Gaspereau Press ¶ Printers & Publishers

Glen Hancock (1919–2011)

2012-01-18T06:15:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, I attended a memorial service for author and friend Glen Hancock. Born in Wolfville in 1919, Glen was writing for periodicals (westerns and mysteries) before he’d even graduated from high school. After serving in the RCAF in the Second World War (an experience he recounts in Charley Goes to War, a memoir published by Gaspereau Press in 2004), he studied at Acadia University, University of Toronto and the University of Edinburgh. His skills as a writer and storyteller underpinned in career, as a journalist at the London Free Press, as a syndicated columnist in 35 papers, and later in public relations for Imperial Oil Limited. In the 1960s, Glen took time off from his job at Imperial Oil to help found the School of Journalism at University of Kings College, Halifax, and was dean of the program from 1962 to 1965. Curiosity, astonishing community spirit and a love of travel were also key characteristics of Glen’s personality. He died just short of the age of 92.

When I first moved to the Wolfville area, Glen was in his late seventies and was active mentoring local writers and writing a column for the local newspaper. He showed up at the press one day in 1999, before Gaspereau had really established itself nationally, with the manuscript of his first memoir, My Real Name is Charley: Memoirs of a Grocer’s Clerk. Glen and I hit it off right away, and he became a sort of fixture at the press. Not that he hung around here much, but you could tell that he derived great enjoyment from popping in for a visit and updating me on his ‘assignments’. We occasionally wrote notes back and forth to each other instead of using the telephone. “I admire your hand,” Glen once wrote me about my odd printing style, which pleased me. I have always had a great affinity for newspapers and journalism, which could as easily have been my own path in life had I not fallen into book publishing.

There was nothing Glen liked better than a party – hosting or attending, it didn’t matter. He was a graceful conversationalist and excellent host with old-timey manners. As well as his annual summer garden parties (which I almost always missed due to my family responsibilities), you could count on Glen to be at the annual Gaspereau Press Christmas party, standing with a drink in one hand and his other arm elegantly draped across the face of a bookshelf, mixing, holding forth, laughing. One year I turned in a crowded room to witness Glen greeting a twenty-something year old woman by kissing her hand. Always the charmer! Another year we even imposed on Glen to host our Christmas party. When the party finally started winding down sometime after midnight, Glen seemed disappointed and seemed to have several more hours of mischief left in reserve.

All the time I knew him, it seemed Glen was at work on a new book for Gaspereau Press, though in our decade-long association he completed only two of the three books we had planned. The third he had always referred to as Charley’s Leftover Life, and was meant to deal with the experience so many people had of returning home from the overwhelming and life-altering experience of serving in the Second World War and trying to figure out what to do with their lives. The war had changed their world utterly, and changed them as well. Over the past few years I had begun to fear that Glen’s resolve to complete this book was waning, and so I tried to encourage him without putting pressure on him to produce something he was not prepared to complete.

In actual fact, nothing about Glen’s life feels like it could ever have been simply leftover. He was someone who truly made the most of his time here on earth.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Blue

2011-11-29T12:48:00.001-08:00

Today, as well as working on the paperwork for a grant application due this week, I had jackets for the Gaspereau redesign of George Elliott Clarke’s poetry book Blue. Gaspereau adopted a number of books from Clarke’s backlist (Whylah Falls, Blue and Black which is due out next spring) when his original publisher stopped publishing Canadian books.

Actually, that’s an interesting story. Clarke was originally publishing most of his poetry with Polestar Books, a very fine west coast literary publisher owned by Michelle Benjamin. In 2000, Polestar got swallowed up by the gigantic west coast book distributor and repackager Raincoast Books. Raincoast was awash in cash; they had a very profitable stake in the Harry Potter franchise as the books’ Canadian publisher and distributor. At the time of the takeover, Benjamin told Publisher’s Weekly that the purchase would give Polestar “the kind of financial security that is hard to achieve as a small press.”

How’d that work out? Turns out that Raincoast’s interest in publishing with a bit flighty. In January 2008, Raincoast announced that it was ceasing its Canadian publishing operations. The imprints and authors they had adopted through their various acquisitions were being turfed. Raincoast brass intoned that publishing books in Canada simply wasn’t economically viable. Ouch! Even after selling us all those millions of dollars worth of Harry Potter books to Canadians, Raincoast felt no commitment to reinvest in publishing Canadian writers for Canadian Readers. Too risky. They just took the money and ran. Did I mention that the decision to stop publishing books and refocus on being a distributor and repackager was announced shortly after the release of the final book in the Harry Potter series? It has to be one of the most cynical moves in the history of Canadian publishing (if you ignore the present elephant in the room, that self-loathing farce of pretending that the once proud flagship of Canadian publishing, McClelland & Stewart, is anything other than an mere imprint of Random House).

