Dieter Rot Sets In

by Alastair Johnston

wait, later this will be nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth, edited by Sarah Suzuki et al, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2013, 96 pp., 108 illustrations, paperback.

    Funny how things come in threes. Last year I wrote on Booktryst about Ian Hamilton Finlay, the Scottish artist (concrete poet and landscape gardener). Finlay's son Eck got a laugh out of my review, calling my take, "IHF: the Dolce & Gabbana Years"! I noted that he had dismissed Dom Sylvester Houédard (ironically the first person to champion Finlay in print in Britain, in an excellent piece in Typographica 8) as "anti-culture" and "nonsense." Then I received a copy of Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter by DSH and reviewed it last week. Both of these pieces mentioned the publisher Hansjörg Mayer and both also mentioned the Icelandic concrete poet and book artist, Dieter Rot. So by some curious coincidence, Saturn cheap-day Return, or whatever you want to call it, I am back looking at the 1960s and the movements that promised so much then.

    It has been 50 years and those of us who remember the 60s are old codgers thinking nostalgically about the explosion of art, fashion and music that signaled our coming of age, and how much grimmer things got, from "Free Love" succumbing to AIDS, acid trips becoming the nightmare of drug wars with crackheads and cough-syrup slurpers pervading all corners of society, to the great liberating joy of rock-n-roll, punk & new wave, succumbing to disco then becoming the tired pablum of Justin Bieber  & Britney Spears. What went wrong? we cry. Stop babbling, gramps, say the youth, and drink your Ensure.

    Dieter Rot (or Roth as he is called here) was born in Germany in 1930. Though he operated at the same time as Op Art, Actionism and Fluxus, he went his own way and, like another German, Kurt Schwitters, he created his own one-man art movement. And he did it out of Germany, moving from Switzerland to Iceland in 1955. His biggest influence was Marcel Duchamp and he worked closely with British pop artist Richard Hamilton as well as the printer and typographer Hansjörg Mayer. There is one constant in Rot's output and that is editioned works, whether books or prints, but otherwise he changed means of expression constantly.

     The title of this monograph suggests the transience of all things, and points to the fact the Rot used cardboard, Sellotape, newsprint and other non-archival material to make his art. (Schwitters too liked bits of acidic newsprint and so many of his artworks are now uniformly brown whereas they once had sparkling red and yellow passages.) Rot's art or anti-art was ahead of its time, though obviously Duchamp and Cage are big influences. He took sheets of overprinted waste paper from a printshop floor and bound them into books. Of course there is an unconscious element in there and the random juxtaposition of fragmentary found images would be a constant in his work for the next two decades. He made masks out of black paper by cutting holes in a sheet at random then overlaying it on a printed page. He also die-cut holes in randomly assembled pieces of print matter.

   Rot's Daily Mirror Book of 1961 is a good example of his conceptual art: he cut random 2 centimetre squares out of the British tabloid Daily Mirror then perfectbound them -- the result is a "book" with pages, text, fragments of ads and imagery that is an archaeological slide of a moment. It also signals a new form: the Artist's Book. (Later he recycled this book, taking some of the pages and blowing them up to be much larger, for Quadratblatt, 1965.)

    Another artwork, less obviously a book, but no less an "artistsbook" is his Litteraturwurst, which he created in different incarnations throughout the 1960s. He took a book or newspaper and ground it up, added gelatin, lard and spices, and stuffed it into a sausage skin. You could slice your own text from it, like congealed alphabet soup (though not so vegetarian). He offered it to George Maciunas as a Fluxus publication but it was rejected. (Thus becoming another of many artworks misunderstood, even by their intended audience.) His point was, we consume literature like sausage and it too ends up as shit. He made litteraturwurst out of Marx, James Joyce, Goethe, Hegel, Günter Grass and many other authors he felt needed this treatment.

    Roth loved playing jokes on the artworld. Not like those clowns Richard Prince, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst who are merely naughty boys in art class saying "But Sir it is art, my mammy says so…," but in a more subversive way. He made a bunny rabbit shaped like a chocolate rabbit you might consume at easter. (Remember the Swiss love chocolate probably more than they love sausage.) It's called "Karnickelköttelkarnickel (Bunny-dropping-bunny)" -- which is amusing in itself. It was manufactured, out of rabbit droppings, in an edition of 250. Not only does chocolate resemble shit, but a lot of art is really shit, he seems to be saying. He called his collected poems The Collected Shit, forestalling any criticism, and retained all the errors in his German that his students at R.I.S.D. (who were tasked with assembling the work) introduced. He stepped in an artwork of his contemporary Joseph Beuys (a bucket of lard), but the more celebrated artist graciously allowed his action as a "collaboration." 

