s “John Adams” miniseries nailed). Even as a young man he was striking and physically imposing.

• A French officer goads Washington with “You are not British yet they send you to speak for them. So that when you fail they’ll have someone to blame.” This introduces some sketchy interpretation. Washington and all the other colonials absolutely considered themselves British at this time. It’s a later nationalist myth that we strapping Americans had already discovered ourselves to be a new, independent species and were just waiting for the right time to buck off the shackles of the Old World. (Even the great Last of the Mohicans tacks into these waters a bit.) See Fred Anderson’s books below for more on that.

• The wagon train in the woods features in a few quick shots, presumably of Braddock’s defeat at the Monongahela. Can’t comment at this point how accurately the film will portray the battle overall, but these shots capture the chaos well.

• After the Battle of Jumonville Glen and his surrender at Fort Necessity (and I can’t be sure that anything in this trailer relates to that event), Washington left the Virginia militia to volunteer as a gentleman aide-de-camp to General Braddock, played by Andy Serkis. As with Kingsley’s Dinwiddie, we don’t get much to judge by here, but Braddock comes across as rather hostile to Washington—a bit of lordly British stereotype. Washington actually liked Braddock, wrote positively of him, and learned a lot during his month under his command.

• Scenes of combat in the forest look appropriately messy, panicked, and dirty, with a mix of men fleeing and courageously holding their positions. It’s also atmospheric as heck. Points for that. The one thing we miss is the massive primeval trees of the colonial American woodlands, something no movie would probably be able to recreate now.

• We also get Washington taking unofficial charge of part of the battle. Washington was not only physically large and powerful, he was ridiculously brave. You might know that he found multiple bulletholes in his coat following the Battle of the Monongahela (which Kingsley’s Dinwiddie seems to allude to at the beginning of the trailer) but he also had two horses shot out from under him. Braddock, before he was mortally wounded, also demonstrated immense courage and had several more horses killed beneath him. I’ll be curious to see how the film treats his relationship with Washington and how they’re depicted in battle. A lot of movies about heroic figures downplay the courage of others to make their subjects look better—a trap I hope they avoid.

• Some other famous names associated with Braddock’s expedition: Daniel Morgan, Horatio Gates, Benjamin Franklin. Curious to know if any of these will show up in the film. It would make sense to include Franklin, as he later told stories—including in his Autobiography—of having tried to warn Braddock about his plan of attack.

• A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot at 1:27 seems to show the moment Washington’s patrol started a global war: allied Iroquois leader Tanaghrisson “The Half-King” killing French officer Joseph Coulon de Jumonville in cold blood. Describing this moment never fails to startle students.

• A final name-drop shot gives us an appropriately young-looking Young Washington. He doesn’t seem to have much human personality in this teaser but, well, it’s a teaser.

Lots to dig into here, and for what it’s worth I enjoyed the trailer—and picking it apart for historical clues. For now I’m curious but not particularly optimistic. I hope to be pleasantly surprised.

In the meantime, if you want make an effort to get at the real young Washington and his time—whether you end up seeing the movie or not—let me recommend the following:

• For a good shorter biography that pays attention to Washington’s early experiences in the French and Indian War as well as his pre-Revolution life of surveying and land speculation: Washington’s Revolution: The Making of America’s First Leader, by Robert Middlekauff.

• For the fascinating, underappreciated story of the French and Indian War, I’d recommend either of two books by Fred Anderson: The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War or, for a much more detailed version, his mammoth Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766.

• For Braddock’s expedition against Fort Duquesne specifically there’s Braddock’s Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution, by David Preston.

Young Washington just started shooting in Ireland last month and won’t be out until next July 4th, so who knows what the final product will be like? We certainly don’t need, per Hawthorne, Washington nude—even HBO didn’t give us that, shockingly—but if we can get past the stately bows and powdered wigs to the real young man who fought for king and crown in the French and Indian War, who struggled to master his temper, who trooped through the forest bearing chains and compass and later rifle and sword, and who wrote to his brother describing how “charming” the sound of whizzing bullets was, I’ll be glad.