Quill & Quire:

In the early 2000s, [Jason] McBride was the press’s managing editor and co-founding editor of the [Fr]uTOpia series of Toronto-centric books…. “He knows the Coach House way of doing things,” [Alana] Wilcox says.

I take this to mean manufacturing books with perfect bindings so tight you can barely hold them open, all typeset by a cackling Mark Fram in an ancient PostScript Joanna with Bringhurstian small-caps rules that are half-understood and aren’t even followed all the time. (With single quotes, as though we were discussing Toronto topics in an Oxbridge gentlemen’s club.)

I know I got one part of that wrong because Ed told me his new book does not use Joanna. But what else, if anything, did I get wrong?

Why does Coach House get a pass despite the structural failings of its books? Do you really think the darling little anachronism of printing on site excuses everything else? It produces books that fight the reader.

Coach House Books is an artisanal publishing collective set up by friends to print each other’s books on a backyard press. But I expect artisanal publishing to produce beautiful objects you will love to read.

Poor Ed Keenan

(UPDATE, 2013.02.11) Esteemed colleague Ed Keenan got the B.P. Nichol (“bpNichol”) shaft in his new book Some Great Idea. Not only is it replete with fake-ass Bringhurstian small caps and numbers that never appear as such, his book brings an especially egregious Coach House Press folly to new heights: It actually has fat-fuck mayor Rob Ford talking about AIDS in British single quotation marks. (Pictures.)

I have previously described the miraculously original design autobiography Chasing the Perfect by Natalia Ilyin. In fact, I gave Ilyin her own category.

Because I submitted a blue form and asked the library to buy the book, using my own review as justification, now Toronto Public Library has two copies of Chasing the Perfect. One of them lives at my home branch. They’re both holdable.

Toronto designers, like Toronto developers, leave the city once they attain a level of competence. Hence Toronto designers dearly need their knowledge of history, and especially their understanding of Modernism, permanently recalibrated by Natalia Ilyin. Some books change your life; this one will change your career. And now there’s no excuse: You can borrow and read her book for free.

Monocle 24 Section D is the overdetermined yet vague title of Monocle’s podcast on “design.” It makes the fatal error of engaging a screamingly gay host, Hugo Macdonald, with an equally screamingly gay voice. “Design” is already viewed as more than twee enough (lamps, tables, chairs, rugs). Assigning this gay a voice to the subject-matter trivializes it further, colouring it with Weimar-like decadence and frippery. With a presenter like that, “design” comes to be easily dismissed as mere decoration irrespective of its importance.

On the show’s so-called Canada special, an unschooled Macdonald attempts to pronounce “Dundas.” He spits it out as [ˌdʌnˈdass], with expected assibilation. (Listen for yourself [.M4A].)

The episode later attempts to describe a (“bespoke”) furniture shop confusingly named Avenue Road. Avenue Rd. is already confusing enough, and the company is actually legally named WYP Furniture Inc. This Avenue Road is located on “East” Avenue, Macdonald told us. It’s actually at 415 Eastern Ave. at McGee, a location I just walked past an hour ago without ever noticing this apparently highly significant furniture retailer.

I’m just trying to understand a lengthy podcast on “Toronto design” that fails to even note in passing this city’s obvious failures of design. And I sure as shit am not talking about icing on cakes.

Do you want design taken seriously?

Then decouple it from the twin stereotypes of decoration and effeminacy. (Now go back and read what I just wrote again so you can quote me accurately later.)

David Bowie, “The Next Day” (Jonathan Barnbrook); R.E.M., Out of Time (Tom Recchion, Michael Stipe):

Quite missing the point, but fun participatory graphic design: Make Your Own David Bowie Album Cover.

Kraftwerk: Automatons manqués standing motionless behind keyboards during any and all of their “performances”? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

The Pet Shop Boys have virtualized the backup singer.

Handsome, open, generous, beautifully proportioned, with tattoos that, like totem poles, tell a family story.

• Matt Haughey, founder, MetaFilter: “You can invoke the ‘plain theme’ as a member, and we’re toying with the idea of making that the default in the future if enough people keep E-mailing us saying the current design is too hard to read.”

• Haughey, as heard on a MetaFilter podcast a year ago: “I just find Reddit so hard to read physically.”

I am user 250 on MetaFilter. After 13 years, I’m taking a year off from this exemplar of community Weblogs, a site I have defended and championed.

I knew the game was over when I realized the only thing that interests me is metadiscussion. For years the only thing I could stomach reading on the site is MetaTalk. It’s MetaFilter’s true innovation, a subsite where you can debate the site itself. (So many other sites need the same thing, but, true to Internet form, those sites are happy to keep doing what is known not to work.)

MetaFilter is, moreover, a great site to read if you’re a fervent defender of Muslims or trannies or both, since criticism of either or both is simply not permitted.

Centrally, though, I object to the entrenched stupidity of the smart and sophisticated people who run the place, namely mathowie and lead developer Paul Bausch (pb). Haughey, a victim of sunk-cost fallacy, is overcommitted to the precept that MetaFilter in the 21st century has to look and behave almost exactly the way it did in the first month of its existence. (Another factor at work is a complete redesign Haughey long ago commissioned that didn’t go over well with the peevish, ignorant MeFi userbase. I gather that, because one redesign didn’t work, Haughey believes no part of the current “design” can or should be changed.)

What I’m talking about here is the counterfactual and reader-hostile insistence that lines of text on MetaFilter be about as wide as your monitor. Civilian MeFites, a cohort banging shit out on Wintel keyboards who can’t even typeset a quotation mark, insist up and down they can read 23-inch lines of text just fine. They’re lying: They can’t. You can’t. I can’t. Nobody can.

My beef with Bausch is his refusal to upgrade the site to 2001-era Web standards. Instead of marking up paragraphs of text, ideally in a list, MetaFilter used sequences of BR BR for nearly a decade. Developers have since gone to the trouble to replace those incorrect semantics with even-less-correct semantics (div class="copy post"; span class="smallcopy"; br hr). Matt Haughey is close personal friends with the inventors of Web standards, from whom he has learned nothing he cared to actually implement.

The fixes, while obvious, will not happen

1. Haughey needs to accept centuries of practice in reading, backed up by decades of empirical research and his own experience, and make his site actually readable with default settings on real-world screens.

2. Bausch needs to join the ranks of the competent developers – the people Haughey considers old friends, the guys he catches up with at conferences.

They won’t, of course.

I’ll be back on 2014.01.01. Neither side should get its hopes up.

Confidential to Adam Greenfield

You are not in any sense a member of, let alone a spokesman for, “the MetaFilter community.” Nor can you read 23-inch-wide lines of text.