    A self-portrait has a Duchampian title, "P. O. TH. A. A. VFB." (written in Dymo tape on the pedestal), it stands for "Portrait of the Artist as a Vogelfutterbüste." His lumpy ugly sub-Giacometti self-portrait bust is made of chocolate and birdseed. His intention was that the work would be left in a garden to be consumed by the birds and vanish as the artist himself does. Of course it ended up in a museum being worried over by conservationists. From the gloom of Beckett to the exuberance of Paolozzi you can see a mirror of the times in his work.

    Rot's increasing use of food was problematic, not just for posterity, but even during its existence. Cupcakes in the shape of a motorcyclist were given out at a gallery opening … and eaten. An installation of pieces of cheese which were supposed to slide down a wall towards open suitcases became rancid and maggoty in a few days and eventually the gallerist's husband drove the art to the desert and abandoned it.

    Roth didn't like the Fluxus artists ("A good thing they are modest, he said, because they have no talent"); he doesn't seem to have liked anybody very much ("James Joyce is kitsch"), apart from his collaborators Hansjörg Mayer and Richard Hamilton, but he created some very amusing and provocative artworks, some in multiple editions, and many of which stretch our concept of what a book is or can be.
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Dust Jacket Designer Philip Grushkin From Comps To Final

by Stephen J. Gertz

Philip Grushkin working in his Englewood, NJ home studio, c.1950s.

A major archive of renowned dust jacket designer, Philip Grushkin, "whose work made him the standard-bearer throughout the publishing industry," (NY Times obit) is coming to market courtesy of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller. Booktryst got a sneak preview of its catalog, yet another key reference and collectible work as we've come to expect from the NYC-based super dealer.

Philip Grushkin was born in Brooklyn, NYC, in 1921, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He became interested in book dust jacket design as a teen and began collecting them, those of George Salter (1897-1967), the preeminent American dust jacket designer 1935-1965, his primary interest. He attended Cooper Union college as an art student, studying calligraphy and lettering with Salter, who became his mentor. He graduated in 1941.

After the war, he began to free-lance as a jacket designer, working for virtually all of the major New York publishers of the time: Alfred A. Knopf; Random House; Harper and Brothers; Harcourt, Brace and Company; Macmillan; and Doubleday; as well as smaller houses such as Farrar Strauss, John Day, and Crown. He became one of the go-to designers at Knopf because the great book and typeface designer W.A. Dwiggins declined to do dust jackets. Grushkin became part of a select group of dust jacket designers that included Salter, Charles Skaggs, and, on occasion, E. McKnight Kauffer, Herbert Bayer, Paul Rand, and Alvin Lustig.

In 1947 he joined the the fledgling Book Jacket Designers Guild established by Sol Immermann (1907–1983), who, with H. Lawrence Hoffman, produced the jackets for the first one hundred titles published by The Popular Library. The BJDG established a code for dust jacket design, rejecting the poster style in vogue for pulp novels in favor of a descriptive, non-blaring style. Its manifesto, embraced by Grushkin, rejected:

• "The stunt jacket that screams for your attention, and then dares you to guess what the book is about."

• "The jacket that is born of the assumption that if the book has a heroine, or if the author is a woman, or the author's mother a female, the jacket must say SEX."

• "Burlap backgrounds, the airbrush doilies and similar clichés as well as the all too many good illustrations that were stretched, squeezed, tortured and mutilated to fit a jacket format with just enough room left for an unrelated title."

1953.

Grushkin's hallmark, like Salter's, was his creative use of calligraphy and lettering in concert with a lightly drawn illustration. His early work tends to mimic Salter's but in the late 194os his own personal style began to emerge, with an emphasis on lettering and calligraphy often to the exclusion of illustration altogether. Perhaps his most recognizable and typical dust jacket from that period is that for Simone De Bouvier's The Second Sex (1953).

