Parrot’s Uncommon Thorny Book

I have a new strategy for posting when there’s not a lot of news coming out of the studio. More by coincidence than intent, over the years I has acquired a number of publications by well known people and presses, which were issued as a very small edition. So small they could almost count as hors commerce “just for fun” projects, except some copies were sold or found their way into booksellers’ catalogues. For the inaugural post in this occasional series, Barry Moser’s Cirsia....

This is an interesting project on a number of fronts. It a sort-of collaboration with the binder Gray Parrot, who bound some of Moser’s Pennyroyal books in the 1970s. As such, it’s a small-scale example of Pennyroyal at its most luxe – typography, art, printing, materials, binding. I’m a big admirer of Moser and GP, plus I like botanical art and uncommon books of just about any type.

 

To be accurate, Pennyroyal is nowhere mentioned or credited. The book is included in the Miscellany section of the 1986 Pennyroyal checklist.

The title on the spine is 12 Cirsia. Each of the engravings is preceded by a page with the plant’s Latin name printed in green. Five of the 12 engravings are black line, the balance white.

 

The plates (as they are called) are preceded by seven pages of notes on the topic, freely adapted from Field, Forest & Wayside Flowers by E.M. Hardinge (1899). Books like this always have to find some text, however brief and/or tenuously relevant, because no one seems to want a book of just prints. People want there to be some text, just so they can skip over it and get to the prints. 

The production details are laid out in the colophon, which is signed by Moser, as are each of the prints. Another piece of lovely Harold McGrath printing. The binding is everything you would expect and want in a GP binding. 

 

My copy of the book came with a proof sheet of all 12 engravings, which has been one of our favorite pieces since it went on a wall. 

 

I especially like that, even in a project of such comparatively small scope, people like Moser and McGrath can let a setting error escape their attention – that were a wrong sort. Makes me feel better about all of the ones I’ve racked up...

Now here’s an odd addendum: I have a second copy. It looks to have been made up from proofs or waste sheets. It has just 11 engravings (Cirsium virginianum – the one shown top left on the proof sheet – is lacking) and there are some odd blanks in the collation. The engravings all look good but some of the text pages are slightly under-inked. The colophon is signed by Moser but not the individual prints. Interestingly, it includes a half-title (which is followed by a blank) that does not appear in my numbered copy from the edition. 

The binding is a puzzle too. The leather is similar to that used by GP, but not exactly. The spine’s head and tail are rounded, like GP’s, but the actual spine is flat; little or no attempt was made to pare the leather. The endpapers are tipped on (boo). 

 

 

The endbands are made, not sewn. The head has been left unadorned. The book does not want to stay open. Overall it looks like something done by an amateur with some skills but new to leather, maybe someone who took lessons from GP using sheets he pulled out of his recycle bin. 

AND ANOTHER THING!

After this post first went up, one of HM’s friendly correspondents wrote to say he also had a copy of Cirsia and that it differed in several ways from mine....

The leather looks the same, but the tooling is completely different and it has a (very attractive) slipcase instead of a clamshell box...

 

and the endpapers are marbled, not Japanese. So it seems Gray was having fun as he bound the edition, trying different things, which maybe was part of the project’s purpose & appeal for him in the first place.

IN CONCLUSION...

There will always be someone who moans Why did they make so few copies? and/or Why does it have to cost so much? I do not have the patience or ability to explain in a way that would help them understand. Part of the appeal of a project like this is you’re just making copies for yourself and a few people you think might share your enthusiasm for it. And the short answer to why so few copies is the amount of labor involved in making each copy. It’s not a question of just keeping a machine running for a few extra minutes. As I make my way through sewing copies of HM=XX I frequently think 40 copies is more than I have the patience for. It takes forever to sew just one copy, due to all the odd sample sheets incorporated to the text block. Good thing I bought the boards last year: apparently mill board is becoming a scarce commodity across North America.  

 

So, obscure or – better still – unannounced or anonymous publications from interesting presses are almost always worth keeping an eye open for. Maybe later this year I’ll be able to write a post about Gray Parrot’s impossible-to-find marbled paper sampler (I don’t have a copy, but I know where one is...).

Wood Type & the Invention of Printing

I’ll try to tie this all together. It’s all related to a book project that might happen one day. There is a common thread, I just have to keep track of it...

I got myself a few books for Xmas, since it’s not exactly easy for others to pick ones I’ll be excited about. Without it being the primary intent or focus, they all ended up having something to do with the block books popular during the early and mid-15th century, and the protracted debates over exactly who invented movable type, when, and where.

Students of printing history will be familiar with debate over whether movable type was invented by Gutenberg or a Laurens Coster, a citizen of Haarlem. It generated a lot of hot air and convoluted opining among Europeans in the 19th century, until it was eventually settled in Gutenberg’s favor. To summarize it as briefly as possible, it boiled down to whether some of the block books incorporated moveable type, and whether that type might have been cut from wood, rather than cast from metal. A good summary of the block book debate, and how it ties into the invention of movable type can be found in William Blades’ Books in Chains (1892). 

