For all of you design junkies here, Lebedev's ru/kovodstvo (or com/mandership for English language version and .com domain) is a very interesting read. Too bad "business lynch" is not available in English. This is where aspiring designers send their works to Lebedev and he or his employees do a review (mostly disparaging and with lots of profanities).
The practice of printing titles top-to-bottom vs. bottom-to-top seems to be more than a Western Europe vs. Eastern Europe thing, though, because French books (and I think German as well) are printed bottom-to-top just like Russian books.
This seems to be one of the many cases where <i>a priori</i> neither technique is much more preferable than the other, but where it's much more desirable that <i>something</i> be chosen as a standard than that there is disagreement.
I have a few friends who still use the old practice in their libraries of rebinding books to have the same cover style & lettering.<p>Never understood it. I find something quite profound/exciting in a big bookshelf full of different sorts of books :)
Maybe I'm missing the point, but I don't see any legibility-on-shelf difference between top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top. Either way you need to tilt your head a bit...<p>Does anyone actually see a difference in readability here?
Interesting, but if a wrong-endian book is in a bookshelf or a pile, can't you just correct the problem by inserting it upside-down? The only case where I'd notice a difference is the top book in a stack.
I didn't see much difference in readability either. But its fascinating, the variety in viewpoints regarding something that most of us would not even give a second thought about.