New Book: The Remarkable Martin Stone

by Stephen J. Gertz

Booktryst is pleased to announce the publication of its newest book and first fine press edition, The Remarkable Martin Stone: Remembering the Celebrated Rare Book Dealer and Blues Guitarist.

The edition is limited to 150 copies (of which 25 are hors commerce w/o hand-numbering), binding designed and text designed and printed by Alastair Johnston at Poltroon Press on Hahnemühle Ingres paper with type composed in Monotype Bell. It is bound by John DeMerritt. And it features an engraved frontispiece portrait by Frances Butler.

Each copy is signed by the designer/printer, binder, and artist on the colophon.

The Contributors:

Nigel Burwood; Tom Bushnell; John Eggeling; Marianne Faithfull; James Fox; Peter B. Howard; Barry Humphries; Ed Maggs; William Matthews; Michael Moorcock; Jeremy Reed; Charles Seluzicki; Iain Sinclair; and Sylvia Beach Whitman.

Advance Praise:

“From its stunning binding and elegant design to its superb, heartfelt writing, The Remarkable Martin Stone is a bibliophile’s dream. Seeing the legendary book scout through the eyes of those who knew him best--booksellers, writers, and musicians--gives us one final, glorious glimpse of a man who was charming and generous to the last. This is a book that anyone who knew, or simply knew of, Martin will hold dear; I know I will” (Rebecca Rego Barry, Fine Books & Collections).

By Subscription Only, no billing. Books will be ready to ship in early December 2017. However, I expect the edition to sell out sooner rather than later, so order asap.

Booksellers who wish to buy 3 or more copies for resale can purchase them at a 30% discount. You must, however, contact me directly; the discount cannot be granted through the buy option below.

Net proceeds will be donated to the ABA Benevolent Fund, which provided assistance to Martin during his illness.
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The Remarkable Martin Stone. Remembering the Celebrated Rare Book Dealer and Blues Guitarist. McMinnville. OR: Booktryst, 2017. Octavo. 53, (1) pp. Engraved frontispiece portrait. Patterned Japanese cloth over decorated paper boards. Printed spine label. Cobalt blue endpapers. Plum cloth slipcase. $200.

Four Days of the Codex Book Fair 2013

by Alastair Johnston

"There is not a prophet in the Old Testament who would not be excommunicated from the modern Church for the vehemence of his opinions" -- John J. Collins

The 2013 CODEX book fair brought together makers of expensive books from all over the world to show their wares. CODEX is timed to coincide with the biennial visit of the California International Antiquarian Book Fair to San Francisco and for that reason (among others) I have never attended, being more interested in the old book I've never seen than the new book I cannot afford, but this time it had been moved to the week preceding the ABAA/ILAB event. It was also moved physically from Pauley Ballroom on the U C Berkeley campus to a former Ford plant in the wilderness of Richmond, California, where I agreed to help staff a friend's table.

The CODEX book fair is the baby of Peter Koch, who models himself after Andrew Hoyem of Arion Press, a grand bookman in the tradition of the Grabhorn Press, producing trouser-press editions of chestnut texts with an emphasis on the materiality of the book, rather than the originality of the work. In fact the typography and imagery generally reflect a style that was popular in the 1930s and is based on pattern-recognition, so people will look at it and think "Ah, a fine press book," rather than question the originality of the concept, production methods (increasingly faux letterpress from computer-generated plastic plates) or structure. Even the Codex fair "look" is based on Cassandre's eccentric Bifur typeface designed in 1929.

Perhaps the success of the fair is due to the "Kindle Effect" (like the "Connecticut Effect" which the NRA hopes will soon wear off). While there is a genuine nostalgia for "real" books after the sudden surge in the e-Book market, it is surprising to see these fancy books still hanging on to an audience, but at $800 for a table there were not going to be too many purveyors of medium-priced well-made books or "democratic multiples." But the fair has grown and consequently a second aspect of it, a morning-long symposium for some of the participants to discuss their work in detail, was sold out.

To accommodate those who missed out on the symposium, it was webcast live, which seemed like a good idea. However, the camera was at the back of the auditorium and the sound was picked up there, rather than fed from the podium, so you mainly heard coughing; the speakers were but a distant speck beneath the large blurry & skewed video screen on which they showed their work. One speaker I heard sounded very silly saying "balance of type image concept brought back into balance." Maybe I heard him wrong. And while it seemed a majority of the exhibitors were women, there was only one woman speaker in the symposium.

