JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS FONT
The Silent Brain: Explorations In Hypnosis – Garry R J Craven and Penny A Craven
Oh, what a joy it was to be transported back to 1983 by this book’s font – the output of a 9-pin dot matrix printer (possibly an Epson); a fixed width, but narrow font, where every ‘m’ is basically a top-rounded blob reminiscent of a poorly rendered pacman ghost.
You can even see the individual dots with the naked eye; I swear I can smell creosote, leaded petrol, burning fields, and deep-fat fryers, just by turning the pages. But I didn’t buy this book because of the font inside, but because of the fonts on the cover – a calligraphic gothic font for the title, and a broad, sans, all-caps font for the sub-title. Oh, I miss the days of the birth of desktop publishing, known affectionately as ‘three fonts minimum’ to those who were there.
Nowadays the use of a 9-pin dot matrix font would be a throwback, a retro instrument to make you relive an era, much like the use of Kate Bush’s ‘Hounds of Love’ in Stranger Things. But this really is retro. An obviously self-published effort, which was likely produced literally on the authors’ desktop; but this pretty much preceded real desktop publishing by about a year, meaning the insides would have been ‘word processed’ instead (on a BBC Model B, I would guess) and the cover was probably laid out manually using Letraset ‘transfer lettering’.
What an era of home and self publishing, where anyone could write a book and, with an almighty amount of cost and effort, put something together that could be sold to the five or so people that had heard about it (via mail-order direct to your door). There was no Amazon, the internet wasn’t a ‘home’ thing, and web browsers wouldn’t appear for another 10 years anyway.
And what a title! The Silent Brain – I have to admit I was intrigued and my expectations were a mix of hope and fear. Would it be a hidden gem, where the authors (whose names, incidentally, weren’t even on the cover) revealed an exciting, twisting and turning journey into something that made the brain silent? Or would it be yet another dull, poorly written hypnosis book that happened to have an interesting title?
As soon as I saw the internal font, my expectations were low. And even though it showed promise in the first half, it basically delivered as expected of any shit book on hypnosis: elongated and detailed history – check; poorly researched and minimally described current theories of hypnosis – check; statement that the authors believe trance to be real – check; terrible instructional chapter on how to do hypnosis – check; final chapter making wild claims about split personalities and past-life regression – check.
To be fair to them, the four (you read that correctly – four) chapters on the history of hypnosis were very, very detailed, and reasonably well researched and put together. I personally don’t care too much about anything that preceded Clark Hull’s Hypnosis and Suggestibility – aside from James’s Principles, most of it was philosophy masquerading as science, featuring all sorts of wild claims. But these authors really did care; they named everyone and anyone involved in anything mesmeric or hypnotic, and did their best to describe an accurate journey through time.
My main problem is that they then stopped at Clark Hull and appear to have not read any academic books published since. For example, a quick look at the shelves revealed at least 10 books published before The Silent Brain that would have helped inform them of theories that were current at the time of their writing, and that’s only what we already own. They could have read books by Weitzenhoffer, Sarbin, Coe, Barber, Hilgard, Bowers, Spanos and Wagstaff, but they didn’t, for whatever reason, and instead embarrassed themselves.
The two chapters on theory are terrible, with faults ranging from a lack of references to poor descriptions and muddled concepts. Towards the end of the history, my hopes had been significantly raised, but then they were crushed for the remainder of the book. For example, the chapter on how to do hypnosis ignored entirely the published inductions that form parts of the standardised hypnotic scales, instead relying on a clumsy set of descriptions of the sorts of words that should be used, with little instruction on how to deliver them and how they should be structured.
Following this, the final chapter talks of split personalities and past-life regression. There’s nothing good that I can say about this. What started out with some promise, ended up as just another bad hypnosis book. But at least it had a great title and was self-published.
[Ed: is that a good thing?!]