And so, as i was saying, Clarke’s marooned poetry titles have landed now at Gaspereau and we are gradually bringing them back into print.

Today I was hand printing the jacket for Blue, a stark departure from the photographic cover of the original, but very much in the Gaspereau style. The paper is a dark blue felt stock. I printed the oversized type in black, and the small text in a silver ink tinted with PMS 301 blue. The type is Plantin, but with extenders modified to match those Sir Frances Meynell commissioned from Monotype for his Nonesuch Press.

When I was goofing around taking photos of the silvery blue ink, I caught my reflection in the ink knife.

Here’s a peek at the finished jacket, and some other stuff kicking around my press-side table:

1. A litho stone collected by my friend Jack McMaster.
2. A bone folder.
3. A photo of my father with the poet Peter Sanger; two Petes in a pod.
4. A funny, handwritten note from Will Rueter at the Aliquando Press.
5. The photopolymer plate for the black form of the Clarke jacket.
6. The Clarke jacket (the hero of our tale).
7. Make-ready sheets.
8. A single piece of type cast by the late, great type designer Jim Rimmer.
9. Some film canisters of copper spacing material for fine letterspacing capitals.
10. A bunch of Linotype mats and a space band, frozen together in some sort of casting midhap.
11. A broken rib from Chestnut canoe.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Don McKay and The Shell of the Tortoise

2011-11-25T09:49:00.001-08:00

On the press this week is Don McKay’s The Shell of the Tortoise, the third collection of literary essays we’ve done by Don (Vis à Vis and Deactivated West 100 being the others). The Shell of the Tortoise continues Don’s investigation into the relationship between poetry and wilderness, particularly into the characteristics of metaphor as a tool. “Art occurs whenever a tool attempts to metamorphose into an animal” asserts McKay in the title essay, which is built around the myth of Hermes and his tortoise-shell lyre. Tools that metamorphose into animals? We’ve certainly seen some animal behaviour from some of the antiquated tools we use here in the printshop.

The book is set in a digital revival of Deepdene, arguably the best book type F.W. Goudy ever designed. Goudy drew the roman for Deepdene in 1927 and the italic the following year, and both were released for use on Lanston’s Monotype casters. It is a typeface I associate with the books of my childhood, and with my late friend Jim Rimmer, who admired Goudy and whose own type designs (Amethyst, for example) were greatly influenced by Goudy’s. Like so many faces from the letterpress age, it is like a fine-limbed race horse which requires careful management if it’s to survive on a modern roadway; it can wilt and fail in the digital environment or the flatland of modern offset printing. I know. I’ve failed and failed again to use it well, but I think I’ve finally started to understand its personality and adapt to its quirks.

In one essay, Don takes the reader over a buggy, boggy portage with the canadian poet Duncan Cambell Scott, surveying Canadian poetry’s complex relationship with wilderness. The genesis of this journey is a photograph found in Canada’s national achieves which depicts Scott, an agent of the Crown, standing at one end of the portage over the height of land between Lake Superior and Hudsons Bay, on his way to settle a treaty with the natives in that area.

I don’t care how often you do it, or how well you understand it. I’ve been printing books for nearly 15 years, and I still get a kick out of the way so many small dots, arranged in varying size and intensity, can through a sort of slight of hand, an illusion, replicate the continuous tone of a photographic image. This is a close-up, shot through my microscope, of the fellow on the right in the photograph, with the bug net on his head. This sort of reproduction, this trick of representation, is a sort of metaphoric, poetic act. A tool becoming an animal?

Well, enough fawning over the sheets. Fold’em, sew’em, bind’em and get them out of here!

The jackets were handprinted on the vandercook 219 in my office. Two colours, black and ‘wayzgoose red’ on a nice felt-finish ginger-coloured paper stock. The illustration is by out pal Wesley Bates of West Meadow Press in Clifford, Ontario, who also did illustrations for the other essay collections of Don’s we published.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

A Movember Moment

2011-11-17T05:01:00.000-08:00

I’ve never been a fan of facial hair as a means of self-expression, nor of punny plays on the names of months, but the ‘Movember’ movement (a well-intended yet goofy media gimmick aimed at getting men to embrace their inner Tom Selleck and people talking about men’s health issues) called to mind an unusual discovery I recently made while cruising the shelves at my local used book store.

