Press News September 2024

Once more it seems inconceivable that two years have passed since we last created a page of press news. The last instalment concluded with the Wayzgoose held here at the press in September 2022 to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary, and already our 52nd is only days away. Although the passing time has been spent principally on continuing work at the press, the details of work from day to day are endlessly stimulating to us – although to attempt to recount them in detail here would soon become an exercise in tedium for the reader.

However, easily the most important event in this interim took place on 30 November 2023, when our daughter Apollonia Felicity and her partner Andrew welcomed their son, Michael Daniel, into the family. They have been overjoyed, as have we. Michael is a warm, affectionate, easy-going, and active bairn, and although at only nine months it may be early to describe him as ‘mischievous’ or ‘inquisitive’, we can report that since he has learned to crawl his parents and grandparents are fully occupied in intervening to avoid imminent disasters, and the cats of both households view the new addition with grave attention. An unsupervised interval of less than fifteen seconds recently resulted in Michael’s being covered in tinned cat food and water after a brief (and uninvited) visit with their two cats, neither of whom seemed best pleased.

On the other hand, he already enjoys books, and when engaged in the contents has learned very quickly to turn pages – or rather to turn pages very quickly, for it must be admitted that he turns them with increasing speed, but whether this displays an ardent determination to reach the end of the story or a speculative interest in page design, we are yet to discover. Either way, we are counting the days until a very small composing stick can be put into his sticky little hand.

Developing perspective: rapt consideration of a lollipop
through the world view of Eric Carle’s Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Clearly the only response to such a momentous event in the Barbarian family was to create a book to celebrate and honour Michael. An idea began to emerge as we engaged with Michael’s intent, unwavering gaze. From his first days, he seemed to be absorbing the world around him , studying us and everything around him. Those moments of connection with him seemed all-consuming, almost out of time. Jan was reminded of Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’, a conception that he recreated and reflected on in his long philosophical poem, The Prelude. These moments are described as experiences of harmony and insight, central to our existence. In them, we ‘see into the life of things’ according to the poet. The truth of this assertion seemed to be realized in Michael’s eyes. And so Michael’s book began to take shape: a selection of Wordsworth’s poems devoted to the experiences of childhood, beginning with his two great odes, ‘Intimations of Immortality, from Recollections of Childhood’ and ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ and followed by lyrics and sonnets suitable to the subjects of the book.

Michael in a Wordsworthian moment.

As the idea originated with Jan, she has taken on the main responsibility for choosing the selection and designing the book, but always with reference to the fount of Barbarian typographical and literary wisdom, Crispin. She has also for the first time addressed the task of composing arrangements of type flowers to provide visual accent to the text pages and create a pattern paper for the printed covers. Apollonia has set the type in the interstices between her maternal duties and Jan has undertaken the printing on our Universal I Vandercook when not running pages of Bordering on the Sublime on the Universal III. Flitting between two books on two presses is not the recommended approach to maintaining focus and attention to detail, but with occasional lapses, the work progresses well. (‘If it is Tuesday, it must be Curwen’, and so on.) Crispin, meanwhile, devotes the bulk of his time to setting pages of his extensive chapters for Bordering and planning the remaining sections of the book. We briefly flirted with the idea of having a second volume for the appendices, but abandoned this as a kind of madness. They will instead be contained within the single volume comprising the text, a gallery of borders, various appendices, and an index.

Please see Books Forthcoming for further details of both these publications.

The Marriage of True Minds

This book is now out of print, but it seems that a fuller account of its progress is called for.
Our 50th wedding anniversary on 6 September 2022 was celebrated in a seemly fashion later that month, on 17 September, in which love, friendship, typography, and bibliophilia were combined in a fine blend. (Details of the event can be seen in the archived Press News of November 2022.) Earlier that year we had conceived a plan for a book to celebrate the anniversary, but as is almost traditionally the case, circumstances militated against its being ready by September for a publication launch at the Anniversary Wayzgoose. Although we were able to show some pages of the book then, the book itself, The Marriage of True Minds, appeared in the following Spring of 2023.

Choosing the poems for the book and creating an order for them proved a delightful task. Of course the preliminary list of possible poems was at least twice the length of the intended fifty we wanted for the book, and the winnowing process was exacting. Several had to be excluded for reasons of length; others we knew were still under copyright, and we wished to avoid the turmoil of dealing with estates (although Jan Zwicky and Heather Simeney McLeod, both still writing, generously gave us permission to use examples of their work); others were overly familiar and ubiquitously available in every other anthology, and while in the end we couldn’t resist including a few of those, others gave way to our desire to leave space for some unusual poems that we thought might be unknown to many of our readers – including two or three in Middle English for which modern English renderings were provided.

