cellio | physical aspects of siddurim

It looks like Mishkan T'filah, the new siddur from the Reform movement, might actually come out before the moshiach comes. Someone asked on the worship mailing list how people feel about physical aspects of prayer books, such as hard-cover versus soft-cover. This made me think explicitly about things I implicitly react to.

My reply:

My criteria for a siddur are, roughly in order:

content (but that's a separate discussion)
legibility (crispness matters at least as much as font size)
holdable in one hand
paper not too thin (the "old Plaut chumash" problem)

Gates of Prayer (both blue and gray editions), Sim Shalom, and our home-grown Shabbat morning service in a three-ring binder all fulfill "holdabiltiy". The paperback Mishkan T'filah does; I'm a little concerned about a hardcover edition with the larger page size and all that extra content (almost 700 pages), but we'll see. I'll use the book anyway, as its content is miles ahead of GOP in my opinion, so this is just a question about how much hassle it will be.

Why is being able to hold it in one hand important? Because I want to have a hand free to turn pages and to hold stuff (like tzitzit during Kri'at Sh'ma, a lulav and etrog in their season, or a magnifying glass when a siddur violates the legibility goal), and I don't see well enough to just rest the siddur on the top of the pew in front of me when I need a free hand.

I don't care about outside factors like cover color/art beyond "would this embarrass me in a non-denominational minyan?". I don't particularly care about hardcover versus softcover, but the latter tend to get beat up as people fold pages back and that's not so good. But I don't feel that I'm having a lesser prayer experience if my siddur is softbound, spiral-bound, or in a binder. First and foremost for me are content and usability.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

spiral-bound

Rise Up Davening?

That's a good one. I actually wouldn't mind seeing that in print. (Not that I'd want to use it every week, but to put on my shelf along with my other siddurim...)

There is actually a "loose-leaf" siddur that a minyan has developed -- the "loose-leaf" format lets the prayer leader mix 'n match without all that annoying "OK, skip ahead 23 pages" bit.

Of course, if you're using that with more than a few people, I imagine the logistics of changing the pages get crazy, and people don't actually swap the pages out that often. I wouldn't know; I've never been part of a minyan that uses such a prayer book.

Our morning minyan uses a home-grown siddur in binders, with plastic sleeves to keep the pages from getting torn up. We don't do it with the intention of swapping stuff week to week, though we've been able to easily modify it when we wanted to replace a page (typos) or insert something we hadn't been doing previously. It's about 50 pages total, so it fits in a one-inch binder with room to spare and is not too heavy.

It's not something I would specifically look for, but it's also not something that would bother me. :-) (It wouldn't work with Mishkan T'filah because of the intentional two-page-spread layout they're using. Personally, I'd buy a "right sides only" edition if one existed, except that they'd have to tweak it in the few places where they violated the format (like the torah service). As you might infer, the left side of each spead is for "creative" English readings.)

I agree with your criteria, but I'll call out that "holdable in one hand" has implications not only for size and binding but also weight. One of the motivators for creating my own siddur was the desire to have a siddur that wouldn't make my wrist feel exhausted by theend of Musaf.

Yeah, a discussion of weight is what led to cover type, but I see I skipped right over that here. (A few times people have offered me large-print siddurim when seeing me using a magnifying glass, but that actually makes it worse. Now, fortunately, both my Hebrew and my familiarity with the service are such that I rarely need the magnifier (it was mainly for vowels, and to distinguish the "close" letters like reish and dalet).

Before I quit the Religious Practices committee (so this is back when Mishkan T'filah was going to be available in January 2007) I remember hearing that it would be available in 2 volumes. This should solve the holdability issue and also allow congregations on a budget to buy just the Shabbat liturgy. Whether or not this will happen now I don't know.

That would help. One of the editors described the contents of the upcoming publication on the mailing list and described a siddur with weekday, Shabbat, and Yom Tov stuff all in one volume, but maybe two-volume editions are coming later. Thanks for the heads-up; I'll ask before buying mine. I like my two-volume Sim Shalom; when I need to supply my own siddur (or for travel) I can take one or both depending on needs.

They are also doing editions of MT with and without the transliteration; we're buying some of the latter specifically for use by students. What I haven't heard is whether the non-translit book will be smaller or laid out differently, or if there'll just be gobs of white space.

Oh, another thing I don't care for in siddurim -- excess white space for the sake of "aesthetics" if it ends up costing too much weight. MT has some problems there, though not severe in the last draft I saw.

Another vote for holdable in one hand but for a different reason: that will generally correlate with smaller (top to bottom) pages. This is important to me because my current glasses have small (top-to-bottom) lenses*, which means that when standing I cannot hold larger pages in a position where both top and bottom are in focus through the glasses at the same time, and sometimes getting either the top or bottom of a larger page in focus requires holding the book in an uncomfortable position.

*This seems to be the current decade(s)-long fashion, so it's likely to be an issue for a lot of people for a while.

I don't like the trend toward smaller glasses either. I had to work hard to find big-enough frames for my last new pair. (My glasses are "too big" per current fashions, but usability trumps that and I never had much use for "fashion" anyway. :-) )

I'm jealous, though -- even with larger lenses, I've never been able to have a whole page in focus at once. I move my head and/or the book a lot when I read.

I'm jealous, though -- even with larger lenses, I've never been able to have a whole page in focus at once. I move my head and/or the book a lot when I read.

I "cheat" by using smaller books: the siddur I usually use is a Rinat Yisrael "softcover" (plastic rather than stiff paper) - Hebrew only, about 5.25" x 3.5" x 0.8". Since the print doesn't go all the way to the edge of the page, and the pages don't go all the way to the edge of the cover (which is what I measured), keeping an entire page in focus isn't too hard (and/or moving the entire book slightly is so easy that I don't notice it). I also like it because it's "complete": it's got everything for weekdays, shabbat, rosh chodesh, major & minor holidays, and even the basics for rosh hashana & yom kippur, although it doesn't have all the add-ins so for those holidays I got the Artscroll softcover "pocket" editions with English as well as Hebrew. Each of those (one book for rosh hashana and one for yom kippur) is larger than the Rinat Yisrael but still okay for one-handed holding. The Rinat Yisrael has Monday/Thursday/shabbat afternoon readings but not torah/haftorah for shabbat mornings, so for that I usually use my student-size Mikra'ot G'dolot - separate books for bereshit, shmot, etc, (each with haftorot) so they're easy to carry to shul and can be held comfortably even if I'm standing (although I usually sit for torah reading). They're Hebrew only, but they've got lots of commentaries and I specifically got the Hami'or edition because they reset the type for both the main text and all the commentaries so even the smallest print size is clear for reading - my chevrusa and I could share one student-size, or 3 of use could share one standard-size, and none of us had to strain to read.

physical aspects of siddurim

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