England's Greatest Type Designer Is Not Who You Think It Is

By Stephen J. Gertz

William Caslon, John Baskerville, Eric Gill, and Matthew Carter: these are the names we associate with great British type design. To the top of that list add Richard Austin. Modern typeface design begins with him.

Who was Richard Austin and why are his typefaces so important? And who, by the way, was Richard Austin, wood-cut engraver?

Rich. Austin
Engraver of Dies, Stamps & CopperPlates

Cuts all Sorts of Musick, Engravers Tools, Steel Letters,
& Figures for Letter Founders, Mathematical Instument
Makers, Steel Engravers, & all Arts -
N.B. Copper Plates neatly Printed on the
Shortest Notice.

Richard Austin (1756-1833), type-cutter, created the types for Bell & Stephenson's British Letter Foundry in 1788, as well as types for other foundries. In 1812, Austin produced the types known as Scotch Roman. He also perfected the revolutionary Porson Greek typeface of Cambridge University Press. He established the Imperial Letter Foundry in 1815. Richard Austin, "who changed the whole character of Type Founding from the old face style (as it is now termed), with its disproportionate letters and long s's, into the truly elegant characters of the present day" (James Mosley) was the father of modern English typefaces. To his everlasting credit, he killed the traditional f-like long "s" that bedevils modern readers of eighteenth century and earlier texts in english.

His son, Richard Turner Austin (1781-1842), was a prolific wood-cut engraver. It was once thought that Richard Austin, typeface designer, and Richard Austin, wood-cut engraver, were one and the same person. Alastair M. Johnston, in his new book, Transitional Faces, sets the record straight.

This is the first full-length study of the Austins and their place within British printing and publishing history. Based upon previously unpublished material, Johnston, the printer and publisher (of Poltroon Press in Berkeley, California), has written a rich, vibrant, and engaging account of the Austins, their times and the milieu within they lived and worked.

This exhaustive investigation, which includes 158 pages of text plus an illustrated survey of Richard Turner Austin's engravings (with 130 examples) and appendices totaling an additional 205 pages, might, as is so often the case with scholastic work on a somewhat obscure subject, be an arid affair, desiccating the frontal lobes of readers. Fortunately, Mr. Johnston (a contributor to Booktryst) is incapable of producing such a work. His analysis of type design and its particulars, which might otherwise cause eyes to glaze, is, in Johnston's narrative, enlivened by his liberal wash of colorful detail and vivid characterization of people and places. 

The book's title, Transitional Faces, refers to British printing during the Georgian era when type-designer Austin flourished. The British government, protective of industry, had prevented foreign craftsmen from working in the trade but their skill could not be ignored. The French were doing marvelous things and their influence upon type-design in Britain was enormous. Richard Austin's incorporation of French type aesthetics into British design, "began an era in English type founding (referred to as 'transitional' by Updike, II, 116, 142), a glorious but short-lived time of harmonious types that had the larger-on-the-body proportions of the Romain du roi with the modeling of Baskerville but with more color and fine serifs…'it represents in fact our first independent design,' said [Stanley] Morison, 'owing only its scale to continental models…the type possesses a harmony in serif formation as between roman and italic not possessed by the French type.'"

It's impossible to discuss the career of Richard Turner Austin, the wood-engraving son of Richard Austin, without surveying the work of the great Thomas Bewick and the world of eighteenth century wood-cut book illustrations. Johnston has, thankfully, devoted an introductory chapter to printed eighteenth century art to prime us on Austin Jr.

Because of Thomas Bewick's influence on wood-cut illustration, Richard Turner Austin is often presumed to have been a pupil or apprentice of his; Austin hewed closely to Bewick's style in his natural imagery. Indeed, many of Austin's unsigned blocks have been attributed to Bewick. and, too, much of Austin's early work copied stock blocks or the work of Bewick. For this reason, early historians neglected him.

But Austin Jr. made connections and was soon executing engravings after paintings by William Marshall Craig (c. 1765-1828). In 1819 he moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, where he worked consistently for the next ten years, his blocks, alas, unsigned. We know he did the work simply because, as Johnston points out, there were no alternative engravers who might have produced the scores of woodblocks that suddenly appeared in the "Athens of the North."

Yet by 1839, Richard Turner Austin's reputation and work were in critical decline. His wood-cuts, rarely signed, slowly fell from notice and he became a footnote in wood engraving history.

It's a direct line from Richard Austin Sr. to W.A. Dwiggins, the great twentieth century typeface designer. In 1939, Dwiggins modeled his Caledonia for linotype after Austin's Scotch Roman. Austin's Bell and Scotch Roman faces were major influences upon Matthew Carter's digital typefaces.

"Thus," as Johnston concludes, "the essence of Austin, diluted somewhat by modern technology, is still a part of our typographical experience."

With Transitional Faces Alastair Johnston has resurrected the lives of the father and son, and reevaluated their careers. The Austins now take their rightful place in the history of British printing and engraving.

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JOHNSTON, Alastair M. Transitional Faces. The Lives & Work of Richard Austin, Type-Cutter, & Richard Turner Austin, Wood-Engraver. Berkeley: Poltroon Press, 2013. First edition. Octavo. x, [2],, 387, [1] pp. Illustrated throughout. Burgundy cloth, gilt lettered. Illustrated endpapers. Dust jacket.

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Maxfield Parrish Didn't Like Book Collecting

by Stephen J. Gertz

"I have steered clear of book collecting always, seeing the ravaging results on some of my friends, and I wouldn't know a first edition from subsequent ones..."