What I stumbled upon was a copy of Edward S. Caswell’s Canadian Singers and Their Songs: A Collection of Portraits, Autograph Poems and Brief Biographies, published in 1925 by McClelland & Stewart. There is nothing particularly noteworthy about the production. But as I was leafing through I decided to look up a local poet, Charles G.D. Roberts. My jaw dropped when I saw his portrait. Holy jumping schmoly!

Perhaps my mind was playing tricks on me. I turned to the clerk and said, “Okay, what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you see this picture?”

I flashed up the book up at her and her response was spontaneous.

“Hitler!”

“Would you believe it’s a pre-war photo of the Canadian poet Charles G. D. Roberts?”

I suppose Roberts would have looked pretty dapper at the time in his spiffy uniform and twitchy little bit of lip hair, but all I could see in that photo in 2011 was the unwitting foreshadowing of evil. I guess it’s possible for one man to ruin a look – forever. Let’s have one more look at that, close-up.

Oh yeah, that’s creepy.

I turned to the entry for E.J. Pratt hoping against hope that he would be sporting a Groucho Marx look, just then arriving on the silver screen, but was disappointed.

This morning, I shaved.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Oh, Wayzgoose!

2011-10-26T05:39:00.000-07:00

Marshall McLuhan at the wayzgoose

Gaspereau Press celebrated its twelfth annual wayzgoose and open house on the weekend. There was a lecture, workshops, and readings, but as usual the highlight of the event was opening our doors to the public for fun and frivolity in the printing works. This year’s special guest was Toronto wood engraver George Walker, who came with his wife Michelle and a suitcase full of prints and books.

George Walker helps a visitor print a broadside

For the wayzgoose, George engraved a portrait of the late Canadian writer and cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan and showed visitors how to print it on our 1833 Albion hand press. The text of the broadside was handprinted on our Vandercook 219. Meanwhile, I found myself (as usual) cornered in the casting room talking lead, tin and antimony and casting Ludlow slugs set by our guests. Once cast, the freshly-cast type was locked up in a parlor press and printed with the help of our young printer’s devils, and the printed sheet became the personalized cover for a hand-sewn blank chapbook. Meanwhile, Gary Dunfield and his assistants Nic (who has a Tim Inkster like obsession with top hats) and Laura had the Hollander beater and hand moulds set up for beating pulp and making paper.

Printer’s Devil Adam Steeves sets up a parlor press

In the evening, authors Sean Howard and Norman Ravvin read from their recently published books and George Walker gave an illustrated talk. We also paid tribute to recently deceased colleagues Glenn Goluska and Douglas Lochhead. We were pleased to announce that the wayzgoose lecture series will henceforth be called the Douglas Lochhead Memorial Lecture, in recognition of Lochhead’s great contribution to literary culture and the book arts in Canada.

I want to make special mention of a few people who helped or attended: Hugh French of the Tides Institute in Eastport, Maine, who dashed over for the morning’s events in his continued effort to foster better cross-boarder cultural relations and – creatively at least – reunite that grand Fundy/Passamaquoddy community one is tempted to refer to as The Old Massachusetts; Thaddeus Holownia of Anchorage Press, who drove up from New Brunswick to volunteer; Steven Slipp, who spent his 56th birthday volunteering at the wayzgoose, and loved it; David Brewer of Rabbittown Press, Fredericton, who just finished printing his first letterpress book; Laura MacDonald, who pulled in with Yukon dust still on her bumpers to volunteer making paper; Nic, Adam, Ellis, Dan, and all the youngsters who lent a hand; Heather Kelday and Peter Williams, who helped us out with the music; and all the Gaspereau Press staff, who so generously and ably shared their craft with our visitors.

We are working on the possibility of having a New England based printer as our special guest next year. I will post details as they unfold.

Typographer and birthday-boy Steven Slipp pulls a print on the Albion handpress with George Walker

Steven Slipp and letterpress printer and photographer Thaddeus Holownia

Sewing chapbooks

Printer’s Devils printing on a parlor press ...

... to impress the young lassies

Lisa and Pam (reps for one of our commercial paper suppliers) talked to people about the importance of paper

Author Norman Ravvin inks the wood block ...