San Francisco skyline from Point Richmond

Point Richmond is a long drive from sillivization and not easily accessible by public transport unless you want to brave the environs of one of the scariest BART stations in the system. Exhibitors could buy a bus ticket (for an additional $50!) to get them there and back before and after the 4 long days of showing their work. It is a lovely setting though, in an old Ford tank factory right on the San Francisco Bay, next to the Rosie the Riveter museum. But once there, attendees are stuck. When it was held at Pauley Ballroom (currently being renovated) it was a short walk to the hotels, restaurants and bookstores of Telegraph Avenue. One woman's suggestion: since Peter is such a macho cowboy, he should hold the next one at the Cow Palace.

Peter is famous for his drinking stories, according to one Midwestern exhibitor. In December, I went to a talk at Moe's Books, advertised as a "preview of CODEX," as I was eager to learn about the fair and its attendance -- not just who is showing work, but what kind of numbers show up, if sales are made, or is it all window-shopping (Since the cost to exhibit is so steep it's not a light investment for most presses, never mind airfare and hotel). Instead I had to sit through a provincial account of "My big trip to Venice," telling how much of Peter's wife's money they spent. As you no doubt know, Prosecco flows like water in Venezia, and only rubes pay $15 for a glass of Prosecco, but that seemed to be the apogee of Peter's visit. That and the fact they spent $15,000 or was it 50,000? in pre-production costs for the reprint of the Joseph Brodsky book they produced there, Watermark, that retails for $6000. Unfortunately the fair suffers from being closely associated with Peter Koch though you cannot imagine all the exhibitors are so pretentious.

There was a lot to look at: too much in fact, and by the time people came around the nearly 200 tables, like yachts with luffing sails being pulled sideways into the Richmond dock, they had that glazed "museum-goer" look. I saw lots of "gratuitous structure": books that were in flag or accordion-spine formats for no reason other than it was a cool idea at the time (with of course no recognition for Hedi Kyle who originated those structures). But, warned Peggy Gotthold, as she showed me her elaborately constructed anthology "For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn," there are no new structures, only rediscovered ones.

I remarked on the one aspect of such fairs which always bothers me: the artists themselves are sitting behind their work, some looking more confident than others, but every person who walks by is seen to judge the work, with either an instant curiosity (sometimes simply "how did you name your press?") or instant indifference: "hmmm, whatever it is I don't wanna know!" One attendee said she felt guilty looking at the books because although she was fascinated, she couldn't afford them and maybe was preventing some librarian from getting in close to make a purchase.

Peter Koch printing the cruciform poster for CODEX 2013

In the valedictorian speech (on line) Koch said he welcomed criticism, as long as it was couched in flattering terms, so kudos to Peter and his son Max for pulling this off four times. While the real audience is rich collectors and librarians, the value of Codex is it enlarges the tiny pond of the Bay Area book arts scene. It's a chance for local enthusiasts to learn something, to get ideas or to meet artists and printers. But it is marred by the cowboy aesthetic. Many women exhibitors complained about the Wild West theme (which is inherent in Peter's typography -- he likes beat-up wood type and the bullets/lead analogy). The poster for the fair is a large Xtian cross with CODEX vertically and 2013 being the horizontal arms; then it has "Drawing a bead on the book" as a subtitle. Targets abound. We are not all hicks in shitkickers, these ladies complain, please leave the target practice out. 

Artist Cathy DeForest listening to dealer Donna Seager

The Bay Area and the bustling Santa Cruz book arts scene were well represented, and it spirals out from there to Ninja Press and Pie in the Sky in Southern California, to Inge Bruggeman (Ink-A! Press), Cathy DeForest, and Diane Jacobs (Scantronic) who work in Oregon. One reason to exhibit was to let people know you are still around. Though nonagenarian Jack Stauffacher was not present, his Greenwood Press was represented by one of his authors, photographer Dennis Ledbetter, holding down the fort. Walter Hamady's daughter, Samantha, showed his superlative Perishable Press work and reassured passersby that Walter is not dead -- in fact he is a sprightly 72, though he gave up printing two years ago to concentrate on sculpture and collage. His last book, A Timeline of Sorts, as well as copies of many of his other fine works, were on display at Codex for the first time.

