You Won't Believe This Incredible Art Edition Of James Joyce's Ulysses

by Stephen J. Gertz

James Joyce completed his novel, Ulysses, on October 30, 1921. Ninety years later, on October 30, 2011, Charlene Matthews, the Los Angeles-based book artist and bookbinder recently the subject of a profile in Studios magazine, began work on an extraordinary edition of the book, based upon Sylvia Beach's true first edition with all its typos included.

Two years later, on October 30, 2013, she completed it: the entire text of Ulysses - all of its approximately 265,000 words in eighteen episodes - transcribed by hand onto thirty-eight seven-foot tall, two-inch diameter poles: Ulysses as a landscape to physically move through; the novel as literary grove, Ulysses as trees of of life with language as fragrant, hallucinatory bark, and trunks reaching toward the sky.

Each pole has sixteen 'cels' comprised of four pages, a total of sixty-four pages per pole.  The first cel has the first line in it and then Matthews measured down 9" and wrote that line in the next cel and so on, with the last cel containing the last line on the pole. The whole totals thirty-eight poles.

I talked to Charlene Matthews about the piece, which I've observed in progress since she began. Our interview follows.

SJG: This project involved an extraordinary amount of work and time. What inspired you to begin?

CM: I had to do a sculptural piece for an art show Doug Harvey was doing at the Shoshanna Wayne Gallery.  So I wrote a J.G.Ballard short story (Say Goodbye to the Wind) on a pole I had in the back yard for years  which I hate to say was not very good.  I liked how it looked and I liked the idea of taking the words out of the book and putting them onto an object, I stayed with the pole.  I went through my book collection and found Ulysses.  Nothing else would do but IT, and I had never read it.

Key to the poles.

SJG: Did you have any idea when you began just how all-consuming it would turn-out to become?

CM: I knew the project would take me a while, I researched poles and pens and jumped in. As problems occurred I solved them, like how to write and turn the pole smoothly, how to write without twisting my back, how to exercise my hands to keep them from cramping, how to sand the pole just so to accommodate smooth writing.  The eventual  get-up I rigged was pretty amusing. I also began mapping the characters' movements on my walls.

All typos included, as well as flaws in the medium.

SJG: What is the over-riding theme here? What was/is your intent? In short (from a philistine perspective), what's the point?

CM: Initially I envisioned just a large group of poles standing around with writing on them.  But as I was writing, I had visions of the poles being exhibited in many ways, I am going to publish a small edition book of these drawings this year.  Some of them are pretty basic, most are pretty out there ( Irish Jig Dancers, energy windmills, mirrors etc.).

Also, as I was writing my eyes would look at my process and get memorized in the patterns made by the black pen letters on the wood grain, the letters moving around, the grain going up and down. I saw pictures of faces, and animals and odd formations.

The point?  I wanted to make something beautiful.  That is how I chose to spend my time at night.  I did have some very personal reasons for doing this, but they are moot.  It really is just my most current book art project.

Basically the book is all about sex.  I have A LOT to say about this.

SJG: It seems that the process must have in some way paralleled Bloom's journey, his a walk through Dublin, yours a walk through Joyce. Anything to that?

CM: It definitely felt like I was having a love affair with Joyce. 

SJG: You've read the book, a work of art in and of itself. You've turned it into a work of art in another medium. How has it changed your perspective on the book?

CM: As I was absorbing the story, I was also observing his style, and method of storytelling. I understood what was going on in his head as a story teller, writer and artist.  What he was trying to achieve in his Modernism.  This is when I knew that the book had more than a plot line, it had a picture line, the movements of everyone if they could be seen over head would draw out symbols/pictures.  As I was taking the words off the page, I was in this fourth dimension with Joyce.

Draft schematic plan for exhibition.

SJG: And for the viewer/reader, what is it you expect or hope from them? What do you want people to take away from the experience?

