A Book Shop Owner As Stuntman

Illustration by Arnold M. Herr ©2016

At the Megalopolis Book Shop, Mickey Tsimmis was all about customer service. No matter how potentially catastrophic the request (i.e. pulling a book from the shelves), Mickey was ready to sacrifice his life to help out. Coolly insouciant (or idiotic), he ignored the peril that was routine while navigating through the thicket that was Megalopolis. Danger was his business and to satisfy a customer no obstacle was too great to overcome. Scaling the shelves was an Olympic event in his jungle jumble of books, where organization was overrated and safety was for sissies.

Illustration from The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer by Arnold M. Herr, "one of the wildest rides since Thompson and Steadman (or perhaps Mr. Toad) took to the highway."

"Screamingly funny" (Bookstore Memories). 

Herr, Arnold M. The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer. Berkeley: Poltroon Press in association with Booktryst, 2016. Octavo. Photo-illustrated wrappers. 136 pp. Illustrations by the author. BUY NOW.

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A Rare & Used Book Shop Owner's Lament

Illustration by Arnold M. Herr ©2016

Poor Mickey Tsimmis, his innocence lost in cruel Hollywood, the burg without mercy, the hamlet of vulgarity, the city without a soul. It's Despairsville, man, a drag and a half. But relief and change you could believe in were routinely found at his Megalopolis Book Shop on Melrose Ave. east of La Brea, west of the moon, south of no north.

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Illustration from The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer by Arnold M. Herr, "one of the wildest rides since Thompson and Steadman (or perhaps Mr. Toad) took to the highway."

Herr, Arnold M. The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer. Berkeley: Poltroon Press in association with Booktryst, 2016. Octavo. Photo-illustrated wrappers. 136 pp. Illustrations by the author. BUY NOW.
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Apologies to Kay Nielsen and Charles Bukowski.
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A Legend in the Hollywood Book Trade

by Stephen J. Gertz

The following appears as the Preface to this just published collaboration of Poltroon Press and Booktryst.

 

 There are legends in the Los Angeles rare and used book trade.

In 1905, Ernest Dawson established L.A.’s first book shop exclusively devoted to rare books. Continued by his equally respected sons, Glen and Muir, the shop remained in business for 105 years. From the 1920s through the 1970s, Jake Zeitlin ran a rare book shop that became a locus for fine printing and local artists and typographers. A Texan by birth, Stanley Rose migrated to Los Angeles in the 1920s and began in the trade by peddling books on a push cart through the writers’ buildings at the movie studios  He opened a shop on Hollywood Blvd. that became a hangout for screenwriters and local and visiting novelists. Rose had a back room that after the shop closed in the evenings became an “art studies” salon that concentrated on studying the nude female form, comely models provided for the students’ edification and attention to detail. Rose was also notorious for selling clandestine erotica, and published a few one-handers written by starving screenwriters.  In the early 1960s, the Weinstein brothers established a junk store in Compton, CA that sold used books in addition to dross. Ultimately focusing exclusively on books, they developed their business into the most successful rare book firm in the world with final headquarters in a former mortuary to the stars in West Hollywood.

And then there was the late Eli Goodman (1925-2016) of Cosmopolitan Book Shop on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. Established in 1958, Cosmopolitan was Hollywood’s oldest used bookstore. A luminary in the shade of the Los Angeles rare book trade, Eli Goodman was a legend based strictly on eccentric character. And he was a character, one too singularly colorful to have been invented; a novelist could not have dreamed-up the man.

Refusing to ever retire, he never did. His final promotion on the Cosmopolitan website was a calculated plea for mercy and desperate tug on the heartstrings: “I’M 91 YEARS OLD – PLEASE HELP ME!  TAKE MY WONDERFUL BOOKS FOR PENNIES ON THE DOLLAR!”

If Eli’s long-time assistant, amanuensis, and literary voice, Arnold Herr, is not exactly James Boswell, Eli Goodman will never be confused with Samuel Johnson - except for their pure love of books. Eli Goodman - within these pages “Mickey Tsimmis” - was passionate about them.

Parts of this book were originally published in the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) newsletter and later episodes on my blog-site for rare books, Booktryst.com. They are collected here, as they were on Booktryst, in serial form but with additional material not found in the online edition [now offline]. The episodes are based on journal entries made by Mr. Herr over many years. Some end with a cliff-hanger. The dangler could be Eli or Arnold hanging onto a steep, flimsy bookshelf for dear life - or somebody trying to hang onto their sanity.

In the 19th century, color-plate books were often “heightened with gum arabic” (as described in bookseller catalogues) to intensify the colors and provide a light sheen. It’s fair to say that the stories herein have been heightened. But it would be misleading to characterize them as tall-tales. They are not. But Mr. Herr was clearly wearing lifts in his shoes while writing them down.

I could go on about Eli Goodman, who I only knew from experience, and Arnold Herr, who has been a friend for many years. But there’s a guy wedged in a truck tire rolling down the street in my direction frantically waving his arms and shouting, “Get out of the way!” And so, hello, I must be going.

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HERR, Arnold M. The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer. Berkeley: Poltroon Press in association with Booktryst, 2016. Octavo. Photo-illustrated wrappers. 136 pp. Cover photo by Shelly Vogel. BUY NOW. 