It was reading some histories of Caxton that led me down the rabbit holes of this debate. I stumbled across a short book listing known reproductions of Caxton productions published in 1879 by John Springer, a printer in Iowa – not a hot-spot of bibliographic inquiry or fine printing at the time. But Springer had ambition: the book was printed in an edition of 125 copies for the United States, consisting of three variants on different papers, the best printed with "carmine initials;" and 69 copies for Europe, also printed in three variants.

What I found most interesting about the book, aside from the limp vellum cover, is an advertisement on the inside back cover for an “expanded catalogue on the history and mystery of printing,” the second & revised impression, to be issued January 1880 (see image at top). A large octavo of 150 pages, an edition of 170 copies (two variants). The notice claims two-thirds of the book had been printed, but I can find no record of an issued copy. (If you have one, please send it along with an invoice.) What I did find was a catalogue with this title, issued by Springer in 1880, totaling just 52 pages The last sentence of Springer’s preface (which is dated 1878) states “Fifty-six copies have been printed on fine paper, nineteen copies on common paper, for private distribution only.” I hope this is a common paper issue; I’d hate to think anyone thought the paper was fine. 

Getting back to our central thread, following a list of Springer’s books about the history of printing (many with amusingly arch comments appended), he weighs into the Coster/Gutenberg debate, but in what might have been considered a typically American, i.e. practical, way: he paid a wood type firm to cut a complete sentence in three lines on a block (sample #2 in the image). Then he cut the individual letters from the block and reset them as one would metal type (sample #4), and again using them to make different words. His thesis, which he believed he had proved, was the wood types could have achieved results as sharp as metal (arguments for & against this claim were central to the Gutenberg/Coster debate). 

As I acquire books on the topic of early printing, the footnotes and references often introduce me to other sources. That’s how I was introduced to Charles Middleton-Wake’s The Invention of Printing (1897). Attractively printed on Van Gelder paper, with 15 plates, he really means the invention: the first three chapters (each a lecture he’d given) deal entirely with block books. I like the presentation note tipped to the front flyleaf – everyone should have custom stationery printed while residing in a hotel. 

That was an Xmas present. So were two books by Robert Proctor. He was an English bibliographer whose career was cut short by a wrong (or possibly intentional) turn in the Alps in 1903. He was one of the first to study the incunables in the British Library from a specifically typographic perspective, as detailed in his Index to the Early Printed Books in the British Museum: From the Invention of Printing to the Year 1500 (four parts, 1898-1903). His studies included an interest in Greek types, and he designed one himself – the Otter type – shortly before his death.

I knew Proctor’s name from the Greek type chapter in Fragments & Glimpses, and various publications of the Bibliographic Society, which issued some interesting & well-printed monographs c.1900. One is an early article by Proctor on the Dutch printer Jan van Doesborgh. Most of it is hardcore bibliographic descriptions, but there’s an informative preface and some lovely plates. 

 

The copy I ordered was a library discard (having been donated by no less than Ellen Browning Scripps): does something look odd in that shot above? Upon initial inspection, I wondered if a second work had been bound in. Nope. 

 

The book had been put in boards at some point after publication, probably by the library, and for no obvious reason, it had been doubled in thickness with blanks. Where they just filling it out so they could use a case that had already been made? Dunno. 

I also got a copy of Proctor’s collected essays, elegantly set and printed at the Chiswick Press (200 copies, 1905). It includes a memoir about Proctor by Alfred Pollard, and all of RB’s published essays along with numerous facsimiles and plates. Several of these he’d had printed by Chiswisk over the years, for private distribution. 

 

Stepping slightly off-topic for a second, Pollard’s essay includes the following:

 

I haven’t been able to track down much information about this society, much less any of its reproductions offered for sale. The closest thing I’ve found is this set of photographs of incunable types.

 

It wasn’t until I got the collected essays that I realized a pamphlet I’d had sitting in my Abe basket for the past year (I dump a lot of stuff in there, then come back in a few months to see if I still want it...) was one of Proctor's privately-issued pamphlets! It is perhaps the driest of his three tracts on early printing, and the paper isn’t nearly as nice as the collected edition, but still, cool. 

The book also includes several of Proctor’s essays on early (Dutch) woodcuts, so I was back with the block books. Realizing that this was were my reading was going anyway, I also ordered a copy of William Conway’s The Woodcutters of the Netherlands in the 15th Century (1884). I haven’t cracked it yet; looks pretty dense and dry, and surprisingly has no plates. We’ll see. 

All of this started a year ago, when I had some vague idea for a project related to the Gutenberg/Coster debate. It’s been a case of the research taking on a life of its own, but hopefully I’ll get things back on track in 2022. 

AND ANOTHER THING!