CM: What I want people to take away from seeing the poles is the magic of the hand written word, the beauty of handwriting.  The beauty of a handmade object only they can create, by hand writing.

SJG: Are you looking for or have you found an exhibition space for the piece? Any interest yet from galleries?

CM: I am talking to people about exhibiting them, and welcome any inquiries. Depending on the space will depend on how to show them.  Either anchored to the floor or hanging from the ceiling. All can be done.

Pole #38, with last line.

SJG: You said that "basically the book is all about sex.  I have A LOT to say about this." You can't declare that and not pay it off.

CM: Spoiler Alert! It covers every angle of human sexuality. One interesting point about the Ulysses obscenity trial in America is that the case was won the day after Prohibition was lifted.

•  •  •

The case was won on December 6, 1933. Prohibition ended on December 5, 1933 when the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution repealing the 18th Amendment was ratified.

"...And what is cheese? Corpse of milk" - James Joyce, Ulysses . 

And what is Charlene Matthews' Ulysses? Copse of novel.

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Images courtesy of Charlene Matthews, with our thanks.
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Dieter Rot Sets In

by Alastair Johnston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Stephen J. Gertz

 "The most brilliant man I've ever met” (Allen Ginsberg).

A "unique and pivotal figure in the literary world of the 50's and 60's, an individual, that's it...they don't make 'em like that anymore" (William S. Burroughs).

"It is true, it has art, it is brave, I wouldn't be surprised if it is still talked about in twenty years" (Norman Mailer, on Cain's Book).

Mailer underestimated by at least thirty-three years.

In 1961, Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984), the Glasgow-born novelist who, in Paris during the early through mid-1950s as the bridge between the Beats and Europe, had established himself at the center of a group of British and American ex-pat writers in Paris, and, in the late '50s moved to New York City, was in trouble, major big-time.

World literature's second most famous junkie author, William S. Burroughs taking the top spot, Trocchi had provided a sixteen year old girl with heroin. In response to an epidemic of heroin addiction that was non-existent, the United States Congress passed the Boggs Act in 1956,  draconian legislation that mandated the death penalty for providing heroin to a minor. The evidence against him overwhelming and, arrested and arraigned, Trocchi was released on bail. But while awaiting a trial that would have sent him to the electric chair if found guilty, Trocchi appeared in a televised debate about drug abuse. During the live proceedings he nonchalantly shot-up. He immediately became the face of evil. His bail was revoked and he was under threat of immediate re-arrest and incarceration. He had to get out of New York and the U.S., pronto. He had no money.

The income generated by his partner in addiction, his wife, Lyn, who prostituted herself to support their habits, was not sufficient to effect a getaway. He turned to a bookseller friend for financial help, writing him a letter.

That plea has just come into the marketplace, along with Trocchi's personal, hand-painted copy of Cain's Book (NY: Grove Press, 1960), his autobiographical novel and literary triumph, banned in Britain upon its publication there in 1963, recounting his days and nights as a writer in New York while working as a scow pilot on the docks, scoring junk and getting high. Trocchi was so far gone that he was unable to attend the book's release party.

After laying out his desperate situation, complicated by Lyn's arrest and the detention of their son, Marc, he makes the request on page two:

"This is probably the last time I'll ask you to do me a favor - for a long time anyway + in one way or another I'll get your good wishes back to you. Nothing is too little, nothing is too much. Please give it to Diane Di Prima or, if you like, she'll lead you to my hide out. Please keep all this secret until I am safely gone.

Yours, Alex T.

Front flyleaf note.

With the assistance of Norman Mailer, a major fan and supporter, Trocchi was spirited across the border into Canada, where he was met by Leonard Cohen, then a young, aspiring poet. A few days later, after surviving Trocchi's company - hanging-out with the mad Scot presented multiple opportunities for too much excitement, often at the same time - Cohen smuggled him aboard a steamer bound for Aberdeen, providing, to Trocchi's ecstatic relief, "enough Demerol to kill a herd of elephants."