... and pulls a print while George Walker looks on

Nic Dunfield making paper

Nic Dunfield and Laura MacDonald beating pulp

Locking up a form for the parlor press

Bibliophile Joseph Stevens and guest artist George Walker at the book table

George Walker

Oh, Marshall! How crisp you look!

George Walker at the Albion

Gary Dunfield drying handmade paper

Basma and George setting up the Vandercook 219

Andrew Steeves setting up the Ludlow caster

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Wayzgoose and other things

2011-10-06T05:29:00.000-07:00

Well, the details are sorting out for our wayzgoose and open house on October 22nd. Toronto-based Wood engraver and letterpress printer George Walker is packing his bags and sharpening his tools in preparation for his trip to Kentville, where he will be giving a workshop introducing printmaking techniques, doing demos at the open house and presenting his illustrated talk “Printmaking and the Visual Narrative.” The workshop requires pre-registration, and there are still a couple of spots left. The poster below provides most of what you’ll need to know.

In the meantime, we are (as usual) scrambling about and working hard to get books completed and out to the first of the fall’s launches. This week, we finished the first copies of Heather Jessup’s debut novel The Lightning Field, which will be launched on October 13 on Gabriola Island, BC, at an event hosted by CBC Radio’s Shelagh Rogers. The story of the scrapping of the Avro Arrow is the backdrop to the novel’s plot, so retro images of the Arrow were featured on the book’s handprinted jacket.

Those of you, like myself, who were unable to be in Montreal or Toronto for recent tributes to our late friend Glenn Goluska will be interested to note new materials that have recently been posted online about his life.

There was also a great obit in the Toronto Globe & Mail:

I’ve got a backlog of material amassed for posting to the blog (including a report about my spring roadtrip to Willowbank, an architectural school in Niagara on the Lake which focuses on the restoration arts, and a whole lot of sleuthing about in old books), but I’ve been so socked-in with deadlines and projects this summer that I’ve had no time to write the copy and post them. I’ll soon get back in the habit again as the workload finally begins to return to normal crazy.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Wayzgoose is Coming!

2011-08-22T07:42:00.000-07:00

The 2009 Gaspereau Press Wayzgoose

Gaspereau Press is preparing for its twelfth annual Wayzgoose and Open House, which will be held on Saturday October 22 at the Gaspereau Press printing works.

This year, we are pleased to have letterpress printer and wood engraver George Walker. George is presently promoting his new trade book, A is for Alice, which was published by our good friends at The Porcupine’s Quill in Erin, Ontario. Click here to see an amusing video of George and the Inksters at The Porcupine’s Quill.

We’re going to keep George pretty busy while he’s here. He’ll be give a workshop in the morning, help entertain guests during the open house in the afternoon, and present an illustrated talk on the future of the book in the evening.

The evening will also feature readings from new books by Montreal novelist Norm Ravvin and Cape-Breton-based poet Sean Howard. I will also be giving brief tributes to two important and recently lost figures in the constellation of Canadian letters: Douglas Lochhead and Glenn Goluska.

The great Canadian typographer and letterpress printer Glenn Goluska, who died last week, was a great frequenter of the Gaspereau Wayzgoose. I stumbled on this short and truly amateur video clip of Glenn at last years’s event, when he met his Alabama counterpart Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., who was the guest artist at last year’s event. Shortly after this video was taken, Amos informed Glenn that all the wooden type in the world belonged to him, but that he was okay with Glenn using it for a while if he treated it nicely.

Robert Bringhurst and Glenn Goluska at the Gaspereau Wayzgoose

We’re still ironing out the details, but in a week or two we’ll be posting a schedule of wayzgoose events and happening. The only two activities that have limited space and require preregistration are the workshops. They will run on Saturday October 22 from 9:00 until noon. There is a $40 registration fee for the workshops. Each workshop is limited to 10 participants and are filled on a first-come, first-served basis. You can register for them by emailing info@gaspereau.com or calling us a 902 678 6002. This year’s wayzgoose workshops are:

BOOKBINDING. Participants will complete a binding with the help of expert conservationist an binder Ruth Legge. Materials are provided.

THE JOYS OF PRINTMAKING. George Walker will demonstrate and discuss a number of letterpress printmaking methods. No experience required. This workshop is intended to introduce the participants to the history, tools, techniques and artistic possibilities of printmaking.

Other activities in the works are a letterpress-related film screening in cooperation with Wolfville’s Fundy Film, an author’s salon, our famous offcut paper sale, and the usual hanging-out in the printshop, talking, printing, papermaking and typecasting. The wayzgoose is always an amazingly good time, even for those of us who host it, so I hope that you’ll be able to join us.