If you are unfamiliar with Grushkin his deceptively simple yet visually aggressive pictorial style is distinctive; once you see a Grushkin book jacket you will begin to see them all over the place on books published during the late 1940s - early 1960s.

"Grushkin forged his own brand of modernism, one that owed nothing to the work of Lustig, Rand, or Herbert Bayer, inventing a unique mixture of bold typographic hand lettering, dynamic background patterns, vibrant colors, and abstract symbolism. By the end of the 1950s, Grushkin’s style was distilled to the point where it resembled Paul Bacon’s 'Big Book Look,' with hand lettering - instead of calligraphy - taking center stage, augmented only by a tonally variegated background" (Paul Shaw, Philip Grushkin: a Designer's Archive, catalog to the collection).

Below, a few examples of Grushkin's work in development, from first comp to final jacket.

The Other Side of the Record (1947):

First comp.

Second comp.

Third comp.

Fourth comp.

Fifth comp.

Final.

The Train From Pittsburgh (1948):

First comp.

Second comp.

Third comp.

Fourth comp.

Fourth comp, side notes.

The fourth comp of Train..., unusually, has notations, not just by Grushkin, but also by "J" at Knopf (likely production manager Sidney Jacobs). Grushkin’s notes refer to the colors he plans to use - blue, red, and yellow - with a reminder that the jacket will be offset printed. The notation by “J” approves the design but suggests substituting the calligraphic lettering of Julian Farren's name to a clean, serif'ed typeface.

Fifth and final.

Mechanical - Shards of Glass.

Mechanical - Lettering.

Helix (1947):

Partial comp.

In what was, apparently, the first (and partial) comp for David Loughlin's novel, Helix (1947), Grushkin employs a blue background, a single swirling spiral, and title lettering running upward on a diagonal from left to right.

First complete comp.

In the above, the first complete comp for the Helix DJ, Grushkin loses the blue background and substitutes red, has the title lettering on a downward diagonal from left to right, acutely triangulates the author and title, features a series of smudgy, overlapping spirals, and adds a tiny ship moving along a black plane.

Second complete comp.

Grushkin's second complete comp for Helix refined his design in the first comp, downplaying the swirling spirals,  deleting the ship's black path, and adding black "gears," elements that made it to the final published dust jacket.

Final.

Grushkin's final design for Helix cleans up, clarifies, and polishes the second comp.

Limbo mechanical.

Final.

The lettering mechanical for an early comp of Grushkin's DJ for Bernard Wolfe's classic science-fiction novel, Limbo (1952) bears a different subtitle than the final. "A Voyage of Discovery and Adventure in the Fantastic World of 1990" must have seemed a tantalizing teaser in 1952. The teaser to the final certainly hammers it home: "A diabolic tale - mad, merry and monstrous - of men and women caught in the vortex of history yet to happen! Check out that mad, merry, and monstrous year, 1990, more frightening that Wolfe could ever have imagined:

• Manuel Noriega surrendered to U.S. forces after acting as dictator of Panama for five years.

• Notorious Gambino crime family leader John "the Dapper Don" Gotti was arrested and charged with racketeering, murder, and various and sundry illegal activities.

• Marion Barry, the flamboyant mayor of Washington D.C., was arrested for possession of crack cocaine in an F.B.I. sting set up in a D.C. hotel room.

• British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher resigned. 

• The first McDonald's restaurant opened in Moscow, becoming for many a symbol of the nation's new progressive free market ideology.

• The World Wide Web was created, along with the first ever web page and web browser.

• Time Inc and Warner Communications, two of the largest media companies in the world merged to create giant Time Warner.

That's some vortex. We're lucky to have made it through 1990 alive.

The Grushkin archive consists of his book jackets (with related comps, roughs and mechanicals); binders of his cover designs for Mercury Publications; letterhead and logo designs; related ephemera; and a collection of book jackets by George Salter: over 2,000 total items in all, 150 of which are highlighted in the catalog, with the largest and most important portion being the dust jackets by Grushkin.

"'His life was literally books,' said his son, Paul, noting that some 10,000 volumes lined the walls of the Grushkins' home.

"Yet, he was an invisible presence, his work evident only to a book's author, the publisher's editorial and design staff, the printer and the bindery" (Times obit).