So wrote the great book, etc., illustrator, Maxfield Parrish, in his distinctive script on both sides of a 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 card, to collector and printer Edward L. Stone (1864-1938) on December 15, 1930, from Windsor, Vermont (later home to J.D. Salinger). Stone was instrumental in the Library of Congress acquiring the copy of the Gutenberg Bible on vellum from the Benedictine Monastery of St. Paul, Carinthia, Austria. Parrish, responding to a letter from Stone, commented on the bible, and then book collecting in general. Parrish collected manuscripts but avoided books:

I have a friend & neighbor who is having a room built for his great collection. He takes out a book as though it were a new baby, his eyes glisten and voices are hushed as in a museum. Were it the MSS I would understand, but it is just one of many printed at the time, albeit a fine job and hard to get and expensive to own. I wouldn't want to get that way. I almost got four with George Washington's signature in them, but luckily was willed a fine Saray Highboy instead, though it ought to be in a museum instead of up here in the New Hampshire hills.

We have no idea what four books signed by George Washington Parrish refers to but I suspect that readers may be salivating, as I am, at the thought of possessing them. I have no idea what the market is for a Saray highboy but the signed Washington books must surely exceed it in value.

Stone, an avid book collector, replied to Parrish, an avid hobby machinist, on January 16, 1931, mentioning the Gutenberg Bible exhibit at the LOC,  printer and book designer, Bruce Rogers (1870-1957), and printer Billy Budge,  an "old-timer," according to the Typographical Journal in 1902, working in Chicago. He also defends the collection of books:

On permanent exhibition in a magnificent mahogany case in the Library of Congress, I imagine it will be of continued interest to a ledge percentage of the people who visit the Library‚ as I feel sure you would enjoy not only this particular copy of the Bible, but the seventeen hundred Fifteenth Century books, which will remain on exhibition for some months.

I have forgotten whether I sent you one of the little booklets which Billy Budge printed for me - "All Hope Abandon - Ye Who Enter Here." If not, I will be glad to send you a copy. Maybe this might ease your pain about not being a book collector. But in my sixty six years I have found nothing to take its place - nothing comparable, but, of course, there are many things I have not tried and know nothing about, but I know of people who have interests of all sorts and collectors who are crazy about everything from stamps to colonial antique furniture, paintings, etchings, and everything imaginable. I think it's a fine thing for anyone to get thoroughly interested in a given thing and know all about it that they can possibly find out. You know someone has said: 'There is more o know about an electron than the mind of any one man can contain.' So whether it be in four-leaf clovers or whatnot, there is great enjoyment, just as there must be in your hobby of machines, mechanics or in models of ships, as was Bruce Rogers.

It is easy for me to understand the thrill that you would get from collecting manuscripts, but such a hobby would be a little too much for me, although I have a few manuscript Books of Hours, the works of some of the old writers and scribes, and they all give me a great thrill. Only the other day I found in a little volume of Ovid the signature of 'Robert Browning, Venice 1878." And although I am not collecting autographs or inscriptions, they certainly do add to the pleasure and particularly if they are accompanied by a sentiment or have some special association. Just as there is a bit of pleasure in having a book printed in Leyden, 1616, by William Brewster before he sailed on the Mayflower, although the subject is not intriguing - Cartwright's 'Commentaries of Solomon.' One of my manuscript books dates back to 1330, quite old for me to own…
 
Last June I was in John Byland's library where they have twelve hundred manuscript books, and to look at a showcase full of them ne could easily imagine viewing a jewelry case with the wonderful illuminated goldwork, wonderful floral designs and other decorations…
 
I have only one George Washingon signature, one of Patrick Henry and William Blake. I suspect I have many others that I have not mentally catalogued."

Edward Lee Stone, author of a Book-Lover's Bouquet (1931) and The Great Gutenberg Bible (1930) was born in Liberty, Virginia (now known as Bedford, VA). After working for John P. Bell's printing company, Stone was promoted and eventually took over the business. He became a wealthy and prominent citizen of Roanoake, VA through his business, the Stone Printing and Manufacturing Company. His wealth went a long way in helping the LOC buying the Gutenberg from Benedictine Monastery of St. Paul.

The Parrish letter and Stone's three-page typed response are being offered by PBA Galleries in their Historic Autographs and Manuscripts With Archival Material sale, July 25, 2013. It is estimated to sell for $700-$1000.
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Image courtesy of PBA Galleries, with our thanks.
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Breaking News from the Sixteenth Century: Typography Takes Off

by Alastair Johnston

Stan Knight, Historical Types (From Gutenberg to Ashendene), Oak Knoll Press, 2012, 104 pp., hardback in dust-jacket, $39.95

Historical Types is based on a smart concept: an annotated picture book of enlargements of typefaces to show how they really look. After all, type is that tiny code we look at without really seeing it: it gives meaning to thoughts, but we rarely give it a thought.

Obviously this approach -- enlarged images of letterforms with commentary -- has been a key part of modern typographic education. A lantern slide show by Emery Walker in 1888, given to the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society in London, where he projected blown-up images of Jenson, Ratdolt and Rubeus pages, inspired William Morris to start his own press. Walker, a commercial photo-engraver, went into partnership with T J Cobden-Sanderson to start the celebrated Doves Press after Morris' death. Bruce Rogers, who also knew Walker, had photo-enlargements of the Jenson pages made to draw his Centaur type.

