5 May 2013
My talk at the Clark Library (UCLA) was a success, thanks to Gerald Cloud & staff and Dr Stephen Kanter for inviting me. I have updated the Rogues Gallery part 2, and Book Arts in Film, with new entries. Stay tuned for announcements of new books in the coming months. The image at left is the announcement of my talk, featuring wood engravings by Mark Head. For a wild time, check out Mark's animation (featuring me on piano), here.
December 7, 2012
I was thrilled to be asked to design the typographic style for David Mamet's new broadway play THE ANARCHIST, which premiered on 2 Dec at the Golden Theatre in New York, starring Patti Lupone and Debra Winger. Mr Mamet also commissioned me to do a short run of letterpress wood type posters.Another noted author, Rebecca Solnit, asked me to design & print a broadside to commemorate a talk she gave at Stanford University on the occasion of their acquisition of a collection of maps of "California as an Island." The Glen McGlaughlin Map Collection, now at Stanford, is quite remarkable for its holdings of early maps showing us (California) detached from the American mainland. It's actually a state of mind found throughout the Golden State.
I've printed up some seasonal greetings cards which I will be selling, along with broadsides and perhaps some books, this Sunday at a Craft Fair in Oakland (It's noon to 4) at 6131 Baker Street, Oakland and will feature many other craftspeople as well as the Baker Street Irregulars. I have made Christian, Jewish and Secular greeting cards. If they go over well I will see about consigning some to University Press Books on Bancroft Way in Berkeley. So if you can't make it to Oakland on Sunday, check out UPBooks in Berkeley if you need letterpress yuletide greeting cards.
I've been blogging weekly on www.booktryst.com. My November posts included a three-part checklist of the publications and job printing of Tom Raworth at Matrix and Goliard Presses, a piece on the earliest American publications of Robert Burns, a review of Ian Hamilton Finlay's Selected Poems, and a review of Controversies, a book about ethics and photography. I caused a huge uproar with a post on "Why I hate Helvetica" on Smashing Magazine's website, based in Germany. It generated 75 replies in less than 24 hours, which is double their normal response rate. I don't know how many people have read it, but I guarantee it's full of bluster and bombast.
Update Oct 23, 2012
Announcing a new book from the press: Docteur Nico Discography, Second Edition, by Alastair Johnston. 88 pages, perfectbound paperback, with indexes, $19.95.The internet is an incredible place, as you know. Among all the esoteric topics we have covered as a small press, none is more obscure, perhaps, than my discographic study of Nicolas Kasanda (1939-85), the Congolese guitarist who earned the nickname "Dieu de la Guitarre." When I started my world music website, one of the pages was devoted to establishing a checklist of his music (one of several discographic projects on my site). The page grew exponentially and I soon found a devoted legion of Nicophiles who sent me more information to add to it. From London, Holland, Denmark, France, Japan and Congo itself, people wrote to give me information. A colleague in London told me he had catalogues of the two labels founded by Nico, Editions Vita (1962-5) and Editions Sukisa (1966-74), which published his records as 45s. When I asked to include them on my site he complained that making such information freely available on the net was driving up the prices for collectors because if someone found an obscure record and googled it, they would discover a whole world of information and, more to the point, evidence that it was not only scarce but in great demand, and then crank up the asking price.
I agreed to remove my web page and put the information into a book. This had two drawbacks. I couldn't afford to include the images in color, nor could I update it monthly as new information came in. However I published my site, as it existed in 2009, as a paperback book.
Since then the information has continued to arrive, and I have corrected my own copy in ink as copies sold. Now the first edition is sold out! and I have published a Second edition, corrected and expanded.
Although Nico died in 1985, interest in his music continues to grow and there have been quite a few reissues in just the last few years. More importantly, a Danish scholar discovered more documents in Parisian libraries and archives and sent me details on 45 releases on Decca's "Surboum Africain" series (1961-5), and Ngoma's recordings which were made in their own Congo studios from 1966 to 71. Finding a checklist of this was a stroke of luck, since much historical material perished during the most recent civil war in Congo. This same scholar completed another part of my checklist, so I was able to add ten pages of new material to the work.
Now most visitors to this website will not be interested, but thanks to the internet a circle of melomanes de la musique Congolais has drawn closer.
In other news I continue to post weekly on booktryst. My most recent posts are on the discovery of the remains of Richard the Third, "My Kingdom for a hoax", a piece on the work of the Regency era artist, William Marshall Craig, a review of Bill Traylor, Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.