Casting slugs at the 2010 Wayzgoose

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Glenn Goluska

2011-08-15T06:05:00.000-07:00

June 26, 1947 – August 13, 2011

Glenn Goluska, one of Canada’s great typographers, died in Montreal on Saturday after a brief battle with cancer.

Glenn grew up in Chicago and came to Canada as a student at the University of Toronto. After graduation, Glenn worked briefly in the United States before landing (on a whim, while on vacation, his then-wife Anne waiting in the car) a job as a typesetter at Coach House Press in Toronto. The work Glenn did at Coach House Press constitutes one of the most important bodies of book design in modern Canadian publishing, on par with the accomplishments of Tim Inkster, Frank Newfeld or Allan Fleming.

Glenn left Coach House to pursue letterpress printing full-time, producing many influential books and broadsides and completing commissions for people like Margaret Atwood and the Bronfman family in Montreal. His imprints were Imprimerie Dromadaire and Nightshade Press.

Later in his career, Glenn relocated to Montreal, where he worked for the Canadian Centre for Architecture and then as a freelancer for McGill-Queens Press.

Glenn was diagnosed with lung cancer last fall. I was able to travel to Montreal twice this spring while he was still relatively healthy, including in May when he was awarded the Robert Reid lifetime achievement medal by the Alucin Society of Canada, recognizing his considerable contribution to Canadian design. Glenn is survived by two brothers, his first wife, Anne, and his second wife, Bernadette.

Bernadette, Glenn and Stan Bevington in Montreal this past May

A number of tributes to Glenn’s life are being discussed by his friends and colleagues, including an exhibition and some sort of publication (a catalogue or a book). One tribute is more immediate: Glenn’s long-time friend Rod McDonald has designed a typeface named Goluska, which will have its first public showing in the forthcoming issue (No. 21) of Parenthesis, which I am producing for the Fine Press Book Association in my shop this very week. This issue contains a spread of reproductions of some of Glenn’s design work and a short tribute by Chester Gryski. When I was designing the jacket, which I printed letterpress on my vandercook, I was aware that Glenn’s life was winding down; its somber tones are a quiet tribute to the passing of a friend.

Glenn had a strong bond with Gaspereau, and was a frequent attendee to our wayzgoose and open house. There was a kinship in the swagger of our design styles and our love of fine typography; admiration that was mutual. I was surprised and honoured a number of years ago when Glenn asked me if I would take on his letterpress shop once he died and move it to Gaspereau Press. At the time, Glenn’s death was a distant, abstract idea to both of us, but now it is as bold and black and real as oversized wooden type inked and slammed into a piece of dampened paper. We’ll sort out the logistics of that move in the coming months and think about how we will keep his memory alive by using the machinery and type that he loved to make beautiful things.

This is a short and incomplete tribute, and I will write more of Glenn and his work as I have time to reflect. For now, I think I’ll just find a little Scott Joplin to play and raise a glass to my great brother in letters.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Best (Small) Publisher in Canada

2011-05-18T10:24:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, May 14, while I was inking up letterpress lobsters in Maine, The Canadian Booksellers Association announced the winners of its 2011 Libris Awards in Toronto. Gaspereau Press was named “Small Press Publisher of the Year,” an honour it has won twice before. On behalf of everyone here at Gaspereau Press, I want to express our gratitude for all the booksellers who voted for us.

The Libris Awards recognize the best in the Canadian book industry. Nominated and voted on by members of the Canadian Booksellers Association, the Libris Awards single out the best in 13 categories including best writer; best editor; best sales rep; best publisher; best small press publisher; best distributor; best fiction, non-fiction, children’s book, and young reader books; and best campus, specialty and general book retailer.

While I’m grateful for the honour, I have to admit that I always have mixed feelings about this particular award, for I feel every one of the publishers nominated in this small press category was equally deserving of nomination in the ‘big boy pants’ category, “Publisher of the Year,” which is reserved for larger firms. Separating honours into specialized categories by region, gender, ethnicity or size is always a double edged sword. While it broadens the potential for the recognition and encouragement of those whose hard work might otherwise go unrecognized, such qualifiers (best left-handed Black Saskatoonian canoeist under 40) always limit and exclude more than they foster and include.

