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On the Eve of Publication - Page 2

Written by Rabbi Professor Jonathan Magonet Friday, 01 February 2008

A Prayer Book in the Making

Some Weighty Decisions

With the editorial decisions completed, the search began for a printer. Already from the beginning of the work on the Siddur one of the greatest concerns was the weight of the book, especially given the heaviness of the Pilgrim Festival volume. The current Siddur has 620 pages whereas the High Holyday prayerbook has 1050 but was printed on particularly light paper. Had the same paper been used for the Pilgrim volume (at 920 pages) the weight should not have been such a concern. But how large would the Siddur be when all the Shabbat and Daily services, special occasions, life cycle materials, not to mention the various anthologies – Study, Psalms, Pirke Avot, had been included? The final count was 756 pages which made it significantly larger than the current Siddur, but nowhere near the size of the other volumes. It was clear that everything would depend on the weight of the paper used. But then another consideration entered into the equation. We had long hoped that it would be possible to introduce a second colour for various purposes, and it turned out that with the advances of technology this would hardly affect the cost of the book. But two colours on such special paper required very particular printing abilities – and the most obvious place where such could be found lay in the publishers of Bibles and Christian orders of service. Our search eventually took us to Holland where a company called Jongbloed had printed, as well as Christian materials, a Hebrew/Dutch Bible edited by Rabbi David Lillienthal. With his recommendation the connection was made and, after exploring more than a dozen other possible specialist printers in the UK and across the globe, this was agreed.

Of course that was only the beginning of a whole series of considerations. Firstly, if there was to be a second colour, for example to distinguish passages that were only read occasionally so that it would be easier to skip over them, what colour should it be? It had to be a colour that would be clear to people who were colour blind; it should be dark enough to be clearly visible, but not so dark that it could not be distinguished from black in the poor lighting that may occur in some synagogue buildings. So various shades of blue were tried out with people with different visual problems till we settled on the version now in print.

I cannot claim to understand the technical difficulties in transferring the word-processed version with which we had been working into the appropriate form for the printer. I can only admire the patience and skills needed to sort out a variety of problems with our Dutch counterpart. Moreover at various stages, peculiar letters kept popping up on the Hebrew page, or others would suddenly become amalgamated with one another in the course of transmission. All these too were finally sorted out as the number of versions of each section of the text to be proof-read and corrected rose to twenty. The task of proof-reading was shared amongst a number of colleagues, rabbis and scholars who paid particular attention to the Hebrew and transliteration, others who focused on the English, and yet others who checked the details and consistency of cross-references, footnotes, punctuation and layout. Let no-one take for granted the final state of the prayer book where every single page has had to be carefully composed and examined.