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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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A Checklist of Goliard Press Jobwork (London 1965-7)

by Alastair Johnston  

Tom Raworth Working Bibliography part III

               porque todo: ropaje, piel, vasijas,

               palabras, vino, panes,

               se fué, cayó a la tierra

                                -- Pablo Neruda, Alturas de Macchu Picchu (1945)

             (for everything: clothes, skin, cups,
                words, wine, bread,
                has disappeared, fallen to earth)

While running Matrix Press, Tom Raworth had done bits of job-printing. His biggest commission was a catalogue with full-colour cover for an exhibition of paintings by Michael Kidner at the Grabowski Gallery. Though Raworth was tired working full time and typesetting and printing at night, Barry Hall interested him in the idea of collaborating in a new press venture. In 1965, they started Goliard Press in a stable behind Finchley Road tube station, leveling the cobbled floor with planks for the equipment to stand on. It was still an evening-and-weekend operation as both were working full-time, but Hall's job as an engraver meant he could put through blocks for their own projects, while Raworth's correspondents from Outburst magazine meant there was no shortage of material to print and publish.

Cover for LOVE LOVE LOVE (Corgi Books, 1967) Artist unknown

The small press scene in London was friendly and fluid with the three main presses, Trigram, Fulcrum and Goliard collaborating frequently. Rathna Ramanathan* characterizes the others thus: "Trigram Press (1965 to 1980) was founded by American poet Asa Benveniste and his English wife Penelope (Pip). Trigram books were notable amongst little presses for the quality of their design and production. A number of Trigram books were printed letterpress or silk-screen by Benveniste and Pip's son Paul Vaughan. Benveniste also designed and printed for other little presses. Louis Zukofsky, Gavin Ewart, and Tom Raworth are some of the poets whose work was published by Trigram Press."

"Fulcrum Press (1965 to 1974) was run by the Rhodesian poet Stuart Montgomery and his wife Deirdre. Fulcrum Press was one of the best known little presses of the period and is recognized for publishing the works of Modernist poets, among them Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, Allen Ginsberg and Roy Fisher."

The Fulcrum Press of Stuart & Deirdre Montgomery was not a printer however, and had most of their printing done by Villiers Press, which was serviceable though typographically uninspired (like the City Lights books they also printed). Montgomery's interest was in marketing so he wanted his books to conform to the (dull) appearance of other trade books, and he also issued special limited edition signed hardbacks on tinted Glastonbury laid paper to lure the collector market. However, Montgomery frequently had exceptional cover art from Tom Phillips, Barnett Newman, Patrick Caulfield, Ian Dury, Ron Kitaj or Richard Hamilton. He also commissioned work from the other small presses in town. Fulcrum's finest work is Basil Bunting's Loquitur (1965), designed by Richard Hamilton and printed at the Eden & Finsbury Press.

A major difference between Fulcrum and Goliard books is the labour involved. Goliard's books were all hand-set whereas Villiers used Intertype to set the books of Fulcrum, meaning longer works, like Gary Snyder's 164-page Regarding Wave (1972), could be typeset relatively quickly. The three vital small presses were joined by Ferry Press whose books were published by Andrew Crozier. He was a Cambridge student who contacted Val and Tom for information on American poetry. Raworth remembers him as "a dry, intelligent man." He started with Thread by Fielding Dawson in 1964. That year Crozier went to SUNY/ Buffalo on a Fulbright Scholarship and became a student of Olson.

Though they were selling out 2-400 copies of their books, Goliard was kept afloat by commissions from other publishers, most significantly Bernard Stone who ran the crowded Turret Bookshop at number 1, Kensington Church Walk, not far from Biba, the iconic fashion shop. Stone was an influential figure in the English small press scene, serving wine in his bookshop on Saturday afternoons to assembled poets and authors. He published 20 graphically exciting poetry posters with Christopher Logue, started Steam Press with Ralph Steadman, and published the poetry he loved under the Turret Books imprint. As Raworth told me, "Poor old Bernard did use us, and pay on time..."

Edward Lucie-Smith, A Game of French and English, Turret Books, 1966

Hall & Raworth probably groaned at the MacBeth and Lucie-Smith manuscripts, but the commissions were important and show them being adventurous with materials. Though they never achieved the typographic acme of Asa Benveniste & Paul Vaughan at Trigram Press, their design for Edward Lucie-Smith's Game of French and English and Robin Fedden's Personal Landscape is excellent, while their handsomest productions for Stone, Zukofsky's Iyyob and Ted Hughes' Burning of the Brothel, mirror their own work at Goliard, so there was continuity with their vision and the jobs they took on.

At the point when Jonathan Cape came on board at Goliard in 1967, Raworth left, but he mentions that many manuscripts had piled up and the later Cape-Goliard publications of Paul Blackburn, Jeremy Prynne, Michael McClure, John Wieners and Charles Olson's Maximus Poems were in process. Raworth says, "We'd already been approached by George Rapp (the aluminium millionaire who later published as Rapp & Carroll) who offered to put money into the press; but we'd knocked him back, thinking that he'd want to publish boring stuff." Raworth recalled the occasion of his briefly famous remark when Rapp came by and asked how he "could help the Press and Poetry". "Give us the money and fuck off" was Raworth's reply. He had the same feeling about Jonathan Cape, that "no one gives money without wanting to influence the product, and I certainly wasn't interested in publishing manuscripts selected by committee."

The committee referred to was Tom Maschler, editor of Jonathan Cape, and one of his authors, Nathaniel Tarn. Born in Paris in 1928, Tarn trained as an anthropologist before turning to literature. His first book Old Savage, Young City was published by Jonathan Cape in 1964, for whom he also translated the widely acclaimed poem of Pablo Neruda, The Heights of Macchu Picchu. In 1967 he joined Cape as an editor and suggested they work with a small press. Among the options, Goliard was chosen and became Cape Goliard bringing more money and work to Barry Hall and a prestigious "loss-leader" to Jonathan Cape who could venture to print works by relative unknowns among their list, adding the New American voices of Olson, Robert Duncan, Zukofsky, their followers, and others. After Raworth left, Hall was joined by Chris Breyer.