"My Dad was also a book designer. He handled in his lifetime close to 1500 books, for many publishers, but most for Harry N. Abrams, the worldwide leader in artbooks. He told me a book design is successful when it's invisible, meaning the reader never has to labor to overcome the designer. In a good book design, the grid and typographic elements illuminate the author's concept along with the book's contents. Nothing jars that reader from experiencing the book - nothing in the design is so boastful that it's the designer who's calling out, before anything else, 'look at MY cleverness'" (Paul Grushkin). 

Book lovers, special collections librarians, and aficionados and collectors of dust jackets will be fortunate to score a copy of the Grushkin Archive catalog, luckier still to acquire the archive itself. While it's not unusual to track a writer's progress through their archive, it isn't often that we have an opportunity to see a dust jacket designer in the midst of their process from conception to completion.

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All images reproduced with the express permission of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, with our thanks.
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Bookplates in a Printer's Library, Part II

by Alastair Johnston

As a letterpress printer, I create a lot of ephemera. Recently I was asked to design a bookplate, so I have been thinking about this ephemeral work (though, like a bumper-sticker, once it’s stuck to something, it becomes a bit more permanent).

It is said that the American flag was inspired by a bespoke bookplate (with stars and stripes) that George Washington had made up for inclusion in his books. I started looking through my own bookshelves for examples and was surprised at what I found. So here is a collection of bookplates found pretty much at random on the premises at Poltroon Press. (We collect books not bookplates so this is not a survey of highspots of the genre.)

In January 2011, I bought (for $12 from Serendipity Books) an edition of Robert Bloomfield’s Wild Flowers, a book of poetry published by Vernor & Hood in London in 1805, illustrated with wood engravings by an unknown engraver. Imagine my delight on finding the bookplate of Robert Spence (1784–1845), engraved by Thomas Bewick, on the inside front board. Spence was a North Shields canvas and sailcloth maker. He was also a Quaker, noted for his height and long white hair, according to Nigel Tattersfield, author of a book on Bewick’s bookplates. Bewick, the most famous of all wood-engravers, started out as a metal engraver and this bookplate is a copper engraving. In the distant background you can see the lantern spire of St Nicholas’ Cathedral, Newcastle-on-Tyne, a characteristic Bewick landmark.

Engraved plates

Bookplates are generally typographic, calligraphic, armorial or pictorial. For those who can afford it, a wood-engraved plate is a nice addition to a book. A lot of nineteenth-century bookplates are of heraldic family crests, printed from copper-plates. Such plates are well-known to collectors through publications such as Augustus Wollaston Franks’ 3-volume Catalogue of British and American Bookplates Bequeathed to the Trustees of the British Museum, 1903–4. I found quite a few of these in my books, and thanks to Google I was able to add some life to them and discover some interesting previous owners of my books. But I won't bore you by parading them here (well, maybe just one).

Found in an 1804 edition of Sterne: Thomas Philip de Grey (1781–1859), was a British Tory politician and statesman. He was First Lord of the Admiralty & a Knight of the Garter. A colonel-commandant of the Yorkshire Hussars and aide-de-camp to William IV and Queen Victoria, he served as Lord Lieutentant of Ireland in the 1840s. He was founding president of the Institute of British Architects in 1834. Wrest Park, in Bedfordshire, is now part of English Heritage.

James Watson’s History of the Art of Printing (Edinburgh, 1713) passed through several hands before reaching our shelves. The title-page bears the ownership inscription Henry Goodwin his book 1736. The bookplate of Philip Absalom is a pierced woodcut with Caslon type. The book is listed in the sale catalogue of Absalom’s library, published by the London auctioneer Evans in 1841. Absalom’s main interest was heraldry. 

Dean Sage (1841–1902), a later owner, who had a simple engraved bookplate which could double as a calling card, was a prominent American collector of Waltoniana; he wrote a book on fishing and helped found Cornell University. His daughter married James Fennimore-Cooper.

The author, James Watson (1675–1722), was one of the first to write in English on the history of printing and does so, “as one carrying a Lantern in a dark Night, that I may communicate to others the light by which I myself walk.” Early writers tended to paraphrase one another, in fact Watson took his historical matter from Jean de la Caille’s Histoire de l’Imprimerie (Paris, 1689) and, interestingly, this copy has been marked up by an editor changing a few words and phrases in the text, clearly with a view to reprinting it in a slightly altered form.

Deaccessioned Library Books 

(N.B. Be sure they have a discard stamp in them!)