As a teacher I rely on large projected letterform details to explain their subtleties. I often use images from a wonderful article, "Photographic enlargements of type forms" by Philip Gaskell, that was published in the Journal of the Printing Historical Society, no 7, 1972 (and is missing from Knight's bibliography). Gaskell's photos, which were printed 5 times actual size, have proven enormously useful in discussing type design and its evolution and are a significant precursor to what Knight has done.

Two gros romain romans attributed to Claude Garamont, from Gaskell's article in Journal of the PHS, 1971. The top type, from 1530, has since been identified by Dr Vervliet as the work of Maître Constantin (from Virgil, Opera, Paris: Robert Estienne, 1532 [R115]); the lower type, from 1549 (as seen in Dionysius Halicarnassus, Scripta Omnia, Frankfurt: Andrea Wechel's heirs, 1586) is by Garamont [R118]

However didactic his aim, Knight has not achieved the same compression and intensity that Gaskell did (in 11 pages!), perhaps because his book is aimed halfway between scholars or students and a general audience. But Knight has provided accurate information on these typefaces. This may sound odd, given that so much has been written over the last five centuries about the legacy of Gutenberg, Fust & Schoeffer, Jenson, and so on.

Faustus and Chauffeur (dubious attribution)

But we have discovered a lot of it is speculative or inaccurate and we can no longer rely on Stanley Morison, Beatrice Warde and D B Updike for facts about the design of type. In discussing Ratdolt's work, Knight cites studies from 2009 and 2011 (showing how type scholarship is constantly evolving). Fortunately we have James Mosley, who teaches at Reading, Charlottesville (Virginia) & London Universities, formerly the Librarian of Saint Bride's in London, as a guiding light in the search for typographic truth. Mosley has been blogging about such matters since 2006. His "typefoundry" blog has been a great resource for Knight, particularly in the untangling of Jannon versus Garamond, the actual spelling of Garamont's name, and other details.

Many documents have appeared to further the historical discussion, from the series of Type Specimen Facsimiles (under the editorship of John Dreyfus from 1963 onward), to the exemplary Enschedé (1993) & Plantin-Moretus (2004) facsimiles edited by John Lane. Some of the older facsimile works could be revisited with the new approach heralded by Knight, for example the 1592 Egenolff-Berner specimen sheet which was reproduced in 1920 by Gustav Mori in collotype. That sheet was the first specimen broadside to clearly identify Garamond and Granjon as cutters of their types and, as it was printed from newly cast type, was the best possible source for modern interpretations: Adobe Garamond by Robert Slimbach (among others) was drawn from it.

But for most of the twentieth century Garamond revivals (and there have been roughly a zillion of them) were based on the wrong type: a poor imitation cut by Jean Jannon in the French province of Sedan in the 1620s. This typographic Lady Gaga, a tragi-comic homage to classic typefaces, should have been left in the dustbin of history but accidentally gained an important place in the story of type development, so Knight has included it. Also included is a text debunking many of the myths about Jannon and Garamond (thanks to Mosley's research). One of the most fanciful stories has Cardinal Richelieu's troops looting Jannon's types to bring them back to the Imprimerie nationale in Paris. This yarn was first spun by Beatrice Warde in 1926 and picked up by Warren Chappell in his Short History of the Printed Word. As late as 1999 Canadian poet Robert Boringhurst was embroidering the fable in his edition of Chappell's book (p. 148), saying that after Richelieu’s armies seized Jannon’s type they felt bad about it so they reimbursed him for them!

As technology improves it greatly assists us in seeing what we are looking at (though collotype mentioned above is hard to beat). Up to now many books on type have used small illustrations of large pages shrunk down, printed from line blocks. In the end you cannot see any details. So the next step is to do more books of this kind that show, as closely as possible, the impression and the texture of the paper, and more specialized books. Knight's previous book was Historical Scripts (also from Oak Knoll) with a similar hyper-visual approach to the history of calligraphy.

Hendrik Vervliet's recent three volumes on the Paleotypography of the French Renaissance have illustrations from Xerox copies and photostats. [Aside: I published Vervliet's monograph on Robert Granjon: Cyrillic & Oriental Typography in Rome at the End of the Sixteenth Century in 1979. We relied on Velox photostats from the Vatican for illustrations, which were so poor, some were even out of focus, but how do you tell the Vatican their reproductive services are lacking?] Vervliet's images (many composites to show full character sets) were painstakingly assembled over decades and often Xerox was the only service available. It would be a useful task for someone to give the blow-up treatment (shot in high resolution with raking light to show the impression, as well as the paper surface) to his studies (now that we have the key data assembled), and then move into the following centuries. 

Garamont's gros romain roman [R118] from the 1599 Le Bé-Moretus specimen shown in Vervliet, French Renaissance Printing Types, 2010, p. 193

Nevertheless Vervliet's work is the major contribution to the field in the last half century. So it's great to see late-breaking news from the sixteenth century when Knight reproduces a page of revolutionary new type from Henri Estienne (previously attributed to Garamond [see top illustration]) and, thanks to Vervliet, we now have to acknowledge the shadowy Maître Constantin for this massive step-forward in the Aldine style which revolutionized roman letterforms across Europe.

Claude Garamont's gros romain roman as seen in Les Vies des hommes illustres, Paris: Vascosan, 1559, shown in Knight (p. 41)

I myself have done a little work in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but that indicated to me how much more needs to be done. Knight himself admits this is just a start: "Some worthy type designers like Pierre Haultin, Hendrik van den Keere, and Antoine Augereau are missing. But as well as the more famous names of Gutenberg, Granjon, and Bodoni, I have been able to include some lesser-known designers like Erhard Ratdolt, Simon de Colines, Johann Fleischman, and Alexander Phemister."