Trocchi, who had been a leading literary light in Paris, publishing the acclaimed avant-garde journal, Merlin, and (along with his friends, including Terry Southern) writing erotica for Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press (under the pseudonyms Carmencita de las Lunas and Francis Lengel), eventually settled in London and continued to write but published very little; his addiction was deep and taking its toll. He died of pneumonia in 1984. Almost immediately afterward, interest in his career became resurgent and intensified and he earned, the hard way, the post-mortem accolades accorded to a literary genius who channeled his gift through a 26-gauge needle squirting diacetylmorphine into his bloodstream in an existential rebellion to separate himself from a world he rejected and surrender in thrall to the muse of nothingness and, in the process, lose everything that remained meaningful to him.

This copy of Cain's Book - the most important copy imaginable - and this letter chronicle his most significant and lasting contribution to literature, his career height and the incident that, as inevitable as a Greek tragedy, instantly toppled him.

Here, Alexander Trocchi, A Life In Pieces, featuring William S. Burroughs and Leonard Cohen:

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Images courtesy of Royal Books, currently offering this item, with our thanks.
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The Best British Binding of the 1930s

by Stephen J. Gertz

On November 29, 2012, Bloomsbury Auctions is offering a copy of Robert Vansittart's The Singing Caravan, published by The Gregynog Press in 1932. It is one of twenty-five copies specially bound by the Gregynog Bindery, one that has been called, "a brilliant binding, one of the most spectacular produced at the Gregynog Press Bindery and perhaps the best British binding of the 1930s" (Maggs,  Bookbinding in the British Isles Part II, no. 307). It is estimated to sell for £3,000-£4,000 ($4,800 - $6,400).

Bound by George Fisher at the Gregynog Press Bindery from an Art Deco-influenced design by William MacCance (signed on the lower turn-in "William MacCance. Gregynog Press Bindery. George Fisher") it is in burnt-orange oasis morocco elaborately tooled with gilt vertical and horizontal fillets of varying thickness, with solid gilt squares and four "L"  shaped onlays of black morocco on each cover. The design on the front incorporates the title and author, and on the lower cover the Press. The upper cover has a fore-edge flap in the manner of an Islamic binding (aka wallet binding) and is tooled to match the covers. It has a smooth spine with gilt lines running over from the covers and lettered up the spine. The top edge is gilt, the others uncut.

MacCance made a charcoal sketch of the design which  Fisher translated into a working drawing as guide.

Lower cover with flap opened.

"George Fisher was born in 1879. His father and grandfather were blacksmiths. He was first employed by a wealthy amateur binder to help with the forwarding and received a sund grounding in this branch of the craft. After two years his employer went to South Africa and Fisher was offered an apprenticeship to Riviere;s. He chose to become a finisher. He tooled thousands of books and also attended Douglas Cockerell's classes. After finishing his time in 1902 he was employed at the small bindery run by Miss Alice Pattinson and her partner Miss Hoffman. In 1907 he married and also set up his own workshop, but this project failed and the next years were spent teaching, with a little binding and working on his small farm in Hampshire.

"It was not until 1924 that, at the sugestion of Douglas Cockerell, he took charge of the Gregynog Press Bindery. John Mason and Sidney Cockerell had also worked there briefly, but it was not until Fisher took over that a limited number (varying between 15 and 43) of each publication were to be specially bound. Except for the sewing these were entirely the work of Fisher. He designed some of them himself but the best designs date from the early 1930s and were the work of William MacCance or Blair Hughes-Stanton. The Press o in 1940 but Fisher stayed on for another four years working on the special bindings. All this time at Gregynog Fisher had travelled the weekends to his farm which was run when he was absent by his wife. When he left the Bindery he retired to the farm and lived there until his death in 1970 but he did no more binding" (Op cit, Maggs).

Frontispiece by William MacCance.