Walter Hamady's parting gesture

M K Publishers from St Petersburg (Russia) were there and Vladimir Zimakov: I didn't know his name but did recognize his work. Mexico, alongside California, was well represented, but there was simply too much to take in. On Facebook people have posted amazing snapshots of things I missed. Nevertheless here is my hopefully constructive criticism: four days is too long (the first day could be a one-day symposium followed by a 3-day bookfair). The fair should end at dusk: since there are no lights in the Craneway Pavilion it was too dark to see the books for the last hour. One final idea: invite a taco truck to park outside.

Browsing in the gloaming

The best looking book I saw was one with five pochoir plates from Shanty Bay Press of Canada, but it is not even for sale, being out of print.

There were many international book artists, like <usus>(Stoltz & Schneider), the lexikon gang "Zweite Enzyklopädie von Tlön", and Veronika Schäpers from Germany, the latter now working in Japan. Italians, French and Brits were there too, from Whittington Press who do traditional Monotype work and publish Matrix magazine, to Susan Allix who presents her fine art in quirky formats, but always impeccably presented.

And surprisingly there was one genuine literary publisher of affordable books there: The Brother in Elysium from Brooklyn, New York, who had a new folder of Ed Sanders' Glyphs and a witty packaging of a Ted Berrigan work in a library binding with a big "WITHDRAWN" stamp and library pocket stuck in. He may have broken even, but only because he was visited by librarians from The Bancroft, Simon Fraser, Florida State University and Stanford. Many of the exhibitors were breathlessly awaiting the arrival of Mark Dimunation of the Library of Congress, hoping he would bestow a purchase order on them. Meanwhile there was plenty of schmoozing to go around.
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Nice Ass, Great Binding

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1904, publisher George Bell and Sons issued a beautifully designed and printed edition of the ancient classic The Golden Ass, aka Metamorphosis, by Apuleius in its 1566 English translation by William Adlington. Published in an edition of 200 numbered copies for sale, it was printed by the Chiswick Press.

In 1960, a copy of the Chiswick Golden Ass received fine binding treatment.  It was bound by Bernard Kiernan.

Now, in 2012, that copy is the subject of a Booktryst post with teasing headline of dubious taste. Aim high, swing low.

Title-page.

Kiernan bound the copy in full light brown morocco with fifteen onlaid deep purple morocco medallions with a radiating sun motif in gilt to the upper and lower boards, each medallion encircled by a black morocco border. Six compartments with onlaid gray morocco hexagons and black morocco label lettered in gilt grace the spine. Inside, burnt orange morocco doublures with gilt rays emanating from a plain central oval stagger the eyes when the book is opened. All edges are gilt.

Few are aware of master bookbinder Bernard Kiernan (1922-1967). Bernard Henry Kierman  took up bookbinding as a hobby in 1954 at age thirty-two. He was largely self-taught and became a member of the Guild of Contemporary Binders in 1958 and exhibited at Foyles in the same year. He was elected a Fellow of the Guild but, alas, died in 1967 at age forty-five. Bibliographer J.R. Abbey had a number of books bound by him, one of which is illustrated in The Anthony Dowd Collection of Modern Bindings (John Rylands University Library, 2002, pp. 106-7). He also bound a copy of Craig's Irish Bookbindings 1600-1800 which was in William Foyle's collection. A copy of Charles Holme's The Art of  the Book bound by Kiernan is found in the British Library. Many volumes in the Gutteridge collection of books on cricket were bound by Kiernan. He was held in high regard for his original designs and tooling skills, as splendidly displayed here. His career was short, his work distinguished.

Cover detail.

Few, if any, care about publisher George Bell and Sons. But The Chiswick Press is another matter entirely. Peel back the skin of the Private Press movement and the enormous influence of the Chiswick Press lies exposed.

Woodcut historiated initial.

"Chiswick Press was established in the printing shop of Charles Whittingham (1767-1840) in 1787. Although the press moved on a few occasions, it operated for the most part in London, England. Chiswick Press became influential in English printing and typography and, most notably, published some of the early designs of William Morris. The press continued to operate until 1962" (Special Collections, University of Missouri Libraries).