While a student at King's College, Cambridge, Tarn had felt British poetry was still stuck on Rupert Brooke. At Cape he was able to bring not only anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss) but poetry in translation from Europe and Latin-America to the press, and this was a major service to the poetry-buying public, while at the same time Trigram & Fulcrum were continuing to promote the Transatlantic voices of Duncan, Zukofsky, Snyder, Ed Dorn, Larry Eigner, Lorine Niedecker and others to British readers.

As I said in Part II, Britain was not devoid of good poets: Roy Fisher, Basil Bunting, Philip Larkin and Hugh McDiarmid, among others, were important and influential writers. Penguin Modern Poets was launched in 1962 with the usual suspects but by 1966 they devoted a volume to the Mersey Sound of Adrian Henri, Roger McGough & Brian Patten and another to the Beat trio of Corso, Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg. 1966 was a great year for mass-market poetry in Britain with Penguin continuing its Modern European Poets series with Four Greek Poets (including Cavafy), Noboyuki Yuasa's translation of Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North, and the landmark Peter Whigham translation of Catullus, dedicated to the memory of William Carlos Williams. The emergent voices in Britain were being heard in live readings organized in Edinburgh, Newcastle, Merseyside and London by Alan Jackson, Tom Pickard, Pete Brown, Mike Horovitz and others. These young voices were proclaimed in a popular paperback book with psychedelic cover art, Love Love Love: The New Love Poetry (edited by Pete Roche, Corgi Books, 1967), published at 5 shillings: the average age of the poets involved was 25. But the Don Allen anthology, The New American Poetry (Grove Press, 1960), gained momentum and created interest in the concurrent voices from the USA. For Cape, Goliard was a solid conduit to the new writing because of the personal connections established by Raworth and Hall over the preceding five years.

Tom Maschler, Cape's editor-in-chief mainly dealt with Barry Hall, but "All of us were initiators and mediators," said Tarn. "I remember having to argue Cape's viewpoint with Barry at times and vice versa: unlike an independent little press, we all had to compromise on occasions. Sometimes Barry & I felt a little hard done by: in cases, for instance, where Cape would decide to take someone like Duncan for the general list rather than the Cape Goliard list. But, by and large, there was a great deal of latitude. Barry, fascinated by design, often performed miracles of book production within (or without!) the official budget. Editorial process was informal: things would come in from Barry's and my contacts and discussion would begin. Commissioning was in Cape's hands.

Part of Cape-Goliard's prolific output: The Adventures of Mr & Mrs Jim & Ron by Ron Padgett & Jim Dine (1970), Maya by Anselm Hollo (1970), J.H. Prynne Kitchen Poems (1968), Our Word, Guerilla Poems from Latin America translated by Ed Dorn & Gordon Brotherston (1968), Out Loud by Adrian Mitchell (1968), Wales: A Visitation by Allen Ginsberg (1968), & In the Dark Move Slowly by Tuomas Anhava, translated by Anselm Hollo (1969)

"The intention at Cape-Goliard was to publish avant-garde poets, mainly American, but with quite a few British and foreign, in the spirit of the little press with the full battery of typographic and design innovation which Barry could bring to the work. The products were to be sold as normal books, normally priced, though some de luxe versions were usually produced."

This arrangement continued until one day, fed up with Cape, Hall inked the press, ran the rollers halfway across a forme of type and walked out. (Oddly, as an eccentric badge of his role, Tarn would wear a cape in those days!) Hall did a few books under the Goliard imprint in New Mexico and in 1974 revived Goliard in London to print Ace, by Tom Raworth (but most of the edition was destroyed in a freak flood).

While this post is not about Cape Goliard's books it is important to distinguish Raworth and Hall's role in creating the market for new poetry in England and also in setting in motion the works of McClure, Olson, Ginsberg, Prynne and others that were published by Cape Goliard. Tarn has often spoken as if he was the instigator of these works, rather than the inheritor and benefactor of Raworth's groundwork. But this is nothing new in the small press world. A parallel instance is the frequent assertion of Andrew Hoyem of Arion Press in San Francisco that he came to town determined to bring into print the unknown talents of John Wieners, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, Lew Welch and the other poets who were published by Auerhahn. The truth is ALL of these works were printed by Dave Haselwood at Auerhahn before Hoyem came to San Francisco and became involved in the press (see, e.g., "The Good Book in Good Hands," by Carl Nolte, San Francisco Chronicle, December 27, 1998, or "Cast Out" by Ken Garcia, where again Hoyem states that he printed the first books of Burroughs and Whalen.)

Raworth says, "Certainly the Olson contact was mine (after all we'd already done West) ... and certainly the Prynne was in the works. The Blackburn too. The McClure came through Barry's SF connections I imagine. And we certainly had personal contacts with Berrigan, Ginsberg and Dine dating from well before the 'deal'. I can't really say that I'm bitter... I couldn't have stood working under those conditions, having to have 'meetings' with arseholes to 'decide'. I thought Tarn's Cape Editions series was excellent, so I had nothing personal against him. I didn't like how, in that Zamir piece,* the implication was that everything started with Cape Goliard, rather than with Goliard. But the important thing is that in London a few people and three or four presses (if one includes Ferry for example), starting from scratch, produced a lot of interesting and generally good-looking books in a very few years and made visible a very different world of poetry."