While to me there seem to be some close calls on who got omitted versus who got in, I think the general reader will enjoy the familiar mixed with the more exotic. The reader may balk at the name Miklós Tótfalusi Kis and be unaware that they have been lôôking at his type and versions of it all their lives.

I am sorry there is such a sadly inevitable bias towards the private press movement at the end of this study. There is certainly enough about William Morris, Cobden-Sanderson and St John Hornby out there in bibliomundo. A page on their cutter Edward Prince could have covered all of them (and freed up two pages). The Ashendene Subiaco type is a joke, or at best a footnote to the Sweynheym & Pannartz page; Eric Gill's Golden Cockerel type would have made a nicer terminus to the work. Otherwise, moving from Fournier to Bodoni is a big leap without including both Bodoni's early types that were imitation Fournier and the truly revolutionary types of Firmin Didot (which were cut by Pierre Wafflard). There is no easily accessible text in English which covers these most important steps forward in type design. William Martin (1757–1830) and Vincent Figgins (1766–1844) would have been solid inclusions and, despite most modern typographers' disdain for the excesses of the Victorian period, it cannot be ignored, but Phemister is the sole representative. (However, he and 26 other nineteenth-century type-cutters are covered in William Loy's book Nineteenth-century American Designers & Engravers of Type [Oak Knoll Press, 2009].)

In compressing info Knight has mixed up the legacy of Caslon: Mrs Elizabeth Caslon did not start the H W Caslon Foundry, that was 30 years later, and I really don't agree with using italic parentheses! For the most part the photos are excellent and give us true insight into the intricacies of these typefaces.

For all of its superficial appearance as a "coffee-table" book on printing types with pretty pictures, Knight's work is a solid piece of scholarship and corrects a lot of misconceptions found in "standard" texts that give a resumé of the development of printing types.
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My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean: Robbie Burns in Philly

by Alastair Johnston

Second (first Edinburgh) edition (1787).

Like many before him, a Scotsman emigrates to the New World. He is a success, prospers, and adapts well to his new home. But as he advances in years he starts to miss his homeland. So he decides, on turning 70, to go home one last time and see his native sod. He telegrams his brothers and gets on the boat that brought him thither many years afore. On Clydebank he gets on the wee puffer to Tannochbrae and heads back into the glens once more. But at the station no one greets him. Then he sees two old guys on a bench. Och, Jamie and Geordie, he says, aa didna ken ye, wi them lang white beards! Aye, says yin, when ye went aff tae Americay, ye tak the razor wi' ye!

                                   
                                     Perhaps it may turn out a Sang;
                                     Perhaps, turn out a Sermon.
                                       (Burns, Epistle to a Young Friend, May 1786)

A new acquisition by the National Library of Scotland sheds interesting light on the way authors' works circulated before publication in the 18th century.

This summer the NLS acquired a collection of newspapers printed in Philadelphia by John Dunlap, containing individual poems by Robert Burns. Dunlap (1747-1812), you may know, was printer to the Continental Congress. He'd been brought to the colonies from county Tyrone, in Ulster (Northern Ireland) by his uncle William as a printer's apprentice. When he turned 18, Dunlap took over the printing business and began publishing a weekly newspaper, The Pennsylvania Packet, or the General Advertiser. Like many colonial publications, its contents reflected the press in Europe, particularly Britain, from whence a lot of material was derived. Thus the Pennsylvania Gazette (which was bought by Benjamin Franklin in October 1729) was padded out with extracts from the Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen. In 1773 Dunlap married Elizabeth Ellison, niece of Franklin's wife. Three years later, a rush job for printing a broadside, brought to him by John Hancock, would put his presswork into the annals of American history. (I have often remarked how American Independence from Britain did not extend to print culture, for not only is the Declaration set in Caslon type, most of the printing in America continued to be cloned from British editions, text and typography.)

His paper was eminently successful and when Dunlap died he was one of the wealthiest men in America, owning large tracts of land. While the survival of old newspapers is not that remarkable, the contents of this group are. They are the first appearances of the poems of Robert Burns in America. Unlike the Lakers (Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge), Burns was immediately popular on the appearance of his first book of poetry. Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock, 1786) was a huge success and Burns would become the best-selling poet of the nineteenth century (followed by Byron, Milton, Pope, and then Bloomfield, whose own rustic character Giles is a complete hick next to the swinging Scotsman we find in Burns' poems and songs.) A review by Henry Mackenzie in The Lounger (no 97, Edinburgh, 9 December 1786), referring rapturously to the "Heaven-taught Ploughman," was picked up by the London Chronicle and brought the Scots bard to public notice.

The 1786 Kilmarnock edition of Burns' poems, set in Caslon type

A second edition of Burns was printed in Edinburgh (with 1600 subscribers) and copies quickly made it to the New World via the ports of Philadelphia and New York. With the peace of 1783 trade as well as immigration resumed. It was common for a bookseller to arrive by boat stocked with the latest books and start business as soon as he disembarked. As Anna Painter said, "Wherever Scotsmen had gone, the poems and fame of Burns followed, and Scotsmen had gone everywhere in the eighteenth century." The continued adoration (and memorization) of Burns' work has also meant the survival of the Lallans dialect.