The next pleasure came in commissioning engravings from six artists with whom we have worked over the years, and who have become treasured friends. In order to avoid six engravings illustrating the same poem, we sent each engraver the texts of a few poems which, knowing something of their tastes and interests, we thought would catch their imaginations. In one case we were more specific. We knew that Abbie Rorer would respond at once to Heather Simeney McLeod’s ‘Affection for Kisses’, and the delightful engraving she sent validated our instinct. As for the seventh of the engravings, we were especially happy to be able to include Graham Williams’ delicate, sublime image for Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, as he had engraved it forty-five years earlier for a pamphlet of Donne’s poem he issued from his Florin Press, designed and printed in consultation with Crispin when he was in an informal apprenticeship with Graham. This closed a circle going back to the beginning of Barbarian Press, since Graham was the man who taught us to print, and who (with our somewhat problematic help) produced the press’s first book, Five Decades for Harry & Frances Adaskin, in 1977. Graham graciously loaned us the block, which Jan took a significant joy in reprinting for The Marriage of True Minds.

The third pleasure in producing this book was in asking Michael and Winifred Bixler to set the texts of the poems in Monotype composition from our own matrices of Pastonchi (Monotype series 206), designed in the 1920s by Francesco Pastonchi and Eduardo Cotti. The matrices for this type, together with those for the Greek face Antigone (Monotype Series 259), designed by Jan van Krimpen, were gifts to us through the generosity of a long-standing friend and subscriber to the press. Antigone we had used for the first time in 2016 for The Splendour of a Morning: Early Poems of C P Cavafy, but we had not found a suitable project for our launch of Pastonchi until Marriage proved to be just the right choice. Pastonchi is not a face which appeals to everyone, although several subscribers wrote to us after receiving Marriage to say how appropriate its use seemed to them. At a guess, more sober typographic traditionalists view it as too ‘romantic’ a mix of influences, while the younger post-modernists of today consider it rather self-consciously ‘pretty’. But these are only guesses – and in any case, neither argument is tenable in our view. All we can say is that we disagree. It is a wholehearted type. For The Marriage of True Minds it was, we state without reservation, the perfect choice. (Moreover, Pastonchi is a pan-European fount, providing accents for languages like Polish, Czech, and Norwegian which other founts do not have.) Stanley Morison, under whose aegis the face was produced by Monotype, seems to have liked it. It falls between two stools, neither of which Jan and I find comfortable: on the one hand, it does not appeal to all conservative tastes, and on the other, the more affective ‘post-romantics’ (if such a group exists) find it too intellectually conceived. The ground between such stools seems perfectly pleasant. The plain fact is that it was created by two Italian designers for the intended purpose of publishing an edition of the great Italian classics, and it has something of the deep Latin emotional wells of Verdi and Puccini, Leopardi and Manzoni. As such, its suitability for use in a selection of love poems ranging from several of Shakespeare’s sonnets, through Tennyson and Yeats, to the unabashed tenderness of Burns’ ‘John Anderson, my jo’, seems all but inescapable. And so say we both.

An Avian Alphabet

In the event, the making of this co-publication offered some new pleasures which should be noted. First, we found Edith Krause to be a wonderful collaborator, always open to new creative directions, even recutting all the images on harder wood and in a smaller format to fit our presses. Apollonia had the opportunity to print woodcuts for the first time on her Heidelberg press, and with her typical craftsmanship, acquired all the necessary skills to do justice to Edith’s lovely blocks. The final stage of production introduced us to a circle of Edith’s friends all capable and willing to learn the techniques necessary to sew the printed pages into a Japanese style binding.

And so I found myself, on a summer morning in 2023, sitting at our dining room table with a workforce of women armed with purpose and ready to sew the books. I think of the process as ‘lacing’, rather than sewing, as the thread used is a robust linen twist on darning needles. The book blocks had already been drilled by Apollonia, so all that was required was a quick demonstration of the process and pattern of lacing and we were off. Amid much interesting conversation about this and that, capable hands flew, stacks of books appeared, and within a surprisingly brief few hours more than half the edition was completed. A second session a few weeks later finished the work. A working ‘bee’ like this is an especially social occasion, and the work with the hands, as it becomes habitual fairly quickly, leaves space for sharing histories, anecdotes of work experience, opinions on many things, and – once a certain acceptable amount has been accomplished – a pause for tea and the muffins and cookies which were generously provided by the participants. The work of book production revealed a new face.

New, but Familiar, Blood at the Press

September 2024 marks a milestone in the life of Barbarian Press. We will be hiring our first ever employee in our 46 years of operation. We have worked with sub-contractors in the past, and since 2019, with our daughter Apollonia on a contractual basis. Our new blood is very familiar to us indeed. Lea Sanchez Milde entered our home several years ago as the girlfriend of a former student of Jan’s. The student moved on; Lea stayed on, capturing our hearts with her sunny and buoyant personality. She has shared Christmases with us – producing masses of highly decorated and celebratory cookies – visited for long weekends, and in essence has become an honorary daughter to us.