 

JOBWORK

Fulcrum Press

1965
Basil Bunting
Briggflatts
12 3/4 x 9 3/4", 30 pp laid paper; Hardback bound in black buckram, green laid paper dustwrapper printed in 72' Caslon with Celtic animal image printed in red.
Note: The poem, finished in May 1965, marked Bunting's triumphal return to poetry after years of obscurity as financial editor for a Newcastle newspaper. The first printing of Briggflatts was done by Hall & Raworth on Trigram's larger Glockner flat-bed cylinder press: so it was a three-way collaboration between the key small presses in London.
Colophon: This first edition is limited to 500 copies of which 100 are specially bound in cloth and 26 specially bound lettered A through Z are signed by the author. The text has been hand set in 14 pt. Caslon Old Face and printed at the Goliard Press London. We thank Barry Hall and Nick Strausfeld for the artwork, Tom Pickard and Gael Turnbull for their help and Poetry (Chicago) for their co-operation. This book has been designed by Stuart Montgomery.

The book has some awful half-uncial hand-lettering (by Strausfeld?) and clip art from Insular manuscripts printed as borders in black and red. The inspiration for these was probably Bunting's
   "punctuate a text whose initial,
     lost in Lindisfarne plaited lines
     stands for discarded love."
There are also Lombardic initials printed in red, with an upside-down C used as a D.

1965 broadside
Basil Bunting
Ode II/2
for Fulcrum Press, made as a Christmas card. Single sheet folded to make six panels.

1967

Ian Hamilton Finlay
Canal Games
Fulcrum Press
9 x 4". Set in 30 pt Placard Condensed caps, printed in multi-colours on 6 heavy cardboard leaves which have been trisected horizontally and spiral bound (in a red plastic comb binding), to form 18 cards which may be turned at random. 8 pp including titlepage and colophon: "This first edition of 1000 copies has been designed & printed by the Goliard Press, London. Fifty copies have been signed by the author & numbered."

Characteristically playful work from the Scots concrete poet and gardener.

Trigram Press

George Andrews, Burning Joy (Trigram Press, 1967)

1966
George Andrews
Burning Joy
9 3/4 x 6 3/8", 40 pp., wove paper, sewn and glued into coated card covers. 550 numbered copies, 1 to 50 signed by the author. Cover painting by Barry Hall, back cover photo by Hans Bruggeman. 15s $2.50 Set in 12' Monotype Centaur. Display in Cochin, cover title in Engravers Roman.
Note: As Benveniste was not a practicing printer when he started Trigram, and his son-in-law Paul was a silkscreen printer with only 6 months experience in letterpress, it's natural they would job out some early titles.

Ferry Press

Steve Jonas
Music Master
Illustrated by Barry Hall
Ferry Press 1966
Three panel folder with Hall's illustration, and Jonas' poem (a fold-out sheet) tipped-in. The edition was limited to 33 copies, each numbered and signed by Jonas and Hall.

Steve Jonas
Transmutations: Poems
Ferry Press 1966
Introduction by John Wieners. Drawing by Basil King.
9 3/4 x 7 1/2" 64 pp (unpaginated) wove paper, sewn and glued into plain pink wrappers, with white chromo dust jacket. Basil King cover image in red; set in 10' Perpetua, cover display in 36' Verona.

1966
Lawrence Clark Powell
Two tributes by Henry Miller
A souvenir of a visit by Lawrence Clark Powell to the College of Librarianship, Wales. 22 November 1966.
100 copies, 3 pp, folded to 10 x 6 1/2" Titlepage in green ink with Hall's rose image printed in red; inside text all printed in red ink. Colophon: "Printed in an edition of 100 by the Goliard Press, London, for The College of Librarianship, Wales.
 Handset in Cochin type, and printed on Glastonbury antique-laid paper.
 Rose drawn by Barry Hall." Right side of fold has two quotes from Henry Miller from Preface to The Air-conditioned Nightmare, 1945, and
 Preface to The Books in my Life, 1951. "No request of any sort, in fact, has he ever turned down." [Info from Kim C Mattheussens] Only institutional copy at UCLA.

Turret Books

Louis Zukofsky, IYYOB, Turret Books, 1965

1965
Louis Zukofsky
IYYOB
4 x 6", 16 pp. Printed on rag paper, and sewn into wraps, in a printed rice-paper dust jacket in large Hebrew in yellow, and Westminster. Text in Cochin type. The lace paper endpaper has acidified, causing discoloration of the neighbouring sheets.
AJ: I found a copy of IYYOB, is it Hebrew as heard?
TR: Original Word: אּיּוֹב
Transliteration: Iyyob
Phonetic Spelling: (ee-yobe')
Short Definition: Job...
I guess that's it... as in "Get an iyyob!"

1965
Edward Lucie-Smith
Fir Tree Song
11 1/4 x 9 1/2", sides folded into flaps to make doors; shaped poem in green and red Caslon type; 250 copies of which 75 numbered & signed; cover title printed vertically in Westminster type

1965
Edward Lucie-Smith
Three Experiments
11 1/2 x 5 1/2" trifold on tan card stock. Cover art in black and red (repeated inside in white). Text in Caslon & Arrighi italic printed in red, cover in Westminster. 80 copies, numbered & signed.

Edward Lucie-Smith, A Game of French and English, Turret Books, 1965

1965
Edward Lucie-Smith
A Game of French and English
8 x 5 5/8" 16 pp., stapled into french-folded wrappers, with a printed tissue dustwrapper, printed in red and blue in 60' Fry's Baskerville type. Text in 12' Cochin, 100 signed & numbered copies.

Dom Moraes, Beldam Etcetera, Turret Books, 1966

March 1966
Dom Moraes
Beldam Etcetera
8 7/8 x 5 3/8" 24 pp. of Glastonbury laid sewn into tan card wraps, with a printed duplex dust jacket. 100 signed & numbered copies, Goudy type. Title-page is printed on Japanese paper with a line-block facsimile of the manuscript in yellow and title display in turquoise.