Excellence in publishing does not reside in the number of employees a company has, or in the volume of books it produces each year. It resides in the quality of the work and the public’s response to it. On this front, there are no small or large publishers, just those who strive for the best and those who can’t be bothered. It strikes me that in a small country like Canada (already a protectionist qualifier) that the need to divide excellence into the excellence of the big and the excellence of the small seems questionable. The Alcuin awards for excellence in Canadian book design do not make such distinctions, and the remarkable balance of big and small firms whose books win their honours tells an interesting story, one the CBA might be interested in considering.

For now, I’ll revel in being the best right-handed letterpress printer residing in Black River, Nova Scotia (as far as I can discover).

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Letterpress & Maine Lobsters

2011-05-17T05:56:00.000-07:00

I met Hugh French on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, in 2009 at a meeting which aimed to stimulate more cross-border cultural exchange between New England and the Maritimes. When I learned about the work that Hugh was doing at the Tides Institute in the tiny town of Eastport, Maine, I resolved to find some excuse to get involved. Too often the American-Canadian border inhibits interaction between artists, musicians and craftsmen and the community institutions which support them. But the same tides rise and fall at Eastport as those which push up the Cornwallis River to Kentville, and a letterpress printer from small-town Nova Scotia often has more in common with his fellows in rural Maine than he has with those urban printers in Toronto or Vancouver.

Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., and Hugh French at the Tides Institute, Eastport, Maine

Or, for that matter, more in common with rural Alabama, for what finally drew me across the border was the news that my letterpress compatriot Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., was coming north to spend a week at the Tides Institute. Amos had been our special guest at the 2010 Wayzgoose, and the chance to see him again was too good to pass up.

For a Canadian making his first foray into the United States in over twenty years, Eastport was an excellent destination, for only a little water separates it from Canada; home was never for a moment out of sight. But the journey was not without its discouragements. A letter from the Tides Institute explaining the nature of my visit did not ease my entry into Maine. In fact, quite the opposite. The US Customs officers who searched my pick-up truck, though respectful and polite, seemed not to share the notion of a binational fraternity of small-town printers and artists, or, for that matter, the notion of altruism in general. They did, however, after a time, let me pass and genuinely wish me well.

The Tides Institute, Eastport, Maine

Eastport itself was more welcoming. It is a working harbour town, not a kitschy tourist trap. Once affluent, recently depressed and languishing, Eastport now appears to be undergoing a bit of a renaissance, thanks in part to an upswing in business at its port (shipping live cattle to Turkey and constructing apparatus for conveying wood chips onto ships) and in part to the innovation and tenacity of its more entrepreneurial and community-minded citizens, like Hugh French. Several years ago, Hugh purchased the decrepit remains of the Eastport Savings Bank, a three storey brick structure erected in 1887, and set about raising funds to refurbish it into a museum, gallery and arts centre. The work on the building is well underway and the project’s momentum and its effect on the community are already in evidence.

The building hosts a gallery space, a sort of ‘great room’ which houses the Tides’ library and items from its permanent collection, and a studio space and printshop. Hugh had been sending me samples of the posters which the Portland-based printer David Wolfe and others have been producing for the Tides under the imprint of Hand Line Press.

Over the side door

When I arrived in Eastport on Friday morning, I found David Wolfe and Siri Beckman busily working in the printshop. Both were participating in short residencies and working on commissions for the Tides. I was familiar with David’s work, but was intrigued to discover that he had once been a press operator at the storied Stinehour Press of Lunenburg, Vermont, and acquired much of Stinehour’s letterpress material for his own studio when Stinehour discontinued that department. Siri was proofing a colour block for a large engraving she was making of Eastport’s waterfront.

David Wolfe in his Portland studio

Amos Kennedy arrived back at the Tides by late-afternoon. He had spent his week lugging a small poster press and two cases of type around to Washington County schools, where he introduced students to letterpress printing. It had been an intense week. “You-all got your 50 cents out of me,” he teased Hugh, but it was clear that he was having an excellent time. To say that Amos is passionate about letterpress printing would be a gross understatement. He spends a good portion of his year on the road, as sort of travelling evangelist for our inky profession. After talking for a while, we headed downstairs to the gallery and pinned up Amos’s colourful and provocative boxboard posters. There was a reception in gallery, and then we moved back up to the great room to screen Proceed and Be Bold, a film about Amos’s experience as a letterpress printer. The audience was small but attentive and appreciative.