Poet, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, song lyricist, and historian Robert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart (1881-1957),  was a senior British diplomat before and during the Second World War. He was Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister from 1928 to 1930 and Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office from 1930 to 1938 and later served as Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the British Government. His poem, The Singing Caravan: A Sufi Tale, was originally published in London by William Heinemann in 1919.

"The Gregynog Press was unique in that everything was created under one roof - design, typography, illustration, printing and binding. Its fine printing owed much to the incomparable skill of Herbert John Hodgson, pressman from 1927 to 1936, and his successor, Idris Jones. It was fortunate also in the employment of one of the great twentieth-century bookbinders, George Fisher, who joined the staff in 1925. Fisher was responsible for inaugurating special bindings in full leather for part of each edition. Though many of these were designed by the Press artists, Fisher undertook the major part of their making himself. They were superbly executed and noted particularly for the quality of their tooling. Among private presses, only Gregynog paid attention to the quality of its bindings which were to enhance the value of the books among collectors" (Dorothy Harrop, History of Gwasg Gregynog and the Gregynog Press).

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[Gregynog Press]. VANSITTART, [Robert]. The Singing Caravan. A Sufi Tale. Quarto (282 x 180 mm). Newtown: The Gregynog Press, 1932.  One of 25 specially bound copies out of a total edition of 250. Quarto (282 x 180 mm). viii, [1] f., 143 pp., plus colophon leaf. Wood-engraved frontispiece, tailpiece, and initials, in brown and black, by William McCance.

Harrop 22.

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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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Common Prayers, Uncommon Binding

by Stephen J. Gertz

This stunning, c. 1853, binding by Hayday of London of an 1840 edition of The Book of Common Prayer is in full brown smooth-grained Turkey morocco over beveled boards, with a single fillet framing an eye-catching panel of onlaid red, green (the quadrants, their color not, alas, fully visible due to lighting), and black morocco with gilt tooling and central cross of gilt-tooled inlaid orange morocco to both sides.

The spine compartments possess deep crimson and orange labels and are decorated in gilt with inlaid red and orange calf crosses. Fine details include extravagantly gilt-tooled dentelles, gilt-tooled edges, and all edges gilt and gauffered.

A cross is not an unusual decorative binding design for finely bound copies of The Book of Common Prayer, yet the design, while based upon earlier  ecclesiastical bindings, is a particularly handsome and contemporary mosaic. It suggests that it was bound for a man of means.

One of the most distinctive and unusual aspects of this binding is the tortoise shell effect to the Turkey morocco most visible along the top edge of the upper board. It's unclear whether the pattern is an attractive blemish in the skin itself or the result of a chemical wash. I've seen countless bindings in calf with various stain-effects (mottled, tree, rainbow, etc.) but I've never seen  morocco  leather quite like this with such a fine grain and unusual varigration.

James Hayday, (1796–1872), "bookbinder, was born in London. Of his parents, nothing is known. He was apprenticed to Charles Marchant, vellum binder, 12 Old Gloucester Street, Queen Square, London, and then for some time worked as a journeyman commencing business in a very humble way. In 1825 he became one of the auditors of the Journeymen Bookbinders' Trade Society. In 1833 he rented premises at 31 Little Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, where he continued until his retirement in 1861…

Gauffered fore-edge.

"Constant opening of traditionally bound books disfigured the grain of the leather, and to obviate this Hayday introduced the cross or pin-headed grain known as Turkey morocco. In his own binding he sewed the books fully along every sheet, a technique that caused extra thickness that Hayday remedied by sewing with silk, rather than thread. Also, in order to equalize the thickness he rounded the fore edges more than was customary. To make the back tight he dispensed with the ordinary backing of paper, and fastened the leather cover down to the back.