In October I have published a review of the show of Children's Book illustration from the collection of Malcolm White at San Francisco Public, a review of Hendrik D. L. Vervliet's Vine Leaf Ornaments in Renaissance Typography. A Survey, a critique of the typography in the BBC period drama, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (which has generated more than 750 hits so far), and today, a review of Kay Larson's new bio of John Cage.
Update Sept 15, 2012
Announcing a new work from the press: The Thirteen Curves by Tinker Greene, celebrating a winding stretch of Highway One that bypasses Bolinas, California. It comes from his latest book Who I Was which he self-published in San Francisco. The illustration is by Jinny Pearce, a Berkeley-based artist, with whom I have previously worked on broadsides for Watershed (In fact we are working on a new one, a poem by Joy Harjo, for the next Watershed Festival later this month.) The work is printed on a full sheet of Kitakata paper, measuring approx 17 x 21 inches, with deckles on four sides (not the best for registering multiple colors on the press). There are 45 copies in the edition, of which 14 are for sale. The work is signed by author and artist. Price $75, shipping extra.My latest Booktryst post is a review of Matthew Young's Rise & Fall of the Printers' International Specimen Exchange, just published by Oak Knoll Press.
Update Aug 26, 2012
Through the tenth of September you can get 30% off our titles in stock at Small Press Distribution here.
I've joined the staff of BOOKTRYST, America's premier blog about rare books and related topics. They've written such generous things about my books in the past I felt sure they were desperate for material, so have contributed columns on Basil Bunting's Persia, souvenir postcards, Henry Lemoine and W A Dwiggins' use of color, and most recently a two-part article about bookplates. Hopefully I will come up with more things to write about in future.
I am also now contributing to Smashing-magazine, an on-line typography and web-design journal. I have a piece about legibility here, and two more coming out soon. Stay tuned.
Steve O Saxe sent me a wild Stanhope image (one I have framed on the wall in fact). I had not included it on my Stanhope post because it is so erratic (even though it looks rather like the Cruikshank one shown at the top of the page as THE THING), but have decided to add it in, on the Stanhope page.
Art Beck's complete Luxorius translations have recently been published by Otis Art Institute Press in Los Angeles. Nice work, Art! And yes we still have copies of the limited edition we did of some of these poems, in Latin and English.
Nice review of Hanging Quotes and Kevin Power's Where You're At on RAIN TAXI.
Update April 3, 2012
Nice piece on the Press' 37th anniversary over at Jacket magazine.
I uploaded Darrell Gray's poetry reading from the Black Bart Poetry Society Benefit at the On Broadway in San Francisco in 1983. There are two parts, dont miss part two.
We have three of his titles in print: Halos of Debris (his last collection of poetry); the new book of collaborations with GP Skratz called Everything Else (see below), and an older book of collabs between Darrell & Alastair Johnston, titled Wreck O'Lections.
A new book from the press
Typographical Tourists, Tales of Tramping Printers, edited by Alastair M. Johnston.
¶ 178 pp., paperback, includes bibliography, $20.
Note: PayPal orders include free domestic shipping (please add $5 for overseas airmail), send to snaporaz(at-sign)ymail[dot]com
¶The anthology, illustrated with cuts and type ornaments from the 1880s, includes "Journalism in Tennessee" by Mark Twain, "Wanted -- A Printer," by Bret Harte, "B. Franklin, Deceased" by Bill Nye, "A Big, Phat Take" by D.T.B., "The Incense of Chicken" by Opie Read, "Greeley's Handwriting" by Hayden Carruth, and many other humorous & entertaining pieces.
¶
In the late 1880s American founders began to print in-jokes about disreputable characters ("gay cats") in black "thousand-mile" shirts, out of date frock coats, worn shoes, and battered stovepipe hats, who would wander into small town print shops looking for work. These were worldly (& wordy) men who could set type swiftly and accurately, write an editorial, set up a poem from memory to fill a space, whittle a needed letter for a headline on the back of an old sort, make rollers, adjust the press -- in short they could do any part of the work in a printing office. Their conversation was full of quotations from Shakespeare, the Bible and Horace Greeley. They could recite the poems of Eugene Field and indeed could tell stories of getting drunk with the author in St Jo. They'd met Bret Harte in Eureka and Mark Twain and Dan de Quille in Virginia City, Nevada, having walked across the entire length and breadth of the United States, even into Indian Territory, working in many shops along the way. Most were well-educated, many came from respectable families, but they all suffered from wanderlust & when it struck they would resign their position, collect their wages and hit the road. Some "of the orbital persuasion" might show up annually (if they didn't owe too many debts in boarding houses and saloons around town), others vanished and became the stuff of legend. Some drank, some were escaping heartbreak; one had been humiliated by his typographical errors, another had married a beautiful octoroon by mistake; some were army deserters, others were brave ex-soldiers who had been shell-shocked and couldn't get used to sleeping indoors. Whatever their background and circumstance, they populated the landscape in the era between the American Civil War and the coming of the Linotype machine in the 1890s.