A wall of Amos Kennedy’s posters displayed in the Tides Institute’s gallery

About half-way through the film, I realized that I had forgotten to eat supper and that by the time we were finished the screening, Eastport’s few eateries would most likely be closed. And I was correct. After futile investigation of the late-evening dining prospects in the town’s two drinking establishments, Amos, Jude Valentine and I ended up back at the Todd House B&B, where we combined our modest stores – fresh eggs, broccoli and sardines, which Amos fried up in the little kitchenette in his room. This meal was supplemented by some homemade cookies which I had picked up at my mother’s on my way through New Brunswick. It was a meal well-seasoned with companionship and conversation.

Amos Kennedy cuts a lobster out of box board while David Wolfe works in the background

On Saturday, we held a sort of symposium of letterpress printers in the Tides Institute printshop. There were only two items on the agenda: 1) the collaborative creation of some sort of printed item, and 2) the securing of a lobster for Amos’s supper. Participates included: Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., of Kennedy Prints, Gordo, Alabama; David Wolfe of Wolfe Editions, Portland, Maine; Siri Beckman, printer and wood engraver, Stonington, Maine; John Vincent of A Revolutionary Press, Brooklin, Maine; Bill Schaefer, sculptor and Tides Institute’s ‘carpenter in residence’, and Hugh French and Jude Valentine of the Tides Institute. I was there too, of course.

I’m the first one to admit that I am a poor collaborator, at least when it comes to this sort of crowded hot house approach. Besides cleaning presses and tinkering with equipment, I stayed on the sidelines and let others plan the piece, set the type, and crank the Vandercook No. 4 cylinder press. Amos demonstrated one of his techniques for laying down colourful backgrounds on his posters. He locked a sheet of plywood in the press that was just about type high and toned it up with ink. By placing shapes cut from box board under the mylar top sheet of the impression cylinder, he is able to force the press sheet into contact with areas of the inked board and print the box-board shapes. These box-board shapes can be shuffled to different locations under the top sheet to alter and build-up patterns over multiple passes. In this case, we cut box board in the shape of lobsters. It is a quick, simple, and inexpensive method of making a mark.

Amos positions a box-board lobster under the mylar top sheet of the Vandercook No. 4

Amos likes to lay down a lot of ink and alters the appearance of his posters across a print run by gradually adding different colours to the rollers. This method leaves much up to chance, but can yield rewarding results.

Inking the rollers. Note the plywood sheet locked in the press

Jude Valentine feeds a sheet into the grippers

Mixing inks

In the meantime, type was set for the text and David cut a quick version of the Hand Line Press hook in a piece of plywood using knives and gouges. These were printed in black and blue inks respectively.

Setting the type

David Wolfe cuts the image of a hook into a piece of wood

Through the day, there was ample opportunity to talk about inking, paper, cylinder packing, make-ready and printing techniques. It was a symposium in the best sense to the word, not a meeting or a workshop but rather an hands-on exchange of working knowledge and ideas between practitioners and enthusiasts. Everyone contributed, and everyone learned.

David Wolfe prints while Jude Valentine and Siri Beckman sort and stack sheets

Amos holds forth while John Vincent prints

Amos in the printshop

As the last colour was being printed, Amos was whisked off to select his lobster, and after cleaning up we descended to the great room for a banquet. We ate, and we laughed, satisfying to be among friends.

Lobster at last, bib and all

I am a reluctant traveller with little wanderlust in my heart. There is a hemlock post in the centre of the house I built, and to a certain extent my health and happiness seems to bear a relationship to my proximity to it. Yet there is something important about stepping off your well-worn path from time to time, leaving your home place and inserting yourself in the company of strangers who share your passions. And if this past weekend is any indication, I feel confident that the Tides Institute in Eastport will become a more frequent destination for such wanderings.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Wild letterforms, Eastport, Maine

Salon: Book Night with the Guys

2011-04-18T13:07:00.000-07:00

Steven Slipp cooking smelts

For pushing a decade now, I’ve been getting together sporadically with a group of local fellows for what I can only describe as an anti-book-club meeting. That is, we don’t all read the same book and then get together to discuss what we liked or didn’t like about that book, like some high school English class for adult learners. No, when we get together we all sweep bound contents of our bedside tables into a rucksack and bring our individual adventures in reading to share and debate with the other fellows. More often than not, we talk as much about what is afoot in local politics and the media as we do about the books. I suppose in many ways you’d more properly call this sort of thing a salon, but that sounds a little too urbany coming out of my spruce-gum-scented mouth.

