A mediavalist PhD dissertation slice of life:

torrain: "Look, it's got a thorn and an eth. It really should have a yogh!"

Me: "That's what she said!"

(no subject)

Slashfilm asks Marvel "When will see see Patton Oswalt's Star Wars?"

Marvel: "Soon"

Stupid publishing question!

Was watching a movie, and saw a stack of obviously fake hardcover books in a rack. Like, "Danny Devito's character wrote it" books, with his face on the cover.

Obviously, they just printed up a bunch of fake dust jackets and stuck 'em on real books. But it struck me: Dust jackets need to fit. So they'd need to know which book they were re-covering, or at least how many pages it had. And that led me to wonder, do they actually do that? Figure out how thick a book is going to be and adjust the dust jacket accordingly? Or is there a standard dust jacket size, that happens to have extra margin space on the internal flaps to allow it to fold nicely around books of any standard size, and thicker books just wind up with thinner internal flaps?

I suppose I could yank a bunch of hardcovers off the shelf, strip the dust jackets, and check, but that seems like more work than just Asking The Tubes.

So, lazyweb, help me: How do publishers figure out how big to make the dust jackets on books?