Front doublure.

In 1811, Whittingham began printing inexpensive editions of the classics. In 1838, his nephew and apprentice of the same name, Charles Whittingham (1795-1876), assumed control of Chiswick, and under his stewardship the press revived old typefaces and made a concerted effort to improve the quality of typographical design and printing in England, which had fallen low.

Historiated initial.

The high quality that Chiswick Press brought to English printing became the craft's gold standard in the U.K. Chiswick Press was a trade printer - Great Britain's finest -  servicing publishers (it became the most in-demand print shop of nineteenth century England), but its influence extended beyond job work. It played an important role in the development of the Private Press movement, which strove to meet and exceed the mastery of the Chiswick Press. They printed many of William Morris's early books, and the great printer and designer, Emery Walker, a founding father of the Arts & Crafts movement who established the Doves Press with T.J. Cobden-Sanderson in 1900, used the Chiswick Press to print  an edition of  Burns' The Pied Piper  of Hamelin in 1889. The Chiswick Press printed books for the Riccardi Press, the Folio Society, Boar's Head Press, etc.

Stamped signature to rear doublure.

I don't pretend to know all there is to know about rare books; I only became aware of the Chiswick Press a few months ago yet I consider it an embarrassing lacuna in my knowledge. Now, as if seeing a previously unknown consumer product or car for the first time, I  find references to it all over the place. And this copy of The Golden Ass bound by Kiernan holds a place of honor.

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Frontispiece.

[KIERNAN, Bernard, binder]. APULEIUS. The Golden Ass. Translated by William Adlington. London: Chiswick Press for George Bell and Sons, 1904.

One of two hundred numbered copies, this being copy no. 195, out of a total edition of 220. Quarto (13 1/8 x 8 in; 335 x 203 mm). [17, blank], [1, limitation], [1, half-title], [1, blank], [6], 226, [1, colophon], [11 blank] pp. Frontispiece and title page by W.L. Bruckman; title page in red and black. Rubricated headlines and running heads, text in black. Historiated woodcut initials in black. Shoulder notes in red and black.

Bound in 1960 by Bernard Kiernan.

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Many thanks to Edward Bayntun-Coward for information about Bernard Kiernan.

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Images courtesy David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.

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Important New Book on Modern Poetry and Visual Art

by Stephen J. Gertz

Cover painting Untitled #12 (1960) by John Altoon.

Between 1974 and 1976, Kevin Power, on a fellowship from the American Council on Learned Societies, interviewed eight modern American poets about the relationship between painting and poetics in postmodern American poetry.

The interviews - with poet and art critic Bill Berkson, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, George and Mary Oppen, and Jerome Rothenberg - were originally published in small literary journals in the mid-70s through 1980s. Those issues of Texas Quarterly, Vort, Spanner, Line, and Niagara, are now extremely difficult to come by.

Poltroon Press of Berkeley, California, now celebrating its thirty-six birthday, has,  fortunately, gathered the interviews together into a just-published collection, Where You're At: Poetics & Visual Art.

The poets that Powers interviewed were directly involved with painters or American Art, or highly influenced by them, bringing the aesthetic of modern American art to their writing.

"They were all part of a prolific range of American writing that was opening up new possibilities for poetry and poetics: literally exciting times," Powers declares.

Here, Jerome Rothenberg discusses the deep image, "perception as an instrument of vision," an attempt "to bring the ojective and subjective world together and to try and eradicate the differences between them."

Robert Bly makes a distinction between "the picture, on the one hand, in which there are simple objects from an outer world, and an image." The former is a fairly straight and objective visual metaphor or simile, the latter, a subjective visual with qualities of surrealism.

Michael McClure talks about the nature of the exchanges between poet and painter in San Francisco during the '50s and 60s, the ideas that flowed back and forth, and the mutual influences.

Creeley relates how, in college during the '40s, he was influenced by Paul Klee's Notebooks in which the painter talked of taking a visual line for a walk; the verbal analog is obvious. (Yet one could strongly argue that the visual/verbal line takes the artist/writer for a walk; the difference between leading and following, between control and abandon). "The whole imagination of art interested me." When he moved to France he became closely involved with art, particularly with painter René Laubies, introduced to him by Ezra Pound.