¶
There were also tramp printers in Europe. Tramping in England was well-established with a system of Union relief to help underemployed printers relocate. Some tramped to Paris to work on Galignani's Messenger. Some made it to South Africa, Australia, or New Zealand and, if there was no printing work, might become a gold prospector.
Praise for the Book:
"What we have here is an extremely colorful, often wildly amusing, ink-stained On the Road, with Johnston steering us through the world of printers with type in their blood but ants in their pants, compelled by personal demons to a precarious existence leavened by an adventurous, if impecunious, black-ink life rich in colorful anecdotes and stories. Johnston has performed a fine service by collecting them here in one place from diverse sources, known and unknown. It's a crazy-quilt history populated by drifters, wanderers, dreamers, vagrants, and transients, a movable type feast, accent on the movable, the don't-miss world of the vagabond printer."
-- Stephen J. Gertz, Booktryst blog
Back in Print
We discovered a box of unbound book blocks and have bound them up. Fans of Tom Raworth will be pleased to know we are now offering two of his early works which are back in print as long as stocks last. Logbook, 1976, illustrated by Frances Butler. Written in Colchester in 1970, Logbook comprises random pages from a ship's log that were found floating in the poet's imagination. Frances Butler illustrated the book with elaborate Rapidograph drawings that echoed images in the logbook as well as her own fascinations with wood, stone, crumpled & torn paper, Japanese aesthetics, and the battle between the vegetables and the rocks! Alastair Johnston hand-set the text in great primer Bulmer and 60 copies were printed on dampened Arches and bound in fabric. The same year we produced 500 copies by offset-lithography in black and white, but it has long been out of print. Limited quantities are available at $25 each. Note: You can hear Raworth reading from this work on the University of Pennsylvania website.Nicht Wahr, Rosie? also by Tom Raworth, appeared from Poltroon Press in 1980. The book was written while Tom was studying Spanish at the University of Essex in the sixties. In 1972 a small press edition appeared in England but was destroyed accidentally in a flood at Villiers Press after only one or two advance copies had made it into the world, so we were pleased to see this major work back into print. Typeset in Sabon by Alastair Johnston. Our apprentice, Marilyn Perry, did the layout and our former professor of calligraphy, Arne Wolf, designed the wonderful cover. In 1980 the book won the Award of Excellence in Typography from the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Again, limited quantities are available, at $25 each.
Cover photo by Shelly Vogel
Update January 10, 2012
It's always a pleasure and a joy to read Darrell Gray's poetry. Allan Kornblum & I have talked about doing a Collected or Selected Poems for years for the many fans and readers of Darrell, however that has not happened yet. Meanwhile, musician and author G.P. Skratz submitted a manuscript to me that consists of collaborations he wrote with Darrell in the decade between 1975 and 1986 (the year Darrell died). Darrell lived and breathed poetry so it was hard not to be involved in collaborations with him: whenever you visited him there would be a sheet of paper in the humming Selectric on the kitchen table and as the wine flowed, & the stereo blared, crazy ideas would be committed to the paper. I printed my own collaborations with Darrell -- Wreck O'Lections-- soon after he died, but here 25 years further on are some gems that were the fruitful result of many sessions with G.P. Skratz and the odd line from Pat Nolan or Andrei Codrescu, who happened to be present at the time. The book is divided into five sections; one of them the spurious translations from the French of Anton Laplace, inventor of the shoe-horn and gnasher of the ankles of princesses. It also includes a wonderful expansive introduction by Skratz on the history of Actualism, the mysterious poetry movement that Darrell founded in Iowa City in 1972 while he was a student of Ted Berrigan and Anselm Hollo at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Another of the key exponents of Actualism, Dave Morice, aka Dr Alphabet, provided two drawings to accompany Skratz' introduction. In order to create a parallel visual narrative I invited New York-born photographer Shelly Vogel to contribute some of his dramatic city nightscapes and urbane California moments to the book.
72 pages, paperback. Available at Moe's, trade orders from Small Press Distribution, or directly from us (write if you want to pay by paypal). Retail price is $18, post free in the US.
