September 26, 2005
A Letter to a book reviewer
Dear Alex White,
I was looking up something on the Type Director's Club site and came across your review of my book Alphabets to Order, which I appreciate. I am mainly grateful that you apparently did read the book before reviewing it. (I have read a couple of reviews that seem to have scanned the dust-jacket flaps for their informed remarks.) I want to reply to your critique that the book should have had more illustrations, since you are not the first reviewer to make this suggestion. The books I quote from, as you probably know, are in rare books libraries like Columbia, Houghton, the Newberry in Chicago, St Bride, and so on. While these libraries welcome scholars they do not welcome photographers. If they offer reproduction services it depends on the rarity of the book and in most cases a library will charge $30 to $50 for a slide of a book page (they won't do spreads typically so they can charge double for a title page and frontispiece); the British Library will give you a Xerox of a page for about $7. Since my book was written some libraries have started scanning pages, but they will not let you do this yourself. I produced this book on my own budget and the reproductions included were from photos I or my partner took in St Bride or Columbia where they did let us photograph, but with the stipulation we use available light (neon, argh!) & of course not smash the binding. I thought of setting type facsimiles of some of the texts to give more of the flavour of the times (We have more than a hundred fonts of Victorian metal type), but I did not want the hokey patchwork look of the blue Phillips Old-fashioned Type book. This would have been extremely distracting and I would have had to edit down my selected texts even more. I wanted to write a serious literary study, not captions for a picture book of funky fonts. There are many specimen facsimiles on the market (as well as anthologies like Pages from type-specimen books and Dan Solo's Dover books), and my final point was that I encouraged people to do their own looking. It's easy to criticize things for what they apparently lack, but try to understand my reasons for making it the way it is.
yours sincerely,
Alastair Johnston
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July 29, 2005
I just completed two jobs for clients. For the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America I made a pamphlet of a speech given by Roger Stoddard on the occasion of his retirement as librarian from Harvard. It's actually a scathing critique on institutional culture and the lack of vision of those bureaucrats who run libraries and don't realize that books have to be imagined before they can be bought, and then have to be tracked down, they don't just show up. In honour of one of Harvard's former lecturers, Daniel Berkeley Updike, I chose Mountjoye type for the book and did the cover in Harvard crimson. Most copies have gone to ABAA members but a few are available from the President, John Crichton of Brick Row Book Shop in San Francisco.
My old friend Art Beck (translator of the Poems of Luxorius we published a few years ago) came to me with a manuscript, ready to go, called SUMMER WITH ALL ITS CLOTHES OFF. It includes wry reflections on middle age. I hope Art doesn't mind if I quote one of his poems here, to give you a taste:
All Saints Morning
for Al Masarik
A lazy, open door Saturday.
The sly, Chinese waitress quietly
flirts with you in painful English
while the cook chops vegetables for the soup.
You flirt with the bacon on your plate.
Your bacon -- you think -- has already flirted
with disaster, has no further
interest in any of this. But outside,
over the chimneys,
a black Halloween balloon set
free the morning after
sails like the risen Lazarus
into a blue, unsuspecting day.
Behind the bar, under spotless glasses,
the rich purple bottles lounge in rows
like squads of fat cops fingering
their nightsticks, waiting to
march you off to lunch.
And who's that walking past
the window on legs you can't
take your eyes off?
What's in the air that's so
helpless and promising? Everyone knows
about spring, but that snappy copper
headed woman's hair really needs
this hard, November, sidewalk light,
this especially anxious breeze to flutter
in that I don't mind winter come
get me way. Even in November, something
in the blood can't ever say no,
doesn't care you can't say why.
It's always a pleasure to work with people who understand what letterpress is about and don't impose their own design ideas on me. The publisher of the book, Lynne Savitt, of GRAVIDA in New York, wrote in appreciation: "just wanted to let you know that every comment made by every person who has seen the book starts with the work you did. i know you hear this every day but i wanted to let you know what a gorgeous job you did & how it does not go unnoticed. art was quite lucky to have you. thank you for your vision."
Copies are available from GRAVIDA, 774 Birchwood Dr, Westbury, New York 11590.
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July 6, 2005
I've added my essay on the Robert Grabhorn Collection of rare books at San Francisco Public Library, which first appeared in Bookways. I've revised it and added a bunch of illustrations.
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April 23, 2005
We're celebrating 30 years of Poltroon Press with a show of our work at the Book Club of California, 312 Sutter Street, fifth floor, on Monday May 2 from 5 to 7 p.m. The show runs through the end of June. If you are in SF try to catch it!
April 6, 2005
[Dissociated Press] This year's Pulitzer Prize for Poetry has gone to Mother Goose. The 144-year-old former teacher and homemaker said she was "over the moon" when she heard the news. "I feel I connect with people," said Mrs Goose, "I just write from the heart. Like the one about Jack Horner: he really was just sitting in a corner." The former poet laureate of the United States, Mrs Goose is the author of innumerable award-winning books of verse. The biseptagenarian will be interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR today.
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April 1, 2005
Robert Creeley [left], died on March 30 in Texas: he was 78. He was a mentor to my generation of writers and artists and, after Williams, arguably the most important American poet of the 20th century. I corresponded with him and when I was spending a month in Rochester, New York in April 1986, I paid him a visit. He gave me an architectural tour of Buffalo. We visited Louis Sullivan's 1895 Guaranty Construction building, and we snuck into the boarded-up railway terminal where I took a snap of him posed in front of the giant buffalo statue there (it's in the Rogues Gallery, linked at left). Later that year he was in the Bay Area and I offered to drive him from Berkeley to an event in Marin. I brought along a tape recorder and captured our conversation about his publishing activities at Divers Press in Mallorca in the early 1950s. I've included the whole text, linked at left. Willem Sandberg's book on H.N. Werkman, which we printed last year, has been accepted into the Western Books Show by the Rounce & Coffin Club of Los Angeles. The show will be on display at the Book Club of California in San Francisco this month, then continue on tour. (There's a nice review of it on Paul Breman's website.)