David Meltzer recalls the role of artist Wallace Berman's L.A.-based Semina in providing a home for visual poetics; indeed Wallace Berman pops up more than once in the collection,  which was thirty-five years in the making; estate clearances prevented Powers from publishing it sooner.

The interview with Robert Duncan, at forty-five pages the longest, is worth the price of the book. Deeply immersed in the art scene of the 1940s and '50s, he was particularly attracted to Miro's busy canvases with lots of objects in them. "I liked the whole feeling of a mosaic going to pieces and that's what I wanted to happen in poetry." His goal was "writing that would be like painting."

"The important thing to understand is that the picture we had of a possible painting or possible poetry is not the painting we saw but the painting we could imagine from what we saw." 

In short, the grammar of modern art - collage, surrealism, abstraction, chance, visual puns, assemblage, typographical design, etc., was co-opted by and informed modern poetry in an attempt to short-circuit objective language and subvert its superficialities toward deeper understanding and insight. It was also, at times, an exercise in throwing words up in the air and seeing where they landed, with the  hope of unexpected revelation. The overarching aim seems to have been a desire to break-up objective reality and put it back together in such a way that the line between the objective and subjective became blurred if not erased. Objective reality was over-rated and not all it was cracked up to be; it was time to make that deeper reality manifest in the work: objective reality as a subjective construct.

Along the way there's a lot of personal anecdote and revelation. Creeley talks about putting a drunk Willam de Kooning to bed, then checking out his studio; McClure mentions his encounter with still-inebriated De Kooning 3000 miles away when the artist makes clay animals with his daughter. The Oppens admit they don't approve of Ben Shahn because he began to imitate himself. They tell startling stories about the expatriate Jewish community in Mexico City. Berkson discusses the New York School in relation to painters like Philip Guston, Alex Katz and Larry Rivers, while Meltzer brings Berman, George Herms and Bruce Conner to the discussion. And Robert Duncan, a close friend of Anaïs Nin and an intimate member of her circle of artists and writer friends in Greenwich Village in the early 1940s, admits that he turned against her work, as well as Kenneth Patchen's.

"I'd actually been lost in admiration for them as only an 18 year old could be...[But I later] realized that, as artists, they weren't responsible for their art, that their art was sort of a plaything for their personalities."

To some readers the influence of modern art on postmodern American poetry will come as no surprise; you may have read these interviews (or any of Berkson's critical prose, i.e. Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006) when originally published. The magazines they appeared in are no longer, and copies have become quite rare. To have these interviews brought together to read as a whole is a gift.

I don't think it an exaggeration to assert that this fascinating collection of interviews is required reading for any student and/or fan of the arts and poetry.

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POWER, Kevin. Where You're at: Poetics & Visual Art. Berkeley, CA: Poltroon Press, 2011. Octavo. 209, [1], pp. Pictorial wrappers. $19.95. To order contact the publisher.

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Images courtesy of Poltroon Press, with our thanks.

Poltroon Press' "Alastair Johnston and Frances Butler, who provoke each other to ... pyrotechnic abandon, conceal a real sense of the outer edge potential of letterpress" (Nicolas Barker in The Book Collector, London, Summer 1990).

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"Men Are Wicked But Their Books Are Good"

By Cokie Anderson

The magnum opus of the Ashendene Press, Dante's Tutte le Opere

The three great English private presses are considered to be the Kelmscott Press of the bohemian and socialist William Morris, the Doves Press of the eccentric and volatile T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, and The Ashendene Press of the astonishingly normal Charles Harry St. John Hornby (1867-1946).

The press was founded by Hornby as a hobby and named after the location of his family home in Hertfordshire. It issued 40 books, plus additional ephemeral pieces, from 1895-1935, pausing production only during the years of the Great War. Originally the work was done by Hornby, his sisters and, upon his marriage, his wife, Cicely Barclay - truly a family affair.

The Ashendene printer's device motto reads "Les hommes sont meschants mais leurs livres sont bons"
(“Men are wicked but their books are good”).

Less elaborate in appearance and design than William Morris' Kelmscott volumes, but more ornamental than the products of Cobden-Sanderson's Doves Press, the Ashendene books have long been considered the most satisfying of English private press books. Hornby’s considerable achievement in design and printing is all the more impressive when one considers that he had a full-time, demanding, and successful career with the bookseller W. H. Smith, then as now one of the largest chains of booksellers in the U. K.