1966
Christopher Logue
In May
broadside, yellow paper (not seen)

Robin Fedden, Personal Landscape, Turret Books, 1966

June 1966
Robin Fedden
Personal Landscape
5 1/2 x 6 1/2" 22 pages Glastonbury laid paper sewn into plain card wraps, with a printed yellow dust jacket. 1000 copies, of which 50 are cloth-bound (in burgundy cloth, with dust jacket). Prose memoir of Lawrence Durrell with a photograph by John Waller bound in. Goudy Old Face with Cochin italic display.

Ted Hughes, The Burning of the Brothel, Turret Books, 1966

October 1966

Ted Hughes
The Burning of the Brothel
11 1/4 x 9" 16 pp. cream-coloured Glastonbury paper, 12' Caslon type. Title in 48' Perpetua printed on a leaf of Japanese paper with lumps of bark (a sure way to destroy your type!). Illustrated with found medieval woodcuts, printed in colours. Sewn and covered with a printed blue wrapper. 300 copies of which 75 numbered and signed. (Variant: less than ten copies were issued in red wrappers before they were rejected in favour of blue.) Sagar & Tabor A9.

Edward Lucie-Smith, Gallipoli, Turret Books, 1966

December 1966
Edward Lucie-Smith
Gallipoli
13 x 6 1/8" broadside in green Cochin type on Glastonbury paper, in wrapper. 300 copies, of which 100 numbered & signed. Folded in thirds, with printed label on front of wrapper. My copy (shown) designated "1 of 3 quality Goliard Press proofs" and inscribed to (American collector) Joseph Gold from the author. (One of four or more Christmas cards issued by Turret Books.)

February 1967
Turret Poets Read
11 x 14 3/4" folded in thirds. Offset on cardstock; programme for reading at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts), 17 Dover Street. With contributions from Kevin Crossley-Holland, Christopher Logue, Jeff Nuttall, George MacBeth, Edward Lucie-Smith, and stills from "Juicy Movie," a film by Barry Hall & Tom Raworth. 400 copies issued as invitation/programmes for the event, with 100 more numbered and signed.

George MacBeth, The Screens, Turret Books, 1967

February 1967
George MacBeth
The Screens
10 x 7 3/4" 200 copies of which 100 numbered and signed. 6 sheets of Canson cover, each a different colour, printed with a poem, then folded to make "doors" in the front with an image printed on the left side. Housed in a sheet of heavy white etching paper, printed, embossed & scored. (Poems inspired by Chinese calligraphy)

Edward Lucie-Smith, Heureux Qui, comme Ulysse, Turret Books, 1966

December 1967
Edward Lucie-Smith
'Heureux Qui, Comme Ulysse...'
8 1/4 x 6" 500 copies, 100 numbered & signed. Three-colour broadside on Glastonbury cream laid paper, tipped into yellow cardstock folder with what appears to be a Flaxman drawing of Greek sculpture on the cover. Caslon type with Cochin italic. Display in 24' Recherché caps in red and green.

***

Note: Anselm Hollo's The Man in the Treetop Hat, published by Turret, was printed by Hall & Breyer in June 1968. Michael McClure's broadside, "Childhood memories are like the smallness of Keats' words..." also appeared in 1968. Other significant Turret publications were Jonathan Williams' The Lucidities, with drawings by John Furnival (Turret, 1967), Henry Miller & Alfred Perles' What are You Going to Do about Alf? (Turret, 1971), Lucie-Smith's A Garland from the Greek (Christmas, 1971), and Beasthood by Bryn Griffiths, with photographs by Pip Benveniste (Turret, 1972), which were all printed at Trigram Press.

Refs: Rathna Ramanathan, "English little presses, book design and production. A Study of five London publishers, 1945-1979," Doctoral dissertation, University of Reading, Dept of Typography & Graphic Communication, October 2006.

Shamoon Zamir: "Bringing the World to Little England: Cape Editions, Cape Goliard and Poetry in the Sixties. An Interview with Nathaniel Tarn. With an afterword by Tom Raworth," in E. S. Shaffer, ed., in "Literary Devolution." Comparative Criticism, vol 19, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 263-286,

[Joe McCann] "Bernard Stone's Books," Maggs Bros Ltd Catalogue 1456, with a foreword by Barry Miles, London, 2012
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Tom Raworth Working Bibliography Part II. A Checklist of the Goliard Press (1965-7).

Tom Raworth Working Bibliography Part I: A Checklist Of Matrix Press (London 1961-4). 
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A Checklist of Matrix Press (London 1961-4)

by Alastair Johnston

Tom Raworth Printing Bibliography Part I
 

Two hundred years ago when people were reading Shenstone, Bloomfield, Cowper and Collins (I am sure you know their works by heart), Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads to great public indifference.

Tom Raworth is known (in literary circles) as the pre-eminent English poet writing today. If you've never heard of him, that is the fate of artists who are ahead of their time. Raworth and his wife Valarie live on the south coast of England. He writes and publishes his work from small presses and sometimes slightly larger presses put out compilations of his writing (Collected Poems, Carcanet Press, 2003). He has also written a prose work, Serial Biography (Fulcrum Press, 1969), and recorded an LP of his reading, Little Trace Remains of Emmett Miller (Stream Records, 1970). Carcanet has also issued CDs of two of his works: Ace (1974) and Writing (1982).

The purpose of this post is to document his early work as a printer and publisher, a little-known aspect of his career, but central to his own interests as an editor and author.

Raworth is of Irish descent (his middle name is Moore and Thomas Moore is one of Ireland's most beloved lyric poets), but he grew up in London and is every bit a Londoner. As a printer too he can claim a pedigree. There was a Ruth Raworth who printed Milton's poems. The widow of John Raworth, she printed and published in Paul's Wharf, in the Parish of St Bennet, London from 1643 until 1655, then remarried Thomas Newcomb. John Raworth and his father Robert Raworth were also printers and members of the Stationers' Company in the early seventeenth century. 