In Philadelphia two Scots immigrants, Peter Stewart, a printer, and George Hyde, a bookbinder, decided to print the first American edition of Burns. There was no copyright agreement between America and its former government in Britain so piracy was rampant. They had been anticipated by some New Yorkers who were trying to get subscriptions from the St Andrew's Society in that city, but subscribers were slow in coming forward, for those who were determined enough were getting copies of the London third edition fresh off the boat. So it took over a year for the New York edition to get off the ground (today there's a statue of Burns in Central Park).

To test the market Stewart and Hyde placed poems in the Pennsylvania Packet from 24 July 1787 to 14 June 1788, then issued their edition on 7 July 1788. The NLS mentions that Burns' poems clearly had a positive impact on their American readership; the selected poems were chosen to portray him as a sentimental, God-fearing ploughman, a working man at one with nature and sympathetic to the aims of the American colonists in freeing themselves from British control. Among the poems printed in the newspaper are: "The Rigs o' barley," "The Cotter's Saturday night," "To a louse," "To ruin," and "Epistle to a young friend."

I kiss'd her owre and owre again, | Amang the rigs o' barley
(Burns' first appearance in the New World)

Despite its arcane rhymes of "grozet" with "rozet", and "smeddum" with "droddum," "To a Louse" is one of the most magnificent poems ever composed in any language, striding boldly from contempt and arrogance to a transcendent observation on human nature in the last stanza. It still boggles the mind today. The putative publishers didn't need to cock the big guns, like "To a Mouse," leaving them for the discovery of the delighted reader. Two later issues of the paper ran ads for the American edition as a 'neat pocket volume.' It is likely the American edition was printed by Dunlap (who was a more commercial printer than Stewart, who only printed ephemeral jobwork), then the sheets were bound by Hyde.

Frank Amari Jnr, an American rare book dealer, attorney, and member of the Ephemera Society, sold (and partly donated) the collection to the National Library of Scotland where it will be a useful tool for those studying transatlantic commerce in books.

               L--d man, were ye but whyles where I am,
               The gentles ye wad ne'er envy them!
                                  (--Burns, The Twa Dugs, a tale)


Ref: Anna M. Painter "Poems of Burns before 1800", in The Library, 4th ser. 12 (1931-32), pp. 434-456.
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A Checklist Of Goliard Press (London 1965–7)

by Alastair Johnston

Tom Raworth Working Bibliography Part II. 

Tom Raworth by Barry Flanagan (from ACT, Trigram Press, 1973)

If Matrix Press can be considered Raworth's incunabular period, the Renaissance flowering of his career as a printer began when he started collaborating with artist Barry Hall at Goliard Press in 1965. 

For those old enough to remember, the "Summer of Love" was a transformative time. As a teenager in England I divided my non-school time between marching with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, rehearsing with my rock band, protesting the Vietnam War and attending poetry readings. They converged occasionally, as when there were benefit readings in support of striking coal miners or teachers -- big rallies featuring poets (Tony Harrison, Tom Pickard, Brian Patten, Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Barry MacSweeney, Adrian Mitchell, Bob Cobbing, Tony Jackson, et al.) instead of agit-prop rhetoricians. Swinging England was turned on to poetry, and these poets were working class. If they went to college it was art school. If they listened to music it was rock on Radio Luxembourg, late at night. In 1965 the Wholly Communion event at the Royal Albert Hall featured Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti from the USA, and many European poets reading their poetry to a packed house. Christopher Logue, Adrian Mitchell and the Scots novelist Alex Trocchi also read, showing that Britain was producing powerful performance poets. I was most impressed with Mitchell and the Austrian concrete poet Ernst Jandl.

Within a few years the younger generation of British poets had infiltrated the establishment, so regulars on the poetry circuit like Logue, Patten, Pickard and Spike Hawkins stood up alongside Basil Bunting, Hugh MacDiarmid, Stevie Smith, Ted Hughes and William Plomer to read the poetry of Ezra Pound at the gala anniversary of the Poetry Society in 1969. I think it was at the Royal Festival Hall. Pound was too frail to attend but sent a note and then his works were delivered by the superb performers on stage including Bunting, Logue, Smith and Pickard.

More Americans came through Britain to read and some stayed: Jack Hirschman and David Meltzer because they were friends with expatriate printer Asa Benveniste at Trigram Press (established in London in 1965 and publisher of many of the same writers as Raworth, including Hirschman, Heliczer, Hollo, Meltzer and Raworth himself); others like the young Tom Clark to attend university (Raworth recalls, "I think he was a student of Jeremy [Prynne]'s at Cambridge, as Andrew Crozier was. They were at Essex probably doing their postgraduate stuff and almost certainly because of Donald Davie whose intention was to make the Essex literature department more interesting than Cambridge."). Clark stayed to ridicule the establishment of George MacBeth, Edward Lucie Smith, Peter Porter and Ted Hughes (in his 1979 roman à clef, Who is Sylvia?). Anselm Hollo was actively involved in the scene in London, bringing manuscripts to the press. He and Raworth would be joined with John Esam in the Trigram Press book Haiku, 1968.

So Outburst had set in motion a whole trans-Atlantic migration, not only of writing, but of writers. Charles Olson came through: Raworth found it hard to take the endless monologue. Ginsberg and Corso were caught smoking hash on a train to Newcastle and told the guard they were smoking Turkish cigarettes (at the time Turkish cigarettes contained 1% hashish, as I discovered in Istanbul). Through the American publisher of Jargon, Jonathan Williams (who had come to England for a year), Raworth met Barry Hall. The meeting of Raworth and Hall brought the work to a new artistic level.