It was Hornby who changed the focus of the Smith’s retail operations from stalls within the railway stations to shops, conveniently located very close to the stations. The railroad companies had demanded an outrageous increase in rent, which Hornby refused to accept. According to the DNB, “Hornby, anticipating the possible loss of the contracts, had set men scouting for possible shop sites, but it was still a considerable challenge to transfer so many of the firm's outlets while keeping the daily business of newspaper distribution running smoothly. Hornby relished a challenge: in ten weeks, 144 new shops were opened on the territory of the two railway companies. This most dramatic episode in the firm's history pointed the way to the future structure of its business, centred on shops rather than stalls, and established Hornby's position as the strategist of the firm.”

The Divine Comedy, in Subiaco type. Woodcut of the Gates of Hell.

In his spare time, as a form of relaxation, Hornby was creating some of the loveliest books of the 20th century. He sought the assistance of his friends Sydney Cockerell and Emery Walker, who created two memorable typefaces for his: Subiaco, based on the first roman typeface, the famous font used by Sweynheym and Pannartz at the press they established in 1465 in Subiaco, about 30 miles north of Rome, and Ptolemy, derived from the font used for the 1482 Ptolemy printed in Ulm.

The Ninth Circle of Hell, from Inferno

The books Hornby chose to print included excerpts from the Bible, essays by Francis Bacon, works by classical authors, and Italian literature, much beloved by Hornby. Two of the highlights of the press were the three-volume edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy and the folio-sized complete works of the Italian poet (“Tutte le Opere), both in Italian. The former was illustrated with delicate woodcuts here were drawn by R. Catterson Smith and cut by Charles Keates (with some assistance from W. H. Hooper) after the Venetian Dante of Petrus de Quarengiis of 1497. Fellow printer Emily Daniel of the Daniel Press wrote to Hornby, "I think it is the most beautiful modern book I have ever seen."

From Tutte le Opere

"Tutte le Opere" is considered not only the most impressive and important of Ashendene publications, but also one of the outstanding works of 20th century printing. In fact, the Ashendene Dante, the Doves Press Bible, and the Kelmscott Press Chaucer have been called the "triple crown of fine press printing." Franklin writes that "this first major folio from the Ashendene Press has always occupied the summit," and Charles M. Gere's illustrations, inspired by works of the early Renaissance, suit the spirit of Dante perfectly.

Typical Ashendene bindings, vellum with silk ties

Most Ashendene books were bound very simply in flexible vellum, with gilt titling on the spine and silk ribbons (usually green) that could be used to keep them tied shut. Occasionally the vellum would be dyed green or orange. A few works, among the the Cervantes and the Thucydides, were issued in white pigskin.

Deluxe Ashendene bindings

St. John (pronounced "Sinjin", in marvelously British fashion) Hornby proved that it is possible to create great art while still working full time in the mundane world of commerce, that it is possible to create great art while having a normal family life, that it is not necessary to be a tortured soul languishing in an attic or one's parents' basement. The soul of the artist does not have to be crushed by the routine of 9 to 5; creativity can soar in spite of that. I like to think of him as the patron saint of every artist, writer, and artisan who does what is necessary to provide for themselves and their families while never losing sight of their vision and remaining true to their art. So if you're sitting at your desk thinking of the novel you'd rather be writing, the painting or scupture you'd like to be working on, or the hand-crafted book you want to print, take heart. You can do that, too. St. John has shown us the way.

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Images courtesy of Phillip J. Pirages Fine Books & Manuscripts
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Ron Rosenbaum At Slate Is Wrong About Nabokov's Pale Fire

by Stephen J. Gertz

Portrait frontispiece by Andrew Hoyem for the 1994 Arion Press edition of Pale Fire

Ron Rosenbaum, writing for Slate on July 23, 2010, is extremely excited: Freeing "Pale Fire" From Pale Fire. The Next Big Nabokov Controversy.

He's over the moon about "a new Nabokovian objet d'art that is likely to touch off the next big Nabokov controversy. One that takes us deeper into the heart of perhaps the greatest novelist of the past century..."