If you are planning to get married this spring or summer, now is the time to start planning your wedding invitations. We have added a link to show various samples of our work in this field. Get a quote from those fancy boutiques on Union Street then ask us to give you better quality for half the price. It can be done! |
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March 6, 2005
The world of typography is saddened by the death, at 41, of Justin Howes, at his home in Dulwich, London. Justin was one of the most generous and brilliant scholars the book world has known in the last half century. He had just given up his post as curator of the Type Museum in London (which preserves the archives and typographical material of the Stephenson-Blake foundry) in order to go to the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp to study sand-casting of large types. He authored books on Edward Johnston and Edward Bawden. He was working on the design of the British Museum's catalogue of early printed books. I had planned to bring him to San Francisco this summer to deliver a paper on "Typographical monstrosities," subtitled "Updike's Irishman, or Justin in search of a footnote," about the appearance of sans serif lettering in London signboards 200 years ago. A graduate of Christ Church College, Oxford, he was going to attend the University of Reading to work on a PhD on "The Development of letterforms and concepts of lettering, 1680-1830." He was also planning to put together a Baskerville show in 2007, the tercentenary of Baskerville's birth. He was helping me with research for my biography of Richard Austin, the Regency era punch-cutter, and his son, Richard Turner Austin, a wood-engraver. Justin was the chairman of the Friends of St Bride Library; he produced the spectacular design for James Mosley's study of Grotesque letters The Nymph and the Grot, published by the Friends of St Bride in 1999, and created one of the best historical type revivals on the market: Founder's Caslon. It was first used in a little booklet he wrote with Nigel Roche called Founders' London (It can be downloaded from the St Bride website.) Rest in Peace, Justin. |
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February 1, 2005
I've added a memoir of Philip Whalen, adapted from my contribution to Continuous Flame, a tribute anthology published by Fish Drum of New York.If you are near a news-stand check out the January/February issue of PRINT magazine which has an article I wrote on the design of African record covers. Nearby you'll find EYE magazine, a really fine design journal published in London. The Winter 2004 issue has a piece I wrote on readymade letterforms from the hardware store, called "In the Abse ce of Good and Bad Taste."
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January 6, 2005
Poltroon Press recently completed an edition of Willem Sandberg's poem about Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman for Star Thistle Press of Sacramento. There are 100 copies for sale from Richard Press. This was one of the most exciting projects I have undertaken in many years.Sandberg wrote the poem about his old friend in 1970 while teaching at Harvard and it appeared in the Harvard Library Bulletin. From my study of Sandberg's work I suspected he would have enjoyed the grander, more expressionistic treatment I gave it in the form of this book, the first separate printing of the poem. I could sense he was constrained by the octavo format of the Bulletin and felt the poem was a continuing onrush of ideas. He cadenced each verse as a series of running indents but I imagine he thought of the whole poem as continuing on this way, like running down a grand staircase.
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I had Pat Reagh set the book in Monotype Gill Sans, then reworked the text in the typestick to get the visual flow I wanted. As I started work I began to experiment with transparent papers and different kinds of rough and coloured paper that were the stock-in-trade of Sandberg's book designs. I thought about a raw boards cover but this has become a cliché in graphic design circles and is also usually acidic. I also abandoned Kraft paper for the more elegant mould-made papers Frankfurt Cream and Nideggan Sand.
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I abandoned my original idea for the title-page (large wood type) and decided to go with a cinematic narrative that operates over several page-turnings. I started layering colour with brayers, friskets and stencils, working in a state of wakeful dreaming. After about 13 runs I decided I had gone far enough. A green human-like figure had emerged and this became the "life force" as I saw it and was repeated on the cover. It was made from an acetate stencil brayed directly onto the paper with a small roller which then completed its circuit and picked up a ghost image. This added a heart-shape in the torso, as if by magic.
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I also put a splash of yellow over it by braying directly onto the image and lifting the brayer's edge as I went. The next images that emerged came from playing with wood type. I thought of "XX" as representing the Twentieth Century as well as two men. I had another idea for a transparent page that showed how the XX was really a "W" with its reflection. The W stood for Willem and also Werkman.
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For me it was a great privilege to work with this material: Two of my typographic heroes in one book. I have been experiment with Werkman's "hot printing" techniques for years since I saw a retrospective of his work at the LA County Museum of Art in 1979. I am always trying to figure out how he got certain effects. But I had to restrain the printmaking urge into the larger context of making a book that was written by Sandberg, an incredibly innovative designer.
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When I took the finished book to Arnold Martinez, my long-suffering binder of South San Francisco, he was wryly amused. There were no straight edges as I wanted to retain the deckles of the paper. The book was not a standard size so he would have to set up his sewing machine specially. There were three papers, including a brittle vellum in the middle of the first signature where the thread would have to go, and the second signature had two shorter leaves as I had also borrowed the idea from Sandberg of using a narrower page for the introduction. However Arnold did a fabulous job of getting it all bound.
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Early responses have been encouraging: R. Russell Maylone of Northwestern University Library (where there is a great collection of Dutch Underground printing) wrote, "It seems less a book about Werkman than one done by Werkman himself. It is a fitting and worthy tribute in every respect. It really is glorious; rather, when one is finished, there is a glory of Werkman in one's imagination."
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For more information on Werkman, Yale University Press has just published a cheap paperback book by Alston Purvis with a short introduction to his tragic life and many illustrations of his wonderful prints and publications, including the Turkenkalendar and the works he published as The Blue Barge.
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