The Library Company of Philadelphia’s hand-trimmed bookplate was printed at the local paper, Zachariah Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, which ran from 1800 to 1839. The border of type ornaments is very ornate.

Mixed-face Victorian typography for the American Whig Society bookplate is more typical of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The Society existed from 1784 ’til 1941. The College of New Jersey is known today as Princeton.

A ready-made letterpress bookplate from the Victorian era was purchased by Howard B. Smith. I like the ATF Rimmed Litho (for "LIBRARY") contrasted with the skeletal "—OF—". It's in a book from 1890, with the wonderful quote from Walter Scott: "...although many of my friends are poor arithmeticians, they are nearly all of them good book-keepers."

The Sawyers, who settled in Northern California, are possibly the same family who run the winery. I found this book in the Anderson Valley on 24 September 1995 (as my penciled note attests). It’s Samuel G. Goodrich’s Anecdotes of the Animal Kingdom, Boston, 1860. It was completely by chance I discovered it in a used bookstore and it was only when I opened it I found something I had been seeking blindly: a story called “Anecdotes of Ants,” which solved a puzzle that had been nagging me for decades, i.e. whether such a work existed.

From A Brief history of Selwyn College Library, we learn that in 1895 the Library comprised 9000 volumes, early donors being: Sarah Selwyn, Lady Martin, Bishop Abraham, Mrs William Selwyn; and especially the Rev. William Cooke. The Cooke bequest was substantial enough for the library to build a new wing. Cooke (1821–94) was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. The book is Greswell’s study of the Early Parisian Press (London, Cadell & Davies, 1818), printed by Dean brothers of Manchester.

One of the great treasures of our library is the 8-volume Shûko Jisshu of Sadanobu Matsudaira (1759–1829), or Ten Categories of Collected Antiquities, containing hundreds of plates reproducing woodcuts, rubbings, armor, harnesses, writing implements, swords, musical instruments. The work was later collected in four volumes in 1908 and is one of the most important sources of visual information on pre-Tokugawa history. Our set, once the property of Daniel Butler Fearing, was deaccessioned from the Grolier Club Library in New York and bought for a song, from Muir Dawson.

There may be a case for owning a “strayed” library book. The long-derelict, now restored, Grand Hotel Villa de France — where Matisse painted the view from his window in 1912 and later home to Tennessee Williams — is in Tangier. Some tourist walked off with this fascinating work, Source Book on the Wreck of the Grosvenor by Percival Kirby, Cape Town, 1953, with its austere bookplate, now in my library.

Scholars and Scoundrels
 

From that dubious source Wikipedia we learn that Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957) was a linguist, philosopher, and writer. Described as a polymath but also an eccentric and outsider, he is now remembered as the inventor and propagator of Basic English, an auxiliary international language of 850 words comprising a system that covers everything necessary for day-to-day purposes. In 1929 his Orthological Institute issued a recording of James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake. In 1932 Ogden published a translation of the Finnegans Wake passage into Basic English. Ogden collected a large number of books. His incunabula, manuscripts, papers of the Brougham family, and Jeremy Bentham collection were purchased by University College, London. The balance of his enormous personal library was purchased after his death by UCLA. This work is therefore a rare escapee from his library and it is also a linguistic curiosity: The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich by Arthur Clough, printed by Charles Whittingham at the Chiswick Press.

Adam Raymond Hausmann (1901–74) sensed the transience of his possession of Doctor Johnson A Play, by A. Edward Newton, hiring “JSF” to create a striking skeletal jester for his bookplate. Clearly a bibliophile, his copy of Joyce’s Chamber Music sold at Christie’s in 2005 for $3700.

Harry Buxton Forman (1842–1917). Though well-known as a Shelley scholar and bibliographer, Forman will live in infamy for his connection to T. J. Wise and the dissemination of forgeries of editiones principes by English authors of the nineteenth century. His bookplate is in a set of Tristram Shandy which I own. Sterne’s masterpiece too was subjected to piracy which must have appealed to the rogue Forman. Sterne even signed all copies of the first printing of Volume 5 to thwart piracy. Interestingly, here the forger was trying to fool himself because the set comprises six volumes of the original printing: the remaining three volumes have been broken out of a later one-volume printing and bound to match the early printings. According to the Buxton Forman sale catalogue vols. 7 and 9 of his copy also have Sterne’s signature. It sold for $7.50, incidentally, and the catalogue says that vols. 1 & 2 are second editions and the others firsts. So he must have had 2 sets. It’s described as being in worn old calf. My set, the bogus set, is in marbled paper over boards.

