Books and Illustrators from my childhood number 6: Pere Castor’s Wild Animal Books

I have to confess that I don’t remember these, but they would have been around during my childhood. I’d like to think I would have seen some.

While I was pottering in a secondhand and bric-a-brac emporium in Hitchin today I came across this.

Frou jacket

This is a story about Frou the hare, number 4 of Pére Castor’s Wild Animal Books, illustrated by Feodor Stepanovich Rojankovsky also known as Rojan.

There are more examples of his work here http://www.fulltable.com/VTS/aoi/r/roja/r.htm

The series was translated by Rose Fyleman  and was published by George Allen & Unwin Ltd in the UK and by Flammarion in France. This book has no date, but Amazon are listing it as 1938.

There’s more on Pére Castor here http://www.answers.com/topic/pere-castor

This book is absolutely enchanting; a mix of non-fiction and a story of Frou the young hare from his early life (His father had been eaten up by a fox and his sister had been carried off by an owl!) to meeting Capucine, his girlfriend and their life together.

We’re introduced to Frou

Frou and Capucine meet

The story covers about a year in their lives. They have to hide from foxes and crows, the huntsmen and their dogs, a separation and a joyful reunion.

The happy ending

The lithographs by Rojan are just gorgeous – I shall be looking for more in the series.

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Books and illustrators from my childhood number 5 – Ladybird Books

I loved Ladybird books. We had a large collection – many of which, I seem to remember, my mum had acquired from somewhere. We had reading-scheme books, make-and-do, factual… There just isn’t anything like it anymore.

This one is from the Nature Book series 536. It’s Birds of Prey illustrated by John Leigh-Pemberton first published in 1970. By 1970 there were over 350 Ladybird titles, and at the time they cost 18p each.

Ladybird Birds of Prey cover

This is the entry about red kites. It’s interesting to see that at the time they were extremely rare. And thankfully now we can see them coming back across the UK.

Ladybird book red kite

Finally for now, the short-eared owl. It hunts during the day – but even so I’ve never seen one!

Ladybird book short-eared owl

 

What is an ePub file? Why won’t it validate when I make one in inDesign?

Yesterday an email dropped into my inbox and I found myself doing some impromptu ePub troubleshooting on an ePub that wouldn’t validate. The ePub had been exported through inDesign – I don’t know which version at the moment.

Now – inDesign is a great conversion tool – but unless you get everything set up right it’s unlikely that your ePub will validate without cracking it open and making some tweaks. In fact – it’s unlikely that it will validate straight from InDesign whatever you do. It’s just a question of how much you do in inDesign.

So I exported one of my test files with some deliberate errors to see what I landed up with. Oh dear.

Validation errors

A while back I wrote a post on what an e-book ‘file’ is. I mentioned that an ePub file isn’t a single file at all, but a zipped-up collection of files. Screen shot below.

unzipped ePub

Just to recap: the xhtml files are the content of the book. It’s a good idea to set them up as one file per chapter.

split screen

This is a split-screen view in Dreamweaver. The xhtml on left and how it should look on the right.

The toc.ncx file contains the table of contents.

Table of contents

The css file deals with how the text is styled. This can be a world of pain, but doesn’t tend to stop your file validating.

The content.opf file is the one you really want to check out if your file won’t validate.

Content.opf file

Notice that there are a whole load of metadata fields that begin with <dc:. You are likely to have validation problems if your title, date, language and identifier fields aren’t filled in. The title is the main one. E-readers often run the title across the top or bottom of the screen and it’s pulled in from here. InDesign should pull these in during the export – but only if it’s set up to. The title field (and some others) is dragged in from ‘File Info’ in inDesign – it’s NOT the file name. I know from working in print for ages that we rarely fill in the file info box for print, or if we’ve used files as templates they might contain old info. So that’s one to get into the habit of filling in.

The next section is the manifest. This is a packing list of everything that’s in the ePub folder. If anything is listed here it must be in the folder. Everything in the folder must be listed here. File names and file types must match, or your file may not validate.

The Spine lists the order that the files will appear. Again, if there are any mismatches your file might not validate.

Finally there is an optional section called the Guide. This isn’t created by inDesign at the moment. You will have to go in and create it manually. It seems to be more of an issue if you want to convert to Kindle format. It shows the Kindle software where the cover, table of contents and the start of the text is located. It won’t stop your ePub validating, but if you convert to Kindle format it may throw up an error if it’s not there.

content.opf file. Spine and guide

And finally don’t have spaces in file names – EVER. It’s a good idea to get into the habit of just using letters and numbers for any files you create. You’ll notice that the majority of warnings in the first image above are down to my inDesign file name containing spaces.

And remember – validation is only the beginning – you can have a file that validates perfectly, but it can still be riddled with formatting errors that will cause it to give poor user experience.