And what is it that will ignite this Nabokovian controversy? His friend Mo Cohen, publisher of Gingko Press, is issuing a "stand alone" edition of the poem Pale Fire that lies at the center of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire. 

"With the publication of 'Pale Fire' as a stand-alone poem, Mo was throwing down the gauntlet, challenging the world's most avid Nabokov readers and critics, telling them for 50 years, most of them had gotten a central aspect of, arguably, his greatest work flat wrong....

"...All the excellences of the poem's complex, Persian-rug pleasures suggest perhaps it deserves to be stolen back...and looked at as a pseudonymous work of Nabokov's that he had hidden inside the Russian doll construction of the novel...

"...the poem deserves to be read on its own terms, solus rex to use a Nabokovian phrase. Standing regally alone. Allowed to convey its own meanings once it left the author's pen. An in a sense that's what this new gesture, this new incarnation of the poem 'Pale Fire' Mo was sending me was. 'Pale Fire' freed from the shackles of, or, if you prefer, the delicately woven web of Pale Fire. 'Pale Fire' free at last to be a poem on its own."

There's just one problem. The poem 'Pale Fire' was "freed from the shackles..free at last to be a poem on its own," extracted from the novel and published in its first separate edition in 1994, by Arion Press in San Francisco.

Title page to the First Separate Edition of Pale Fire (the poem).

Moreover, it was printed to appear as the fictional manuscript is described in the novel, on index cards.

Arion Press publisher, Andrew Hoyem, lays it out in the book's colophon:

Furthermore, Hoyem wrote an essay, published by Arion Press in 1997, in which he makes a strong case for the poem as an important and distinct work; exactly Ron Rosenbaum's point - thirteen years afterward.

"The poem is not regarded as an independent work, for it is embedded in a novel that takes its title from that of the poem and is a part of the fiction in verse, yet it is self-contained and unreliant upon the rest of the novel...it is possible to read the poem by itself and to recognize its greatness as a distinct literary work" (Andrew Hoyem).

It is difficult for me to believe that Rosenbaum, a rabid fan of Nabokov, was not aware of this earlier, separate edition of the poem 'Pale Fire.' He has spoken to Dmitri Nabokov, the novelist's son and literary executor, and to Brian Boyd, the novelist's biographer. They were quite aware of the existence of the Arion Press edition; Hoyem, in his essay, writes about communicating with them. Dmitri wrote to him after receiving a copy.

"It is very attractive, including the little marsupial," he wrote, the marsupial in question the separate edition of the poem that accompanied Arion's edition of the novel.

And Brian Boyd wrote:

"Thank you very much for for your wonderful edition...I pore over it with delight...it is designed with imagination, wit, and scrupulous care."

It may be that Rosenbaum is fudging a bibliographical point. He's careful not to call this new Gingko Press edition the first separate edition; he refers to it as a "stand alone edition," by which he may mean that the prior Arion Press edition was not meant to "stand alone" by itself independently from the novel with which it was issued as a two-volume set. But "stand alone" is imprecise and far from accurate.

Pale Fire (the poem) standing alone.

Pale Fire (the poem) standing alone with its companions

What remains puzzling about this is that every Nabokov fan on the planet was likely aware of the Arion Press first separate edition of 1994 and yet I don't recall headlines heralding a new Nabokov controversy as a result of its printing. And Hoyem's essay has been around for thirteen years, plenty of time for Nabokov critics and scholars to engage in a literary food fight. There was none that I can recall.

Is it possible that the only controversy here is that Ron Rosenbuam may be shilling for his friend, Mo Cohen of Gingko Press?
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Bibliographers take note: The upcoming Gingko Press edition (November 2010) of the poem 'Pale Fire' by Vladimir Nabokov should be cataloged as the First Separate, Independently Published Edition to distinguish it from the Arion Press First Separate Edition that accompanied the novel as a two-volume set.

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Images courtesy of David Brass.
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Binding Women

Women have worked in book binderies for centuries—wives and daughters assisting husbands, fathers, and sons, and sometimes taking over the bindery when the patriarch died—but not until the Arts & Crafts movement of the late 19th century did women come into their own as independent bookbinders who signed their own work. 

Many members of that movement were supporters of equal rights and opportunities for women, especially those involved in the private presses of the day. The Kelmscott, Eragny, and Ashendene Presses all had women on staff, and binder T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, who added his wife's name to his own when they married, trained a number of women in the art and craft of bookbinding.