Announcement for a show of Barry Hall's paintings at the Batman Gallery, San Francisco, 1961

Raworth's partner, Barry Hall (born in Westminster, 1933), was a commercial engraver (having served a 7-year apprenticeship to learn the trade) and an artist. When he died in 1995, Raworth wrote his obituary for The Independent. He had studied at St Martin's School of Art in London, before going to San Francisco in 1961 for a year, where he exhibited at Batman Gallery and met the poets & painters of the San Francisco renaissance (Batman's publicity was printed by Dave Haselwood at Auerhahn Press). He returned to England, and, as Raworth wrote, "we co-founded the Goliard Press in 1964 in a ramshackle stable in West Hampstead, and hand-set, printed and published books by Elaine Feinstein, Charles Olson, Aram Saroyan and others: many for the first time in Britain. Other small presses benefited from our skills: we printed the first edition of Basil Bunting's Briggflatts for Fulcrum, and produced many volumes for Bernard Stone's Turret Books.

"Goliard was so successful that in 1967, through the efforts of Nathaniel Tarn and Tom Maschler, it came under the Jonathan Cape umbrella as Cape Goliard. Hall continued working, producing a list that included Neruda, Ginsberg, Paul Blackburn, J .H. Prynne, Gael Turnbull and Ted Berrigan, until one day, bored, he left the rollers halfway across a page of type, walked out, and went to America.

"For many years he was on the move. Breeding quarter-horses and making movies in New Mexico. Writing scripts in London. Filming Dale Herd's Dreamland Court in Los Angeles. Recovering from a severe illness in Newport, Rhode Island. Making a television film on Kerouac. Working again (briefly) as an engraver in London. Then he visited Africa, fell in love with Kenya, and moved there."

Elsewhere, Raworth wrote about the beginnings of Goliard: "In 1964 I met Barry Hall, one of the only two people I've ever been able to work with, and we decided to start Goliard. We got a larger press, a guillotine, a variety of type and set up in a cobble-floored stable off the Finchley Road. We worked together for a few years, then when Jonathan Cape wanted to get involved, I left."

Goliard Press books, London, 1965-7

Further light was shed on Goliard (and the difficulty of making a living as a small press) in a discussion about British poet Jeff Nuttall, when Raworth recalled, "Val, Barry and Jackie Hall and I ran into Jeff forty years ago at a party (home-grown marijuana, laboratory-made drink, candles and Dylan Thomas records). He asked us if we knew anything about a William Burroughs someone had told him of. We met a few times, he began to do My Own Mag, we were evicted, stayed for a while with the Hollos, then in December 1964 moved to High Barnet (a flat, strangely, in the street where the party had been). Jeff and Jane (and those four Calder-invisible children) lived a few streets away, and as Jeff passed our flat twice a day to and from his teaching job we spent quite a lot of time together. He got involved with Trocchi and the Sigma stuff, Barry and I struggled with Goliard. I wonder if anyone else remembers Priscilla and The Woolies. We saw one another less frequently after I left Goliard and we moved to Colchester: but we stayed in touch then, and through our years in the USA."

When I wrote commenting on the prolific output of Goliard during this time, Raworth replied: "How it mounts up. I'd really forgotten the amount of stuff we did in those basically couple of years before the Cape. I wonder we had time to drink and take drugs."

Goliard Press Checklist

1965 Broadside

Tom Raworth
Weapon Man
15 copies. Light olive green paper printed in black on front of folded sheet.
Notes: the image was reused from the cover of Outburst 2 where it was credited to the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum (It is a reversed image from Hans von Gersdorff, Fieldbook of Wound Surgery, Strasburg, 1519).

TR: The first item ever printed by Goliard was the small broadside Weapon Man, a thing of mine I wrote in the stick...

1966 Broadside
Tom Raworth
Continuation
Illustration by Barry Hall. 15 3/4 x 9 1/8" Cochin type
Handset, printed and published ... in an edition of 150, 25 copies numbered and signed, plus 15 copies printed on handmade Japanese paper.

Books

September 1965

Michael Horovitz
Nude Lines for Larking in Present Night Soho
7 3/4 x 6 1/5" 8 pp bond paper, stapled into flesh-colored (Caucasian) textured card stock. 36' Verona type on cover, four different text types.
Colophon:
Designed and printed by Barry Hall and Tom Raworth
Published in an edition of 160 copies in September 1965
Copyright Goliard Press  10a Fairhazel Gardens  London NW6
Note: (first book of the press).

TR: The first little booklet was Michael Horovitz' "Nude Lines for Larking in Present Night Soho". Nude was from mis-reading his writing and should have been "Rude". As far as I remember I did all the setting and it was all letterpress.

1965
Anselm Hollo
The Claim
10 1/4 x 5 1/8" 8 pages, sewn into plain beige covers with a printed dustjacket on speckled Japanese paper; yellow tissue endpapers.
Set in 12 point Goudy Old Face. Much better typesetting and printing than the preceding work. 150 copies of which 50 signed & numbered. Cover display in 36' Verona type. The image is a reproduction of a medieval woodblock from the Rosarium Philosophorum (1550) repeated 5 times in red.

Note:
 T.R. There was probably some nice japanese paper from time to time..
A.J. yes, cover of the claim by anselm. my copy signed "to Barry & Jacqui from Anselm" with a poem added, $8 thanks to peter [howard]
T.R.:  i think I have a rare unsigned one somewhere

1966 July
Charles Olson
West
9 7/8 x 6 1/2" 18 pp laid paper, sewn into coated paper with glassine frontispiece portrait and Japanese paper overlay, glued-on wrappers of brown Japanese paper. Title in 36' Verona type, text in 12' Caslon with Cochin italic.
Colophon: "This book has been set in Caslon Old | Face and printed by hand on Glastonbury | antique laid paper at the Goliard Press, | 10a Fairhazel Gardens, London NW6 | in July 1966. This edition consists of | 500 copies in japanese Nagaragawa | wrappers and 25 copies hard-bound, | numbered and signed by the author."