Tom Raworth started Matrix Press in 1961. His first book was a tiny edition of poems by Pete Brown. He then issued three numbers of a magazine called Outburst. One, in collaboration with the Finnish poet Anselm Hollo and the American Gregory Corso was Outburst: The Minicab War, a humorous salvo in the class war. (The British satirical magazine Private Eye was launched in 1961.) Outburst became part of a network of avant-garde writers and aired the trans-Atlantic voices of Creeley, Dorn, Levertov, Fee Dawson, and Olson for the first time in Britain.

In an interview with Andy Spragg, Raworth explained his reason for starting his own press:


TR: I was following threads of people I liked in the Allen anthology [The New American Poetry, edited by Don Allen, Grove Press, 1960] ... Dorn, O'Hara, Creeley, Ginsberg and so on ... hard to do then in London (though Better Books and Zwemmers in Charing Cross Road were occasional sources) and I got used to having to write to the US for books. It crossed my mind that if I liked this stuff there might be a few others who would too. Around then, late 1959 early 1960, my father-in-law gave us a delayed wedding present of £100. I can't remember how I'd got interested in letterpress printing: it might be genetic ... years later I discovered my father had wanted to be a printer, and that an ancestor, Ruth Raworth, had printed one of Milton's early books in the 17th C. Anyway, I got a small Adana press first and then a larger treadle press. Offset printing was slowly taking over and letterpress equipment and type was not too expensive then. By late 1960/early 1961 I was in correspondence with Dorn, Creeley and others in the US and had met Anselm Hollo, Michael Horovitz, Pete Brown and others here. I printed the first small booklet (a couple of tiny poems by Pete Brown) on the Adana. I was working then in the Euston Road, at Burroughs Wellcome, the manufacturing pharmacists, and a photographer friend there, Steve Fletcher, had a brother who was an engraver and shared a workshop just off Oxford Street with a letterpress printer. They let me move the treadle press there so they could use it for small jobs and in return I could have access whenever I wanted. I'd met, and become good friends with, David Ball and Piero Heliczer (also a letterpress printer with his Dead Language in Paris). So I did small books of Dorn, Ball and Heliczer. And two and a half issues of the magazine Outburst. I had to set two pages at a time (only enough type for that) on the floor at night after work, carry it into town the next day, print the pages on the press with whatever colour ink was in use, go home, sort the type back into the case and start again.

BOOKS

1961

The first book of the press was Pete Brown Sample Pack. According to Raworth about 6 copies were printed. The poems were collected in Let Em Roll Kafka, Brown's book from Fulcrum Press (London, 1969). Best-known today as the lyricist for the rock band Cream, Pete Brown was Britain's first performance poet who earned his living giving readings. He was the first reader at the Morden Tower in Newcastle, one of the most important poetry venues in England in the 60s. "When John Lennon was still in art college Pete was turning on Liverpool with his synthesis of Beat poetry, Bop jazz, and British humour."-- Stuart Montgomery

1961
Outburst 1 

"published in the basement of 167 Amhurst Road * London E 8" 2s 6d
8 x 5", 52 pp, plus wrappers, stapled. Handset by Raworth in Gill Sans, Perpetua, Times Bold, Ultra Bodoni. Printed by Richard Moore and Sons. Cover photo (& 2 more inside) by Steve Fletcher.
Contributors include Anselm Hollo, Tram Combs, Robert Creeley, Fielding Dawson, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Christopher Logue, Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, Michael Horovitz, Piero Heliczer, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Pete Brown, Gregory Corso, "Six Poems of Tu Fu" by Chao Tze-Chiang, et al. The advertisements for other little magazines, like Migrant, Yugen and New Departures, show how closely networked the avant-garde was in the 1960s. Gael Turnbull (1928-2004) was a key figure in the literary small press movement. A Scottish doctor he started Migrant Press in 1957 and continued operating it (with a mimeograph machine) after he moved to Ventura, California. He published many of the same poets as Raworth, including Dorn, Hollo and Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose The Dancers Inherit the Party is reviewed in this issue of Outburst. My copy has a blown-in newsprint ad for The Outsider published by Loujon Press in New Orleans.

Gregory Corso, Anselm Hollo, Tom Raworth
THE MINICAB WAR: the gotla world -- interview with minicab driver and cabbie
16 pp., unpaginated. 8.25 x 5".
Wrappers (white or blue wrappers). Staple bound, each page in a different color of ink.
Photo: Steve Fletcher. "This issue was done with the hope that it might give a benevolent lift to the satirists of the Establishment, who want very much to destroy a possibly REAL revolution by making entertainment of it, and England's future darker -- The Minicab War is the Synthesis of Class War."
Cover title: OUTBURST: THE MINICAB WAR | ELIOT BETJEMAN MACMILLAN | BARKER RUSSELL BORMANN | MINICAB DRIVER & CABBIE GOTLA
Signed: de la rue sykes o'moore

Notes: In June 1961 Michael Gotla of Welbeck launched a fleet of 400 minicabs on the streets of London, that carried advertising and undercut the well-established black cabs. Soon things turned nasty with hundreds of bogus phone calls to the minicab companies ordering cabs, black taxis hemming in the smaller vehicles, even vandalism as the situation escalated. In an editorial in August, under the headline “What the Public Wants,” The Times wrote: “It is fairly obvious that for many people in London finding a taxi has become too chancy and paying for it too stiff.” Minicab War contains spurious interviews with T. S. Eliot, John Betjeman, (Prime Minister) Harold MacMillan, George Barker, Bertrand Russell, Martin Bormann, & various cabbies. The perpetrators were Tom Raworth (O'Moore), Gregory Corso (De la Rue) & Anselm Hollo (Sykes). Martin Bormann was Hitler's personal secretary. It was believed he had escaped Germany after the War and fled to South America so he remained alive in British popular culture, resurfacing on the beach in Brazil with Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs in the Sex Pistols' movie The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir: Julian Temple, 1980).