Because we are based in the University town of Berkeley it’s natural that there are a lot of books here and sometimes unusual connections between the books we buy and former owners. Leo Olschki’s Le Livre Illustré au XVème Siècle (Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 1926), bears the modest bookplate of Herbert McLean Evans in red Futura type. Evans (1882–1971) was an embryologist and Professor of Anatomy at the University. In his research he discovered Vitamin E. It’s interesting that he took time off from dissecting rats and mice to contemplate this collection of Italian woodcuts.

At a $1 sale at the University Library recently I found a first American edition of an Alberto Moravia novel. It has the bookplate of Ruth & Mark Schorer: an etching of a man climbing a stepladder to the moon. It’s a reproduction of a work by William Blake, called “I want! I want!” executed in 1793, here reprinted from a zinc with Bulmer type. Unfortunately this plate was attached with acidic glue which has discolored it. Mark Schorer (1908–77) wrote a book about Blake called The Politics of Vision in 1946. He chaired the English Department at Berkeley in the turbulent sixties. He also wrote a biography of Sinclair Lewis and many short stories that were published in The New Yorker and elsewhere.

Though just a paperback catalogue, the Exhibition of Books at the Festival of Britain, 1951, has the bookplate of George Laban Harding (1893–1976). It’s a wood engraving with Caslon type. Harding was not just a book collector but also an authority on the history of printing. He collected every single newspaper item he came across that mentioned anything to do with the press in the West (which to Harding included Tahiti and Hawaii). His archives, now in the Kemble Collection at at the California Historical Society, are a trove of information. He was a student of Updike at Harvard and recalled taking a seminar with Bill Dwiggins which consisted of stack tours and long lunches. He wrote books about Agustin Zamorano, the first printer in California, Charles A. Murdoch, the first printer of taste in the West, and biographies and bibliographies.

It’s quite common for bookplates to be added to a collection posthumously. It adds coherence, especially when the books become absorbed into a larger collection. I work as a volunteer in the Kemble Collection on Western Printing at the California Historical Society in San Francisco, which houses several collections, the core being the library of William E. Loy (1847–1906), an historian of American printing & typefounding who built an important collection of trade periodicals, type specimen books and other material related to the printing and graphic trades in American in the nineteenth century. When his collection was acquired for CHS by George L. Harding, Roger Levenson of Tamalpais Press printed the plate (in Bell type) which adorns the books. Loy was my neighbor (He died in 1906 and his house was bull-dozed in the 1960s, but he lived round the corner from me) & I have spent many hours with his books and periodicals. I wrote a short biography of him as the introduction to his work on Nineteenth-century American Designers and Engravers of Type, which I co-edited with Stephen O. Saxe.
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To be continued yesterday ...
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Bookplates in a Printer’s Library, Part II

by Alastair Johnston

(Note: part I will follow tomorrow)

Bookplates can create wonderful associations to their former owners. For a lover of ephemera the bookplate of Bella C. Landauer, drawn by Sidney Hunt in 1925, is a treasure.

This imposing art deco gem is very confident in its place on the front paste-down of Hansard’s Typographia (London, 1825). The story goes that Landauer (1874–1960) bought a scrapbook full of bookplates from an impoverished student, only to discover the book had been stolen. Nevertheless she caught the ephemera collecting bug and she went on to build a vast collection of printed matter, partly housed at the New York Historical Society Library. In addition to the 800,000 items there, she donated other collections to the Met, the Smithsonian, NYPL, Library of Congress, Harvard — and still had enough paper left over to leave to other institutions.

John C. Tarr (1894–1976), calligrapher and type designer, was the author of Good Handwriting and Printing Today. Tarr was a draughtsman at the Monotype Drawing Office in London alongside Victor Lardent. He worked on some of the notable types of Stanley Morison including Times Roman. Due to weak lungs he moved to Morocco, then Berkeley, California where he died. Having known him, and got the inside gen on Morison, I was pleased to find some volumes from his library at Moe's Books in Berkeley.

A conservative Arts & Crafts design was produced by calligrapher William Brooke for his plate (found in Caractères de l’Ecriture by Stanley Morison, Paris, 1927).