Lea’s university training was in microbiology and she secured jobs in labs after attaining her Master’s degree. However, her instincts and interests have always drawn her toward the arts. In the press, she began by learning to distributing printed pages and moved on to the more challenging tasks of composing type, printing, and collating and folding signatures. (She was responsible, for example, for hand-setting the lengthy introduction to Endgrain Editions 5: Richard Wagener – a Dialogue with Wood Engraving.) With this informal training, gained over weekends and the occasional more extended stays, and with her own diligence and intelligence, she acquired the skills necessary to practice the craft of letterpress. Her name appears in several of our colophons as a contributor to our books’ production.

A few years ago she decided to shift her professional focus from the sciences to the arts, and joined the staff, which then included Apollonia, at Porchlight Press in Vancouver, a letterpress shop which specializes in high end commercial printing. After three years there, she decided for various reasons to return her to scientific roots, but has continued to assist us at the press in her spare time.

We are delighted to say that life in the lab has begun to pall once again and Lea will be returning to the craft of printing as a salaried part-time employee with Barbarian Press. This new arrangement comes at a particularly welcome moment for us: Apollonia is deeply occupied with the needs of her son, Michael (nine months old at this writing) and can only spend sporadic sessions in the pressroom at present. We have come to rely on her energetic, skilled, and dedicated contributions to our book making and she is sorely missed – although still available for consultation as she, Andrew, and Michael live on the property. With Bordering on the Sublime in full swing along with several smaller projects, and the larger project of the Eric Bergman book ahead, Crispin and Jan found themselves pushed. Lea will help ease the pressure until Apollonia is freer to work at the press, and brighten our lives with her warm and loving presence. Even after Apollonia returns to her usual schedule, we hope Lea will stay on and play a role in the press for years to come.

Upcoming plans for smaller projects

As we have explained at other times, large projects like Bordering on the Sublime require subordinate smaller ones to provide support while long-term work continues. These are typically smaller books, but still books with substantial contents – as opposed to chapbooks or pamphlets. However, we have long been aware that most people just putting their toes into the inviting but deep waters of fine press printing for the first time may not feel themselves in a position to dive in with a purchase of a book for several hundred dollars. We have always tried to keep our prices as reasonable as possible, given the real costs of materials, the amounts of time such work takes, and the external costs of binding and occasional outside work such as photographs or offset-printed facsimiles. The temptation has too often been to pass on less than the real costs of our time, sometimes with difficult financial consequences, for it is easy to forget that even though we love our work, the fact of its being enjoyable does not mean that it should be given free. One must live. Fine press books remain costly.

Our more major titles are sizeable operations. The Play of Pericles Prince of Tyre (2011), for example, took ten years, and involved the creation of a new edition of the text, lengthy discussions with Simon Brett, writing a separate volume of notes and commentary, and a great deal of time in the press, as the more than a hundred engravings had to be printed separately from the text. During this process we published more than ten other titles.

The present example, Bordering on the Sublime, has been in the planning, research, and production stages for more than ten years already, and over and above the usual costs of paper, type and so on, it has required the expenditure of several thousand dollars’ worth of research materials; we have published thirteen other titles to date while Bordering has been in the press. . . . and so on it goes. In the midst of such projects, despite the great pleasure we experience in preparing and producing them, we sometimes find ourselves thinking what a pleasing diversion it would be to take a brief break and publish something we could produce and finish in a week, or even a weekend. Recently, with Apollonia busy with Michael, and knowing that Lea Sanchez Milde would soon be joining us, we have discussed various such possibilities, and our recent acquisition of a platemaker for creating photopolymer plates has suggested some new ideas.

The two Wayzgoose Pamphlets we have published so far have been warmly received, and we are planning more of those on a variety of subjects, among them Jan van Krimpen’s types, a discussion of display faces and initials, the Granjon Arabesque & Bradley Ornaments, and a ‘shopping list’ of the necessities required for a working hobby press. It occurs to us that further pamphlet or chapbook series along similar lines would be interesting. The platemaker will make many such things possible, notably the reproduction of line drawings and other illustrative materials, and – a deep breath here – texts for printing produced from computer-set type.