Binding by S. T. Prideaux

One of the first women to gain notice was Sarah Treverbian Prideaux (1853-1933). She began binding when she was 31, training in London under Zaehnsdorf and in Paris under Gruel, and worked independently for 20 years. The Maggs Bros. Catalogue of Bindings #966 says that Prideaux "was by far the best of the women binders of the period, . . . she wrote several books on the history of bookbinding, and [she] also taught the craft, one of her best students [being] Katharine Adams." Marianne Tidcombe, whose Women Bookbinders is an essential reference, says that Prideaux bindings "all have a restrained beauty about them that continues to appeal to book collectors. Anything pictorial or gimmicky would have been anathema to her, and she leaned instead towards clean, crisp floral motifs . . . , avoiding over-intricate tooling which hides the beauty of the leather." Adams says that Prideaux was a particularly "good judge of leather, using only skins of very high quality, for hers was a counsel of perfection in all things."

Adams binding from SMU Library online exhibit Highlights from Six Centuries of Master Bookbinding

Katharine Adams (1862-1952) was another woman binder who achieved acclaim. She grew up near William Morris' family and was friends with his daughters May and Jennie. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "The connection with the Morris family proved useful when she began binding professionally during the 1890s. After a short period of training with Sarah Prideaux (1853–1933) and T. J. Cobden-Sanderson (1840–1922) in London in 1897, she set up a workshop in Lechlade, where her first commission came from Janey Morris. In 1901 she established the Eadburgh Bindery in Broadway, Gloucestershire. Adams initially worked alone, but was later able to employ two women assistants, whom she herself trained. For several years during this period she taught binding to the nuns at Stanbrook Abbey, although she was never quite reconciled either to the restrictions imposed upon the nuns or to the practical difficulty of teaching through a grille. . . . She took first prize in bookbinding at the Oxford arts and crafts exhibition of 1898, and was soon receiving regular commissions from the engraver and typographer Emery Walker [of the Doves Press], St John Hornby [of the Ashendene Press], and the bibliophile Sydney Cockerell."

The advent of independent women binders was not restricted to England. The lovely binding above is the work of Countess Eva Mannerheim Sparre (1870-1957), who received a degree in wood sculpting and leatherwork from the Stockholm Technical School in 1891, and became the first person to teach leathercraft in Finland. With her husband, the Swedish artist Count Louis Sparre, she had a profound impact on applied art and design in Finland. One of the few Scandinavian binders to receive any attention in Tidcombe's "Women Bookbinders, 1880-1920," Sparre is described in that work as being "responsible for some very restrained and tasteful designs for modelled leather bindings." Tidcombe mentions three examples of her work--one in the Huntington Library and two others illustrated in Sunny Frykholm's article "Bookbinding in Sweden, Norway, and Finland," in "The Studio" (Winter Number 1899-1900, pp. 78-82).

This binding for George Eliot's Jubal is one of the historically significant productions done by members of the Guild of Women Binders, a group of British female artisans responsible for distinctively innovative binding decoration during a kind of golden moment at the very end of the 19th century. The bookseller Frank Karslake established the Guild in 1898 in order to give an organizational identity to a group of women already at work binding books in various parts of Britain, often in their own homes. Karslake first became interested in women binders when he visited the Victorian Era Exhibition at Earl's Court in 1897, held to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. He was impressed with a number of bookbindings at the Jubilee exhibit, prominent among them being those of Mrs. Annie MacDonald of Edinburgh, and he invited the women to exhibit their work in his shop at 61 Charing Cross Road. The Guild was formed soon thereafter, when some of the women named Karslake as their agent. The binding here with its attenuated Art Nouveau feeling, is typical of the early work of the Guild, much of it designed by Karslake's eldest daughter Constance, the director of the Guild's workshop (a pencilled note at the front here attributes the design of our volume to her, but we have not been able to verify that). As Tidcombe notes, "because the women were generally unaware of the long history of traditional bookbinding design, they produced designs that were freer and less stereotyped than those of men in the trade."

Next week: modern women book binders.

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All images, except where otherwise noted, courtesy Phillip J. Pirages Fins Books & Manuscripts