A typographic approach from the same era is seen in the work of the Rev. Charles Clinch Bubb (1876–1936). He ran a private press in Cleveland, Ohio from 1905 to 1931, called the Clerk’s Press, so he probably designed and printed this bookplate (in Figgins’ Caxton type) himself. He corresponded with T. Bird Mosher and Richard Aldington, and printed a lot for the Rowfant Club of Cleveland.

A grail for scholars of typography is the Library of the American Type Founders Company, now housed at Columbia University in New York. In 1934, the librarian, Henry L. Bullen, had the notion to sell off duplicates from the collection. We (the Poltroon Press library) have two of them. This label (printed in ATF Caslon 540) is in the 1888 Benton-Waldo Portable Book of Specimens, which Bullen sold originally for $3.50.

Jackson Burke (1908–75) was Director of Typography at Linotype, where he designed the typeface Trade Gothic. In 1975, Dawson’s Books of Los Angeles put out a 3-volume catalogue of his library that included many treasures including a copy of Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises (1683) that was purchased by San Francisco Public Library. Though not on the level of the ATF Duplicate Catalogue, Dawson’s set is still a valuable reference work. From it, we acquired Copy & Print in the Netherlands by Wytze Hellinga (Amsterdam, 1962) for our library.

When I say “we” I should perhaps introduce my partner in Poltroon Press, Frances Butler, who has worn many hats, including that of textile artist, book artist, illustrator, scholar and calligrapher. Since she retired from academia to rural France it is often said of her that she is out standing in her field. Her husband, Jonathan Lowell Butler (1939–74), was a Romance Philologist who taught at UC Berkeley in the 1960s and 70s. His bookplate was calligraphed by Frances & printed letterpress.

Peregrine Press was the San Francisco press of printmaker Henry Evans (1918–90). Publisher of poets Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, he was busted for selling Tropic of Cancer. A nice multiple-association copy as this two-volume set of John Johnson’s Typographia (1824) also has the signature of printer and publisher Roger Levenson (1914–94). Hand-trimmed bookplate in Caslon 471 type.

William Albion Kittredge’s (1891–1945) bookplate was designed by Bruce Rogers. Kittredge worked as a designer at the Lakeside Press in Chicago and worked with Rockwell Kent, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and Frank Lloyd Wright. Bruce Rogers was one of the most playful typographers in America, as this bookplate demonstrates. However he designed on paper, preferring to let others handle the kerning and rule mitring which he desired. The type is Monotype Bell; the bookplate is in a British Museum catalogue from 1929 that is the first trial showing of Monotype Bembo.

R. R. Donnelley & Sons' Training Department bookplate is one of two different ones we have. This one was designed by the master W. A. Dwiggins. I wonder how many young apprentices in the Lakeside Press building in Chicago’s Printer’s Row were inspired by their lunch-time browsing of this technical manual from 1910.

I wrote earlier about Dwiggins' pochoir or stencil-work, and the Lakeside Press bookplate has that look about it. Another pleasing find was the stenciled bookplate of S. A. Godfrey’s Circulating Library of Marylebone, London, in a well-worn copy of a Victorian set of Dickens’ novels. Godfrey was also a tobacconist so his clients probably popped in regularly to check out a book and buy smokes.

As a youngster, Thomas Maitland Cleland (1880–1964) became a printer and moved to Boston where he came under the influence of D. B. Updike. He worked as a commercial artist and illustrated fine press books for the Limited Editions Club and others by means of pochoir using thin metal plates which he cut himself. His white lettering on a red background is particularly striking on green endpapers.

I found the bookplate of Will Ransom (1878–1955), American book designer, author and historian (and creator of the evil Parsons typeface), in the back of a vellum-bound pamphlet, Of Typecasting in the Sixteenth Century, printed for members of the Columbiad Club by Carl P. Rollins at Yale in 1941. Ransom lists where he got it, and how much he paid.

Daniel Berkeley Updike (1860–1941), the distinguished American scholar-printer, came from an old Rhode Island family. He worked at the Riverside Press division of Houghton Mifflin and set up on his own as a typographer at the Merrymount Press in 1896. A series of lectures he gave at Harvard Business School turned into his two-volume work Printing Types, published in 1922. His library went to the Huntington Library in Southern California, so it is remarkable to find his bookplate in a book given to him by his colleague Stanley Morison. His bookplate is in Janson.