Notes: The frontispiece portrait of Red Cloud (supplied by Ken Irby), printed on glassine, has a guard sheet of translucent Japanese paper which seems to have its own "red cloud" in the paper.
Slight notes, with Duncan & Blaser manifestations intercut into scribblings from the Report of the Board of Indian Commissions (1870) etc., as the Big O says in the preface: "So I have here a much larger story than would appear."

TR: Olson bombarded us with letters about West: move this here, move that there, do this, do that -- until we stopped opening the mail, did the book the way we thought, and on publication received an ecstatic telegram of thanks.
(Second printing 1969)

1966
Elaine Feinstein
In a Green Eye
Photographs by Al Vandenberg
9 3/4 x 6 1/2" Cover title in Westminster type, perfectbound in coated wrappers. 36 pp of wove paper. Text in Caslon O. S. with headings in Verona.
500 copies on chromo; 30 numbered & signed.

Note: Today, Feinstein is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature: this was her first book. She began writing poetry influenced by Pound, Williams and the Objectivists, and was one of the first women to attend Cambridge University. Olson wrote her a letter defining "breath prosody" in which he famously addressed her as "Dear Mister Feinstein." Subsequently she wrote numerous poems, novels and five biographies, as well as plays and translations from the Russian. Vandenberg was a successful London photographer.

Not seen: Broadside prospectus, "For the baiting children in my son's school class..." 150 copies, of which 25 numbered and signed. Drawings by Johannes de Cuba. Pale tan paper printed in grey, browns, yellow-green and black.

Christopher Logue
Selections from a Correspondence between an Irishman and a Rat
3 3/4 x 6 1/2" 16 pp Glastonbury paper sewn into tan covers with a green wrapper printed in green and black. Poem set in 30' Placard Condensed (Monotype 1958). Cover drawing of rat & potato (?) by Hall(?)
150 copies*

*most destroyed by Barry Hall after a dispute with Logue. One of the worst situations a publisher can be in is to have a falling-out with the author after the book is printed. This happened famously with Jonathan Williams and Asa Benveniste over Imaginary Postcards at Trigram Press, and with Jack Spicer's circle over his Heads of the Town up to the Aether published by Auerhahn Press.

1966 broadside
Bill Butler
Twenty-four Names of God
large poster, tan paper printed in black and orange. Limitation unknown.



1966 broadside
Ron Padgett
Sky
white cardstock, folded to 9 x 4 1/8". A prose poem. Cochin type with a square of blue tissue paper glued on. 325 copies, of which 25 numbered and signed.

1966 Christmas
Aram Saroyan
Sled Hill Voices: 13 poems
4 7/8 x 6 1/2" Drawings by R. G. Dienst
30 pp wove paper sewn into plain card covers with a Japanese paper wrapper. Set in 24' Cochin italic, printed in multi colors. Imprint in 11' Engravers Roman. Drawings printed on tipped-in colored papers. 450 copies. Note: Minimalist pantheism from the minimalist poet. The author's first book.

1967 January
Tom Raworth
The Relation Ship
Illustrated by Barry Hall.

10 x 6 1/2" Set in Goudy Old Face
60 pp (unpaginated) of Glastonbury laid paper includes 3 illustrations and 3 additional leaves tipped in. (These tip-ins might have been conceived as tissue guards except they come after the images.) The images were offset-printed, then blind-embossed and hand-coloured. 450 hardbound of which 50 signed & numbered, plus 6 specially bound. Cover title printed in gold Westminster type on glassine wrapper.

Note: The major work of the press. Raworth's first book, and winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize from the Poetry Society of London. Second edition, without monoprints, Cape Goliard/ Grossman 1969

1967 February
Tom Clark
The Emperor of the Animals. A play.
6 3/8 x 4 3/4"
16 pp of wove paper sewn into yellow cover stock printed in brown and green with Ultra Bodoni caps. Set in Cochin italic, Goudy Old Face and Westminster (for stage directions). Colophon: 300 copies of which the first 35 are numbered and signed by the author and all other members of the original production, and contain two illustrations of the sets.

Note: This play was first performed privately in London on January 14th, 1967, with the following cast:
Edward -- Edward Dorn
Benedict -- Robert Creeley
Howard -- Charles Olson
Helga -- Panna Grady
Janet -- Helene Dorn
Norma -- Valarie Raworth
Sets & costumes by Barry & Jackie Hall
Music by Tom Raworth
Directed by Tom Clark

Note: Clark doesn't recall whether there were signed copies or not. He adds, "As to the details of production, that remains a secret between me and Tom R."

1967 March
Zoltan Farkas
The Baltimore Poems
7 1/4 x 6 1/4"
20 pp of laid paper with tan Glastonbury laid endpapers, sewn into white card covers with Japanese paper wrappers. Printed cover title. 500 copies of which 35 are signed & numbered. Set in Goudy Old Face. Illustrations by Richard O. Tyler.

Sheet of coated stock bound in with sepia photo of the tomb of Edgar Allan Poe (in Baltimore). Note: Anselm Hollo brought the manuscript to the press.