I confess at once that I believed I would never condone such an idea. But I must also confess that while I execrate the internet and dislike computers intensely – I favour a Brother portable typewriter with a legal carriage I was given for my 21st birthday, 56 years ago – I have been persuaded to realize, with a discretion born of deep-seated suspicion, that they can be forced to emit some useful matter. (This Damascene conversion is the sort of thing that comes of having a fiercely intelligent, resourceful, and endlessly patient daughter.) On the suggestion of Jason Dewinetz, a beloved friend whom I trust implicitly, and whose work at Greenboathouse Press is exemplary (and all handset) we have purchased an online designing program called Affinity which will permit us (even me) to set text pages in decent type which can then be made into photopolymer plates and printed – so avoiding the expenses of the time and space involved in hand-setting and distributing a text. We will investigate some well-made digital founts of excellent typefaces (with Jason and Robert Bringhurst advising us) and once we have learned to negotiate the digital mazes of Affinity, we will set to work. It seems this will make possible the small quickly produced projects we have wished for, in the forms of two pamphlet/chapbook series we have in contemplation.

Well-told Tales & Commonplaces

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA

First, we are making plans for a series of ‘classic’ short stories to be called Well-told Tales, and have chosen two titles to start the series: Katherine Mansfield’s lovely story ‘The Garden Party’ and Anton Chekhov’s autumnal, rueful ‘The Lady with the Dog’. We are also considering further stories by Poe, Chopin, Joyce, Doyle, and Stevenson. Stories like these are the chamber music of literature – concentrated, piquant, decorous, and shapely. Because they are often passed by as people read the longer works of their writers, we mean to bring some of our favourite stories back into the sphere of our readers.

As a partner to this series a second is being planned derived from Crispin’s love of the essay. It has the working title ‘Commonplaces’, a term Aristotle used in his Topics [Τοπικά] for various forms of argument, and will comprise classic examples of the essay by writers such as Lamb, Montaigne, Twain, and Thomas Browne. If stories can be called literature’s chamber music, essays are surely its sonatas – a single declarative voice initiating ideas and exploring their ramifications with the reader understood to be nearby, listening intently.

These two series will complement the two we have already begun – the Wayzgoose Pamphlets and Loose Canons. Loose Canons One, ‘Wild Peaches’, was published nine years ago, and printed a selection of poems by Elinor Wylie. The series – always meant to continue – is intended to offer a selection of what we consider the best poems by writers no longer thought about or read widely. We will recommence the series with a reprint of the Wylie pamphlet, as most of the original printing were given as gifts or featured in Alchimie du verbe, an ‘assembling’ portfolio of printing issued by Peter Koch from The Codex Foundation in 2015. That second printing will be closely followed by Loose Canons Two, featuring poems by Edward Arlington Robinson, a poet still well known for a few poems (Simon and Garfunkel made ‘Richard Corey’ famous) but who wrote many others that deserve attention, among them a delicious dramatic monologue called ‘Ben Jonson entertains a man from Stratford.’ Other poets under consideration are Ralph Hodgson & Humbert Wolfe, L A G Strong, W H Davies, Amy Lowell, Merrill Moore, Roy Daniells, and Edward Thomas.

The ‘Wayzgoose’ and ‘Loose Canons’ pieces we intend to continue to produce in handset type, but for the two new series, ‘Well-told Tales’ and ‘Commonplaces’, we will use digital type printed from photopolymer plates. The main reasons for this are that many of these texts will be substantially longer than, say, the essays in the ‘Wayzgoose’ pamphlets, and will by their nature be prose. We can spare neither the time, the quantity of type, nor the space to have so many pages of prose standing in the shop for an extended period. Hand-setting the poetry in ‘Loose Canons’ is much less time-consuming (and frankly, more pleasurable) than lengthy stretches of prose, however brilliant. As for the ‘Wayzgoose’ pamphlets, their subjects, being largely typographical, will require the use of type we hold in case.
A further consideration of the short story series is that we are keen to explore the possibility of using line drawings by young artists who are as yet unestablished, and who we hope will become interested in trying their hand at illustration. Since drawings can easily be made into plates, the idea seems both practical and fitting. We have yet to devise a way of winkling these artists out from whatever hiding places they inhabit, but we will find a way. We may try a similar approach with the essays, perhaps asking for drawn portraits of the authors. These ideas are still very much works in progress, but we are excited by their possibilities, and look forward to developing them.

In the meantime . . .

the summer is passing away at last, and autumn will soon be here – a favourite time of year. Within a month we will harvest our apples, provided the bears have not stripped the tree first. Two years ago they pipped us at the post by one day. Then comes winter, Crispin’s favourite season of all, and the pleasures of continuing work.

We hope you are all well, steady in the heart – a quality more than ever needed in these days of baffling gluts of ‘information’, tediously mediocre popular entertainments, and the endless babble of unwanted online opinion. We offer here, hopefully, Marianne Moore’s simple answer to these confusions, the best advice we know: ‘Feed imagination food which invigorates.’

With warm wishes to you all,

Crispin, Jan, and Apollonia September 2024