"Works bound by Hayday became famous and increased in monetary value. Edward Gardner of the Oxford Warehouse, 7 Paternoster Row, London, secured Hayday's services for the Oxford University Press. William Pickering, bookseller, of 57 Chancery Lane, also introduced him to many wealthy patrons…A number of his bindings are in the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London" (Oxford Online Dictionary of National Biography).

Between 1837-and 1838 the Hayday bindery employed between thirty and forty people including ten finishers. James Hayday's retirement in 1861 had nothing to do with a desire for a life of ease after a life of toil. He went bankrupt. He then partnered with William Mansell until he finally retired in 1869.

Close-up of gauffering, with gilt-tooled edge.

The first manual of worship in English for any religion. The Book of Common Prayer is the key and most important volume of the Church of England, uniting all Churchgoers within a common liturgy in English, and was so prior to the publication of the Church's King James translation of the Bible in 1611. It has been in print without interruption since its introduction in 1549. It was revised in 1552 and mildly amended a hundred years later, in 1662, 350 years ago.

Dentelle.

It is, for the most part, the work and language of Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), Archbishop of Canterbury 1533-1556 and a leader of the Reformation in England, who based it upon the centuries old Latin liturgy of the English Catholic Church and gracefully simplified the language so that it would be understood by all no matter their degree of literacy. It is, what the Oxford historian and author of A History of Christianity, Diarmaid MacCulloch, has called, “one of a handful of texts to have decided the future of a world language.”

Here bound in a  masterful manner suitable for worship.

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[HAYDAY, bindery]. [CHURCH OF ENGLAND]. The Book of Common Prayer, And Administration of the Sacraments. And Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church, According to the Use of the United Church of England and Ireland; Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David, Pointed as They are to be Sung or Said in Churches; and the Form and Manner of Making, Ordaining, and Consecrating of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. Oxford: Printed at the University Press by Samuel Collingwood and Co., 1840.

Small octavo (5 1/2 x 3 1/4 in; 140 x 80 mm). Unpaginated.
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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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A Bonet Lion Binding That Roars

by Stephen J. Gertz

This majestically leonine binding wrought by Paul Bonet [1889-1971] in 1969 for a copy of the 1937 Raoul Dufy-illustrated edition of Daudet's Les Aventures prodigieuses de Tartarin de Tarascon (Paris: Scripta et Picta) is being offered by Christie's-Paris in their Importants Livres Anciens, Livres d'Artistes et Manuscrits sale on Monday, October 29, 2012.

It is estimated to sell for $14,000 - $20.000 (€10,000 - €15,000).

Based in Paris, Bonet was one of the great bookbinders of the twentieth century.

"Paul Bonet does his designing in his apartment on the Rive Gauche and in 1938 had an atelier where workmen carried out his designs under his supervision. [He] evolved an entirely new style of book decoration - totally original, amazingly clever, and really 'modern' in spirit, with a mouvement radiant. His great swirling designs are so ingeniously drawn that, although they are carried out on a flat surface, they represent a third dimension purely through an illusion created by the drawing, and not by means of an alteration in the surface of the cover as was practiced by Creuzevault. The tooling on his bindings is faultless and brilliant. It has a machinelike precision with a quality that can only be achieved by 'striking' each tool separately by hand. Paul Bonet, in my opinion, is without a rival today" (Diehl, Edith. Bookbinding: Its Background and Technique [1946], p. 108).

When the king of beasts met the king of binders the result was a victory for both.

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Images courtesy of Christie's, with our thanks.
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Booktryst has 32 great posts on fine bookbinding in our archive. Enter "bindings" in our search box to access them all.
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Two Doves Bindings To Drool Over

by Stephen J. Gertz

Two Doves Press books bound at the Doves Bindery recently passed through my hands. In a swoon, I almost passed out.

"In 1893, when T.J. Cobden-Sanderson decided to give up bookbinding after a short career of less than ten years, he was already the most famous binder in England. The beauty and originality of his designs ensured that his bindings were sought after by collectors and and booksellers in both Britain and the United States" (Tidcombe, The Doves Bindery, p. 1).