Cover art by Frances Butler
Update November 6, 2011
The first printing of the Kevin Power book Where You're At is sold out and so we are reprinting it. This is exciting as the book is just selling by word of mouth, no major reviews having appeared yet.Congratulations to Lisa Rappoport of Littoral Press, Oakland, the winner of the 2011 Alastair Johnston Award from the Pacific Center for Book Arts for her work THE SHORT GOODBYE, an imagistic recreation of Philip Marlowe from Raymond Chandler's novel. Her work was selected for purchase and presentation to the Special Collections of San Francisco Public Library from the many entries in the 14th Triennial Members Exhibit of the PCBA. -- Yes, it's a bit awkward having a prize named after me, while I am still alive, but it's better than the alternative...
Speaking of me, I have a new book out from Cuneiform Press, titled Hanging Quotes, a compilation of 19 interviews I conducted over the last 40 years with important figures in the worlds of typography, type design, book arts, small press publishing and poetry. It's a large paperback, heavily illustrated with the work of the people in the conversations. The oldest conversation in the book was with Noel Young of Capra Press, Santa Barbara, which took place in 1974. At the time Noel was publishing books of Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Diane Di Prima and many others and also printing the early books of Black Sparrow Press. I was finding my way in printing but at the time writing a column for the local free papers the Santa Barbara News & Review and planning a move to the Bay Area. This conversation has never been published. The most recent is a great long rambling discussion with Walter Hamady held this June and drawn from three hours of taped chatter (there were four hours on tape, but by the fourth we were into whisky & Walter was modeling his druze and bedouin outfits for our amusement). This conversation which covers his career and his thoughts and opinions on other book artists has also never appeared before.
At key moments in the development of the artists book I sat down with major critics to discuss the field. In 1988 I had a provocative discussion with Joan & Nathan Lyons of Visual Studies Workshop; then Sandra Krishenbaum, of Fine Print & I debated just what each of us thought an artist book is or should be (from ArtWeek, 1991).
Poetics and publishing were among the topics discussed with Bob Grenier and David Meltzer, two opinionated poet friends. Grenier talked about his voice and the visualization of his poems on the page; Meltzer reminisced about the LA Art Scene in the 50s and his close involvement with Wallace Berman of the ground-breaking Semina magazine. I quizzed poet Robert Creeley about his small press activities in Majorca, when he published the books of Divers Press in the 50s. Another Black Mountain figure, Bob Hawley, was told to give up poetry by Charles Olson and concentrate on publishing, so he put out the series of books under the Oyez! imprint. His printing was often done by Graham Mackintosh, who like Hawley talked about Everson, and also discussed Jack Spicer's philosophy of the book, in a whimsical conversation in 1986.
Glenn Todd (Arion Press), Dave Haselwood (Auerhahn Press), Joe Dunn (White Rabbit Press);
party at Ernesto Edwards, 1986. Photo by Alastair Johnston
One of the longest and most engaging discussions is with Dave Haselwood founder of Auerhahn Press who gets indiscreet about Kenneth Rexroth and (like Meltzer, Hawley, et al) tells wonderful anecdotes about the poets of the 50s and 60s: McClure, Lamantia, Snyder, Whalen, and Wieners. I was aware during many of these discussions of the historical import of getting these memories down. While I had spoken to and indeed had wonderful chats with Jonathan Williams of Jargon Press and Asa Benveniste of Trigram Press, I never taped them and so I wanted to elicit memories of them from others who had known them too. The resonances bounce around as I also chat to the late Holbrook Teter about his work at Zephyrous Image. Not only is this the only interview he gave about his work with Michael Myers, it's the full unedited interview, published here for the first time.
Among interviewees I consider my teachers, I was able to tape conversations with Nicolas Barker, former Deputy Keeper of the British Library, Roger Levenson of Tamalpais Press, Arne Wolf, calligrapher and painter, and Jack Stauffacher of Greenwood Press, San Francisco. Tying in to their comments on typography and visual design I went to the source and conducted a group of interviews with the prime movers in the world of type design -- the key people who oversaw the transition from metal to digital type -- Matthew Carter, Sumner Stone and Fred Smeijers. I also had an enlightening 90-minute discussion with the late Paul Hayden Duensing, typefounder. Figures like Hermann Zapf, Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn, Kenneth Patchen, Eric Gill, Jack Spicer, Dieter Roth, crop up in these conversations that represent, as Terry Belanger says, "Excellent printing history -- by it's 20th-century makers."
Details here.