   It's hard to date this undated pamphlet from 60 years ago. A rare book dealer described it as the first work of the press. Raworth thought it was a sort of Outburst 2 and a half, but the current of events suggests the end of 1961 rather than 1963. Also Corso was in London then, as Raworth recalls: "As I remember it, Allen and Gregory were in London on their way from Tangier. I remember that because they asked me if I could get a Minox film developed privately for them, which I did via Steve Fletcher and the Wellcome Foundation photo lab... The film was those naked images of them all in Tangier which Allen thought would cause a scandal if Boots Photos did the job. I have somewhere a clear memory and a photo of Gregory outside our basement flat in Amhurst Road, Hackney....  And we were well out of there by 1965. So it is quite possible the 1961 date is accurate though it certainly was after Outburst 1.  Maybe winter 1961 as Peter Cook's The Establishment club opened in October that year and is referenced in the text.

 "I remember in one of those 10,000 word biographies for Gale Research I did mine by addresses lived at, so there are some parameters there. For Minicab War I remember Anselm Gregory and myself sitting around in Anselm and Josie's flat in Cornwall Gardens, which was also where we made some reel to reel tapes of poems and distorted music. Those are decomposing somewhere in our stored stuff."

1963

Outburst 2 
8 x 5", unpaginated, 48 pp, plus wrappers, stapled. Some pages printed in colored ink.

Contributors include Douglas Woolf "Notes for an Autobituary," Paul Blackburn "Ritual IV," Leroi Jones (2 Poems), Fielding Dawson, Allen Ginsberg "To an Old Poet in Peru," Gregory Corso "Moroccan Writings," Larry Eigner (2 poems), Ruth Weiss (2 poems), Ed Dorn, David Meltzer "Heroes," Alan Sillitoe, Carol Bergé, Piero Heliczer, poems of Klee & Pentti Saarikoski translated by Anselm Hollo, "Irregular Ode" by Philip Whalen, "Four Poems of Tu Fu" by Chao Tze-Chiang et al. Artwork by Barry Hall, and photos by Irving Penn & Edward Steichen. Also contains 4 pp of book reviews and pointed commentary by Anselm Hollo.

1963
Piero Heliczer
& I DREAMT I SHOT ARROWS IN MY AMAZON BRA


Brighton: Dead Language & London: Matrix Press


11 x 4.5", 20 pp. Second edition, stapled illustrated wrappers, cover photo by Ph Mechanicus, Amsterdam. The image is reused from the last page of Outburst 2. 2 shillings 6 pence or 50 cents.

Notes: & I DREAMT I SHOT ARROWS IN MY AMAZON BRA is "a poem in eleven takes". "An earlier edition was dittoed by Anselm Hollo... My earlier inspiration little frogs and clay dams in the sound of leaves theres no need to worry about fulfilling a sign as signs necessarily fulfull themselves just as every thing has a pot dimension ie that emittor sends pot signals to pot man it is not necessary to the manifestation whether the emittor is under the influence".-- Author

  "Piero was living with us; he and I printed in on my treadle press which was off Oxford Street in Richard Moore's print-shop..." --TR

Spread from Piero Heliczer's & I Dreamt I Shot Arrows in my Amazon Bra

   Ambitious design using the gutter as a focal point. Each page has a black bar printed in the gutter which then continues across the fold. Large condensed Gill Sans headers make striking compositions. The text is in Perpetua with Times Bold. One leaf is printed on lavender paper.

1963
Anselm Hollo
History
24 pp., 6 1/4 x 5 1/4"; stapled in card cover, in yellow printed wraps, with images on yellow paper bound in. Set in Linotype Times, printed on Brookleigh Bond wove paper; price 3 shillings. Colophon:
This book has been set in Times Roman type. The two drawings are by Ken Lansdowne. Nelson is by Gregory Corso. A photograph of the cover illustration was supplied by Steve Fletcher.
All blocks were made by Barry Hall. 350 copies were printed.
Designed and printed by Tom Raworth

Note: AJ: History by Anselm seems like the transitional book from matrix to goliard, since barry made the blocks. i guess you met him at this point and decided to collaborate from then on? it looks like a really light impression, or else some of it is offset, and it says typeset and printed by you, so what press were you using?

TR:  It was done on my treadle press, the Adana, smaller than the later Goliard press one, which was stored at the print shop of Richard Moore, three floors up off Oxford Street where the deal was that he could use it for small jobs (his main press was a large Heidelberg). That came about because one of the other two craftsmen in the shop, the engraver (there was also a diestamper and process engraver) was the brother of my friend Steve Fletcher a photographer, who took the photo on the front of the second issue of Outburst.

   I must, if it says plates by Barry Hall, have known Barry and he did them at his work to save me money. If it doesn't specifically say that, then they were made commercially via Richard Moore. There were very few copies of History stapled and Anselm never includes it (I think) in bibliographies. Somewhere I have a box of pages and covers.

March 1964
Edward Dorn
From Gloucester Out
drawing by Barry Hall
12 pp., 8 3/4 x 6 1/2"

Colophon:
This book is set in Times Roman. There are 350 copies
Designed and printed by Tom Raworth, Flat 3, Stanley House, Finchley Rd, London NW11 20.3.64

Spread from Ed Dorn's From Gloucester Out, with illustration by Barry Hall

Green wove paper, stapled in white wrappers, with Hall's image in black and gold on coated stock, printed over a brown tint. Asymmetric design with large margins and running heads set off to the left of the text block.