Bookbindings personally bound by Cobden-Sanderson now fetch up to $50,000.

 

 Cobden-Sanderson did not, however, entirely give up bookbinding. In the same year as his "retirement," he established the Doves Bindery to carry out, under his personal supervision to his exacting standards, the physical binding of his designs.
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They are no less sought after by collectors than those bound by C-S himself. Why?

"From the beginning Cobden-Sanderson questioned every stage and aspect of bookbinding, and sought to improve on whatever he discovered to be shoddy in the way of materials and design, both structural and decorative" (ibid.).

Cobden-Sanderson not only designed all the bindings of The Doves Bindery (a total of 837), he designed the tools used to execute them, each unique and proprietary.

He disdained overly gilt bindings. "Some of the top trade binderies such as Riviere, Zaehnedorf or Fazakerley produced more lavish bindings, with onlays, tooling, and lettering covering not only the back, covers and doublures, but also the flyleaves. Cobden-Sanderson was opposed to such gratuitous excess, calling such bindings 'deplorable miracles of misapplied skill,' because the amazing ability of the finisher was wasted on such poor design" (Tidcombe, p. 84).

In contrast, Doves Bindings are without peer for their handsome sophistication, graceful elegance, stylish restraint, classically clean lines, and deceptive simplicity. It took an enormous amount of effort to make them seem effortless.

"The output of the Doves Bindery cannot be compared to other 'trade' binderies, because there was no other bindery quite like it...No bindery other than the Doves designed its own tools, produced all its own patterns, and worked to such a high standard, while also being so selective in the books it bound" (Tidcombe, p. 84).

 

The books of the Doves Press were routinely case-bound in limp vellum. Clients of the Press, however, were advised that they could have their copies specially bound at the Doves Bindery. Not many Doves Press books were thus bound, however, but those that were were unique; the Doves Press Shelley, for instance, was bound in brick red/terracotta leather for one customer. For another client, the Shelley was later bound in blue morocco with a completely different design.

The leather used for these two Doves bindings was not the usual morocco goatskin or calf. "Cobden-Sanderson ordered sealskins from Richardson's in Newcastles. He apparently liked it, as seal was used s an alternative to goatskin for binding many other Doves Press books. The sealskin used ranges in colour from orange to brick-red or terracotta, and some of the skins were probably specially selected by Cobden Sanderson for their attractive blotchy appearance" (Tidcombe, p. 94)

The Doves Bindery was and remains the finest and most respected bindery of its era, the evolutionary link between the Victorian Age in which it was born and the early Modern Age in which it thrived with the highest possible respect and admiration of collectors then and to this day.

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[DOVES BINDERY]. KEATS. John. Keats. [Poems Selected, Arranged and Printed by T.J. Cobden-Sanderson]. Hammersmith, The Doves Press, 1914.

First Doves Press edition, one of a limited edition of 200 copies on paper. Octavo (9 1/8 x 6 3/8 in; 232 x 162 mm). [11], 12-203, [1, blank] pp.  

Designed by Cobden Sanderson and bound at The Doves Bindery (stamp-signed "Doves Bindery 19 C-S 16") in full brick red sealskin with both sides by master finisher Charles McLeish featuring a three-line panel interlaced with a three-line strapwork lozenge with concave curves at sides, with a central wreath of rose leaves and stars with a sprig of three rose leaves above and below the wreath. Spine compartments with gilt panels. Gilt decorated turn-ins. All edged gilt with dotted fillet gauffering  Printed in black and white, and red.

Tidcombe, Doves Press 36. Tidcombe, Doves Bindery 791.

[DOVES BINDERY]. SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe, Shelley. [Poems Selected, Arranged, and Printed by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson at The Doves Press]. Hammersmith: The Doves Press, 1914.