1967 broadside
Jack Hirschman
Wasn't It Like This?
12 1/2 x 7 1/2" 100 copies printed, 25 numbered & signed. 3 colours. Westminster type. The famous Flammarion engraving (from 1888) used here, was also used by the UFO club and for the spring 1967 benefit for International Times in London, that featured Pink Floyd, Lennon & Ono, Soft Machine and other bands. The event known as the 14-hour Technicolour Dream was held at the Alexandra Palace.

1967
Jack Hirschman
London Seen Directly
4 x 6 1/2" 16 pp sewn into yellow card cover with green Japanese paper wrapper, title printed in red. Text set in large Westminster printed in brown with yellow ornaments on each page. Re-uses Hall's rose from "Continuation" broadside.
150 copies of which 50 signed & numbered.

Note: The design shows the art nouveau influence which was big in the Swinging London/ Carnaby Street era.

1967
Various
"before your very eyes!" (cover title)
12 x 8"
Images lithographed in brown ink, printed on white card stock and stapled. Handset in Cochin and 24' Westminster Old Style.
Price: 7s 6d     $1     5 NF   "Unsolicited manuscripts will be burned without ceremony."

A magazine anthology, larger and more ambitious graphically than Outburst. Back cover reprints Corso's drawing of Nelson's column from Hollo's History. Hall's image of rat & potato overprinted to create abstract glyph with another splatter-like illustration. Contributions from Olson, Aram Saroyan, Hollo, Hirschman, Raworth, Ron Padgett (on his Max Jacob kick), & James Koller. "The pictures are from Rose Birth by William Jahrmarkt." (Billy Jahrmarkt was the proprietor of the Batman Gallery in San Francisco, which had shown Hall's work, and was the key location for the artists of the Beat Generation in North Beach and the Fillmore district. Unfortunately he was a heroin addict.)

(Note: Part III will contain Goliard Press jobwork).
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Tom Raworth Working Bibliography Part I: A Checklist Of Matrix Press (London 1961-4).
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William Blake Meets Batman

by Stephen J. Gertz

Garden of Love by Delphi Basilicato.

 In 2007, Letterpress II students at the Center for Book Arts in New York, under the direction of master printer Barbara Henry, produced Songs, a collaborative artist book in a portfolio of nine loose letterpress and hand-colored folded sheets that reimagined William Blake, excerpting twelve poems from his Songs of Innocence and Experience and illustrating them anew. The edition was limited to thirty-nine copies.

The poems included in this Songs for the modern age are: The Garden of Love; The Fly; A Dream; The Human Abstract; The Laughing Song; The Poison Tree; The Shepherd; The Tyger; The Blossom; The Sick Rose; Infant Joy;  Infant Sorrow. The compositor-printers were Delphi Basilicato, Amy Bronstein, Bonnie McLaughlin, Amber McMillan, Sarah Nicholls, Michelle Raccagni, Rosie Schaap, Louisa Swift, and Barbara Henry. Each sheet was signed by the individual printer.

Title-page.

William Blake's conceptual collection of poetry, Songs of Innocence and Experience, first appeared in 1794, a marriage of Songs of Innocence (1789), comprised of nineteen poems celebrating the human spirit when allowed to be free as in childhood, and Songs of Experience, twenty-six later poems in which he demonstrates what happens to the human spirit when the real world of adults intrudes and shackles us by rules and religious doctrines. He considered these to be the two states of the human soul. He illustrated the collection with his own engravings.

Blake's title page engraving sums it up: Adam & Eve in and out of the Garden of Eden. Blake was besotted by God and the Bible but not by the Church of Endland, nor any religion, for that matter. Influenced by the American and French revolutions, freedom of thought and imagination drove him; to him imagination was the body of God, the basis of human existence. It is unfettered creativity and imagination that bring us close to God, for that is what God is, the font of all creative endeavor. The mystic streaks through his work. He was the forefather of Romanticism.

Blake's original title-page engraving.

The conflict between spiritual freedom and imprisonment by religious dogma remains a constant. In Delphi Basilicato's contribution to Songs, a trio of superheroes, including The Dark Knight, confront a scolding priest with verses adapted from Blake's Garden of Love:

Priest: Thou Shalt Not!!! Thou Shalt Not!!! Thou Shalt Not!!!

Flash: Bloody fuckin' Christ...
           I went to the Garden of Love,
           And saw what I never had seen:
           A chapel was built in the midst
           Where I used to play on the green.

Green Lantern: And the gates of this chapel were shut,
                         And "Thou shalt not" writ over the door;
                          So I turn'd to the garden of love
                          That so many sweet flowers bore;

Batman: And I saw it was filled with graves,
               And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
               And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
               And binding with briars my joys and desires.

To Blake, it was the Church that corrupted the Garden, not Adam and Eve, and the Garden became a graveyard littered with broken spirits. To Dephi Basilicato, in Songs, superheroes - crusading, Christ-like angels, seraphim in capes and tights - are the only thing that stand between us and The Dark Church, saviors against those who would save our souls by crushing them.

In Basilicato's image artists are culture's superheroes, keeping repressive forces in check, the A-Team in battle against the bad guys, and Blake is Charlie, these angels' unseen, anti-Establishment chief, pointing the way toward enlightenment and resolution of the case.

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BLAKE, William. Songs. New York: Center For Book Arts, 2007. No. 12 of 39 copies. Nine folio sheets, each signed by the artist. Loose, as issued, in orange paper portfolio with white paper title label to spine.
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Internal images courtesy of The Kelmscott Bookshop, currently offering this item, with our thanks.

Image of binding courtesy of Center for Book Arts, with our appreciation.

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