Notes: Dorn visited England to teach at the University of Essex. He and Raworth became lifelong friends and collaborated later at Zephyrus Image, when both were living in San Francisco in the mid to late 70s.

August 1964
David Ball
Two Poems
9 x 5 3/4", 8 pp.
Drawing by Gene Mahon
Blue paper, stapled into brown wrappers
This book is set in Baskerville and Times Roman (cover title in Verona). Matrix Press, 3 Stanley Hse., Finchley Rd., N.W. 11.
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Tom Raworth Working Bibliography Part II: A Checklist of the Goliard Press, London 1965-7.
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Thereby Hangs a Quote, and a New, Must-Read Book on Books

by Stephen J. Gertz

When poet, master printer, and Perishable Press publisher Walter Hamady casually mentioned to master printer and Poltroon Press publisher Alastair M. Johnston, Peter Glassgold's book, Hwaett!,  Johnston, without skipping a beat, interjected:

"From Anglo-Saxon. It's the first word of Beowulf."

I have no idea whether Johnston, with whom I am acquainted, had been waiting decades for the opportunity to slip that factoid into a conversation but he did and I'm impressed.

As I am by the new word for today,  "slobagoody," which Hamady uses to describe a slapdash, thrown together, gallimaufry of text, later turned into readable narrative prose.

Hwaett and slobagoody (attorneys-at-law?) appear in Hanging Quotes: Talking Books Arts, Typography & Poetry, a new book by Johnson from Cuneiform Press. It's a keeper.

It's easy to be impressed with all of Hanging Quotes, a series of conversations Johnston had with book and printing people Nicholas Barker; Robert Creeley; Matthew Carter; Sumner Stone; Fred Smeijers; Joan and Nathan Lyons; Sandra Kirshenbaum; Dave Haselwood; Holbrook Teter of Zephyrus Image Press; Bob Hawley (Oyez Press); poet David Meltzer; and Graham Mackintosh, that widely ranges through the world of books, printing, and the visual manifestation of poetry in print.

More than impressed, you'll enjoy the book. Johnston, and his partner in Poltroon Press, Frances Butler, seem to ask just the right questions and pursue the right leads, tapping into their subject's interests, taking the conversation into unexpected places, and allowing it to take delightful turns.  Fascinating anecdotes, details, stories from book and printing history, unusual factoids, and captivating digressions are the reward.

You can read the interview with Nicholas Barker, renowned bookman, author, and editor of The Book Collector, for instance, and feel satisfied with the book without reading further (though you'll be sorry if you stop there). In this interview, which, as all the others in Hanging Quotes, is kaleidoscopic and delightfully all other the place, you'll learn about:

Trade secrets of medieval book illuminators, the private press movement and Barker's welcome apostasy ("Who the hell reads Kelmscott Press books?"), the degradation of paper quality, the improvement in ink, bookshop merchandizing, the importance of visual detail and symbolism and how the ability to read images has decayed, the importance of the shape of letters as a map of the human mind, Congolese bards, calligraphy, copperplate engraving and the personality of the engraver, Victorian typography, Goudy, Gill, Dwiggins, Morison, the importance of curve, and the current state of "Jine" printing.

Did I mention that Johnston, Butler, and those they interview are often quite amusing? This is not an academic book. It's absorbing, engaging,  informative, and highly entertaining; a wish-you-were-there read. You will not get a headache. But if you have one before reading it, Hanging Quotes may do more good than Advil.

You know you're in for a good time when the book opens with these quotes: 

"Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre" (Everything in the world exists to produce a book - Stéphane Mallarmé)

and

"Talk is cheap, but a Flair pen costs 69 cents" (Darrell Gray).

I'm still in the book, around three-quarters through it, and am hooked. This, despite a rare, interesting, and heretofore unexplored phenomenon associated with the topography of a book and reading that I experienced with my review copy, which arrived water-soaked in an unlined envelope during a recent  storm. After allowing it to dry I found myself hanging ten while reading Hanging Quotes, surfing the text block, which had more waves than Waimea, up and down, up and down. To all appearances my head was bobbing to music only I could hear.

It's unlikely that you'll experience motion sickness while reading Hanging Quotes, though you'll likely feel pleasantly lightheaded after reading what are simply amongst the best, most engrossing and enchanting interviews we bookpeople will ever be treated to.

I have a good news/bad news fantasy that I'm a contestant on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? I reach the million dollar round. The million dollar question is, What's the first word in Beowulf?, the ultimate  Trivial Pursuit question from the, alas, never-issued Bibliomaniac Edition. I mentally spend all the money. But I have to correctly pronounce the answer I just happen to know only because I read Hanging Quotes. Yet I didn't put Alastair Johnston on my Friends list; I can't call him.  Preceded by an "Oh" I utter an Anglo-Saxon word I can pronounce.

"Is that your final answer?"

I kiss that windfall goodbye.

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JOHNSTON, Alastair M. Hanging Quotes. Talking Book Arts, Typography, and Poetry. [Victoria, TX]: Cuneiform Press, 2011. First edition. Large octavo. 270 pp. Illustrated wrappers. $22.00. Order here to support a small press publisher and allow them to make a decent profit without Jeff Bezos unmercifully squeezing their...uh, margin in the name of public service.

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Full disclosure:

Alastair M. Johnston designed the print edition of A Wake for the Still Alive, Booktryst's series from last year. He's a friend but I have no idea what the "M" stands for; it's news to me. I'm hoping, Murgatroid.

Kyle Schlesinger, publisher of Cuneiform Press, along with his associate, Wm. S. Burroughs aficionado Jed Birmingham, is a friend of ours through Mimeo Mimeo, their publication (and website) devoted to the mimeograph revolution and grass-roots printing. Read Booktryst's O Solé Mimeo here.

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