First Doves Press edition, one of 200 copies on paper of a total edition of 212. Octavo (9 1/8 x 6 3/8 in; 232 x 162 mm). [6], 7-181, [1, blank] pp. Text in back and white, and red.

Designed by Cobden Sanderson and bound at The Doves Bindery (stamp-signed "Doves Bindery 19 C-S 14") in full brick red sealskin elegantly gilt paneled on both sides by master finisher Charles McLeish with a line panel with large open dot at each corner, and a smaller two-line panel extended inwards at the sides to form a lozenge, with a wavy lozenge inside, tooled in the center with a wreath composed of close-set narrow leaves, and a cloverleaf of three hearts on a stem at each corner of the panel and lozenge. Gilt decorated turn-ins. All edges gilt and with dotted fillet gauffering. Spine gilt in compartments.

Tidcombe, Doves Press 35. Tidcombe, Doves Bindery 792.

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Of related interest:

A Doves Binding To Die For.
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Menacing Bookplates (Don't Mess With This Book!)

by Stephen J. Gertz

For Lloyd Douglas, artist ("UD") unknown.
It is unknown whether this is the bookplate
of novelist Lloyd Douglas, author of
Magnificent Obsession (1929), The Robe (1942),
The Big Fisherman (1948), etc.

Lew Jaffe, the man with the bookplate jones, has recently added some intimidating specimens to his website, Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie.

The late Mr. Ferguson (1920-2011) was a bookseller
in Concord, Massachusetts. His bookplate was designed
by a German POW after WWII and was based upon
"two or more Weird Tales - one being William Fryer
Harvey's The Beast With Five Fingers plus another
by my late friend, August Derleth" (letter from
Ferguson to Jaffe, Oct 2, 2006)

There is a long tradition of of oaths, curses, and doom-saying against those who steal books. Who can forget the classic denunciation found in the library of the monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona?

For him that Stealeth a Book from this Library,
Let it change into a Serpent in his hand & rend him.
Let him be struck with Palsy, & all his Members blasted.
Let him languish in Pain crying aloud for Mercy,
Let there be no Surcease to his Agony till he sink to Dissolution.
Let Bookworms gnaw his Entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not,
When at last he goeth to his final Punishment,
Let the flames of hell consume him for ever & aye.

By Philip Reed, an illustrator and book designer
based in St Joseph, Michigan. Along with his wife,
Nancy, he operated a woodcut, stationery, and
bookplate business. Shown above is one of the
nineteen universal bookplates he designed to
be customized with the collector's name.
(Audrey Spencer Arellanes. Bookplates in the
News 1970-1985, p. 57).

As there is, alas, no monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona the threat above is apocryphal. But though of dubious authenticity it is no less genuine in its diabolical condemnation of book thieves.

Artist unknown.

These bookplates, all dating from the twentieth century, are a bit more direct, less a damning shake of  the fist to the heavens than the acute threat of homicide, mano á mano.

For John Sympson. Artist unknown.

Scimitars, stilettos, snickersnees, and the gallows are here the suggested therapeutic tools for bibliolarceny. Slow death by lethal injection of highly radioactive material via umbrella-tip as you anonymously stalk your prey on a London street, while appropriately agonizing, does not possess, in my view, the necessary (and satisfying) eye-to-eye up-close-and-personal intimacy that a quick shiv to the gut can provide.

Above, a favorite. Not a threat nor violent in any way, it is merely the quiet and reserved vengeance of one to gain a degree of satisfaction from a situation that did not go well and from which he was not compensated for loss. Revenge is a bookplate best served cold.

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All images courtesy of Lew Jaffe, with our thanks.
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Of related interest:

Bookplates in a Printer's Library Part I.

Bookplates in a Printer's Library Part 2.

The Man With the Bookplate Jones.

Bookplate Special On Menu at Bonham's.

Virginia Library Serves Up Bookplate Special.

Authentic G. Washington Bookplate Comes To Auction.
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