Believe it or not, I’m still collating copies of This Monkey’s Gone to Heaven. That’s the entire edition of 40 copies below, the printed sheets trimmed, collated and waiting for the sample leaves to be inserted before sewing. That bit takes ages because each of the sample leaves has to be inserted in a particular way. But I have the cases all figured out, so it’s just a matter of pushing through. Still on track for publication in April.

Robert R. Reid, Printer (1927-2022)

Robert Reid – the person I have called Canada’s first true private press printer – died last week. HM’s second publication was a bibliography of the five books his press issued. For just my second project on a handpress it was far too ambitious, but that seems apropos for a book about Bob. There will certainly be tributes to Bob’s career in the coming months. I’m going to limit mine to simply sharing the following three pages from a brochure he produced (c. mid-1980s?). I think it’s a concise representation of his typographic tastes, and the way he expressed his many passions in life (golf being a big one) through print.

HM’s Predicted Light Cone for 2022

So apparently people like more random pictures & less yak, based on all the new visitors to last month’s post. I’ll try to remember: this month, images from 2022 projects for HM: two that definitely will happen, one that probably might, and one likely to stray into ’23 (assuming HM also manages to stray into ’23...).

These incongruous parts are from a project that will feature original reduction (color) linocuts by Walter Bachinski of Shanty Bay Press fame. Needless to say he’ll be printing the linocuts himself, HM will do the text and binding. Scheduled for fall ’22.

A Jim Rimmer/Pie Tree Press thing (hard to describe at this point); summer-ish ’22? 

Got my new finishing press from Illtyd Perkins just in time to put it under the tree! It will be put to work on the two projects mentioned above.

The too-long-discussed HM=XX, which will be issued by April even if it kills me & makes the previous two projects mooted moot. I spent most of the Xmas hols painting in 40 Hs and 40 Ms. (Marginal notes in all copies courtesy Barbara Hodgson.)

I don’t know why I have this orphan brayer handle (tho it might have been one of the things I inherited when Black Stone Press closed up), but in 2022 I will load it with a roller, one from Lawrence in the UK. 

    

This one may take a while. I have to get my head around a few basics before anything gets printed, including Minkowski space (see top), not to mention staining all the old paper from broken books it will be printed on (sample above). We’ll leave it there for now, I still have 10 Hs and 10 Ms to paint in. I’ll show some of my bookish Xmas bounty next month (because it hasn’t arrived yet...). Happy happy, keep being nice to all.

Starman

Peace, shalom, as-salaam ’alaykum, wa chxw yuu & etc. for 2022. Don't blow it.

HM Studio Tour, Just This Once

Sometimes people ask to visit HM. I say no. It’s where I work (& play), so it’s private. Anyone interested in printing won’t find anything unusual. But here are a few highlights, parts I think are interesting. 

The shelves shown above hold some of the books that have been the focus of most of my work-related reading (& acquiring) this year. 

This was my first book press, and remains my most used. I learned from Claire Van Vliet to adhere mill board to the bed & platen (I use double-sided tape). Less chance of doing damage to the covers of a book. But I generally use 0.25-inch acrylic boards to sandwich anything going into the press anyway. That’s the first trial binding for HM=XX.

When HM=XX is released, next spring, I’m going to have a garage sale of remnants and samples left over, all sewn up into some presentable form.

Big books are kind of a pain. You rarely pull them off a shelf on a whim. I keep my folios in the studio because it’s the only place I know there will always be somewhere to put them down. 

I love this print. It’s an etching. I can’t read the artist’s name, but she came from a family of printers and made this when she was living in Montreal. For me, it captures how exhausting printing by hand can be, but you can’t stop because the run’s not finished. 

That's my “Yannick Jauzion” Laguiole knife on the lanyard. It’s not actually that useful in the studio, but it’s gorgeous. And you can never have too many knives around. 

I love old drafting instruments, interesting looking bits of machinery (especially brass), and any small tool that looks like it might be useful. That mechanical pencil is Italian. David Clifford used it back in his pre-digital designer days. I have no idea what that brass crucible, with nested ones inside, is for. The Kern stainless steel dividers I use when binding. The butterfly knife was made by a guy I met in Buenos Aires. I’m still learning to open it without slicing off my fingers.

Good ink (which always means oil-based) is getting hard to source. I keep a stash under the bench. 

I have to start using some of the printing papers I’ve been hoarding. It’s always a struggle because I know I’ll probably never get more like it, so saving until maybe the next project always seems the prudent decision.

As I said, hoarding. That package of 300 g Fabriano came to me from the artist Takao Tanabe. He’d purchased it in the late 1950s, when he was working as a job printer, and never used it. Paper hoarding must be a common affliction for printers. 

Then there are the drawers of paper...

And at the end of a day of work at HM, this is what it looks like outside the studio (seriously):

 

 

I probably will post once or twice more this month. I have some show-&-tell from a 19th-century American printer that should be amusing. Stay safe, be kind to each other.