The Robert Grabhorn (1900–73) bookplate in Bell type was printed by Roger Levenson (from the look of it) and added to his books posthumously (as his appended dates attest). After his death, his library went to the San Francisco Public Library where it forms the basis of their collection on the history of printing. So a stray book with his bookplate is a rarity, unless it was stolen from SFPL, which mine was not. It occurs in a copy of Richard Freeman’s Graffiti (Hutchinson, 1966) and includes a charming inscription from Grabhorn’s young niece (now a lawyer in Los Angeles): “Kilroy was here [peace sign] Merry Xmas Uncle Bob Love Vicky.” The Library or family must have discarded it.

Scottish designer and historian Ruari McLean (1917–2006) had a bookplate in Walbaum italic. The border hints at the Victorian excess he documented in his many books, but he was also a champion of Jan Tschichold’s modernist design aesthetics. I was thrilled to discover his plate in a rare book I had long sought, J. Millington’s Are We to Read Backwards? published by Andrew Tuer at the Leadenhall Press in London in 1884.

An issue of Monotype, published by the Lanston Machine Company (Philadelphia, 1923) as a showing of Goudy Garamond, designed by Bruce Rogers and printed by W. E. Rudge, has the intriguing die-cut circular plate of “N. McN.” (Unidentified)

In the Watergate era Berkeley bookseller Peter Howard asked me to make a large bookplate he could use to cover up unsightly ones in books he had for sale. I came up with the fictitious character P. Howard Hunt. I must have a copy somewhere; it was pretty plain, in Palatino capitals, as I recall.

I have printed many bookplates, all of them designed by others. Thousands of books given to the University of California’s Bancroft Library by the Hearst family and poet Robert Duncan (in Bembo) have an example of my printing in them, executed while I was an apprentice at Arif Press in Berkeley. A favorite early job was the large bookplate for Sam Bercholz, co-founder of Shambhala Books in Berkeley in 1974.

Shambhala became the leading publisher of Buddhist texts in the West. The art for Sam’s bookplate was done by Glen Eddy (1941–2006), a Californian who became adept at the Tibetan thanka style of Tikse, or proportional drawing. The typeface is Centaur.

Byron Griswold Dodge was clearly ahead of his time. His woodcut “New Age” bookplate, printed by Taylor & Taylor of San Francisco, dates from 1928. But Californians have always been interested in spiritual matters.

Another Taylor & Taylor production is Frank Pierce Hammon’s neat bookplate in Nicolas Cochin and Gill Sans types and some richly colored border ornaments (Caslon's 5-line pica No 15 from their 1895 catalogue).

It’s not the labor, it’s the sense of permanent possession that makes me uncertain about printing a bookplate for myself. Lots of bookplates take a philosophical approach, from “As I never return books, I make a rule never to borrow them” (Sydney Smith) to Shakespeare’s “My Library was Dukedom large enough” (The Tempest), to Schopenhauer’s “It would be a good thing to buy books if we could also buy the time to read them.” We might add “You know you’re working class when your television is bigger than your book case.” (Rob Beckett). Berkeley bookman Ian Jackson suggests I use this old Latin motto, a tribute to ephemerality: NUNC MIHI, MOX ALIIS or “Now mine, tomorrow others.”

But, come to think of it I do have a personal bookplate in one book, given to me by James Mosley, in his The Nymph & the Grot (London, 1999). The author printed a special bookplate in an experimental sans serif, which he created as a revision of Caslon's Egyptian of 1830. That type has only appeared in one book, Radici della scrittura moderna, by Mosley, edited by Giovanni Lussu (Nuovi Equilibri, 2001). (Another version of the Caslon Egyptian was created by Justin Howes and is used by the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London.)

Another treasured book, Thomas Bewick’s Memoir of my Life (Oxford University Press, 1975), was given to me by the editor Iain Bain, who inscribed it around his own bookplate.

Lawyer Alfred Sutro (1869–1945) was president of the Book of Club of California. His ostentatious bookplate is gold-foil embossed on blue leather. There’s a lesson for bibliophiles here: After his death someone found a collection of his bookplates and one of these was stuck into a lurid paperback called Deviate Wives which I now own. 

Deviate Wives with Sutro bookplate.

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