Ed Thomason and Steven Slipp (and a fried smelt)

The most recent salon was hosted by Stephen Anderson, a bonne vivant who works in international development in the area of food aid and ‘rural livelihoods’, commuting between Wolfville and Africa. When I arrived, Steven Slipp was displaying his catch of smelt, presently running up the Gaspereau River on the incoming tides.(Steven is a local designer whose work you’ve likely seen if you’ve ever licked a postage stamp in this country – the loon, the polar bear and the moose stamps to name a few – or followed a wayfinding sign in Halifax Airport)

Also present were Michael Cussons (Irish-born country doctor, bicycle enthusiast, and James Joyce booster) and Ed Thomason (English-born playwright, director, Bob Dylan fanatic and the present executive director of Festival Antigonish). There are other members of the this salon, but I’ll punish them for their non-attendence by not mentioning them here. Better show up next time guys.

The rabble: Myself, Michael Cussons and Ed Thomason

The books I took to discuss were a history of the Doves Press, George Walker’s graphic novel about the day before the World Trade Center attacks (Book of Hours, published by Tim Inkster at the Porcupine’s Quill), The Etiquette of Freedom (interviews with Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison, published by Jack Shoemaker at Counterpoint), and a catalogue Francis Meynell did for the Pelican Press. There was a rather involved discussion about purpose created content (as in whether a film made for the big screen really could ever be at home on an ipod screen), prompted in part by Michael’s expressed desire to see George Walker’s engravings from Book of Hours dispayed framed on the wall instead of bound into a book (and was it really a novel anyway, where was the text?). We also had a long talk about how, despite his old-fashionedness, Dickens often seems to have a much broader scope and is able to communicate a much broader and much more detailed picture than most modern novelists. This was prompted by Ed’s bringing Dickens’ Dombey and Son. He was going to read aloud from it, but I made the mistake of asking him if he felt there were any similarities between Dickens writing his novels in bits and pieces for periodicals and Ed’s own work on radio plays broadcast in series, and we never got back to his reading from Dickens. As is typical of these gatherings, the books often get left behind as we follow this or that thread, follow it until we’ve completely lost our way or something brings us around to someone else’s book with a "well it's funny that you would mention French Impressionism, because I’ve just been reading ..."

Michael: "Good lord! Thoreau again! Enough of it. Let's get back to Ulysses."

Anyway, after much wine and chatter about books and reading, I’m afraid that it all descended into Ed, Stephen and I playing music until nearly 2:00 am.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Poetry Books for the Trala!

2011-04-14T09:49:00.000-07:00

We’ve been in high gear this week getting two books together in time for our annual Poetry Trala! (with Coach House Books and Signal Editions) in Toronto next week. Sean Howard’s Incitements is printed, sewn and bound and was merely (until minutes ago) waiting for the jackets that I have been letterpress printing on a Vandercook hand press.

One of the interesting things about Howard’s book is that his poems are made up of text from other books. Most literary works build upon and are indebted to the texts that preceded them in the literary tradition, but Howard’s technique actually mines three books specifically – Peter Sanger’s literary essay White Salt Mountain, Merritt Gibson’s guidebook Summer Nature Notes and Hans Fallada’s novel Every Man Dies Alone – uncovering new relationships and resonances in the prose and remixing them as poetry.

I printed the jackets in three colours on a felt-finish stock: black, PMS 187 ‘wayzgoose red’, and a warm grey which was custom mixed with complete and utter disregard for replication. I have a soft spot for warm grey inks and varnishes – things that can’t be replicated in the slight-of-hand of cyan, magenta, yellow and black dots that dominates most commercial printing.

The typeface I used in Howard’s book is a customized digital version of Monotype Plantin. Released in August 1913, Plantin was one of the earlier revivals developed for the Monotype composition caster. Shortly after its release, special characters (longer ascenders and descenders and a few other niceties) were commissioned from Monotype by the English typographer Francis Meynell for use at the Pelican Press and later Nonesuch Press, but these are unfortunately absent from modern digital versions. Those wishing to use ‘Nonesuch Plantin’ must sharpen their digital gravers & files and make their own. You can read more about Monotype Plantin in an excellent paper by Brigitte Schuster, who adapted her own digital verion of Plantin while studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at The Haag, The Netherlands.

*

The other book we’re getting ready for the Poetry Trala! is George Elliott Clarke’s new collection, Red. When Clarke and I were batting around ideas for the design of the book, he presented me with a folder of artwork produced by his late father, Bill Clarke, who dabbled (in the best sense) in visual art throughout his life. As George eloquently speculated, his father seemed to understand “that art could free an Africadian from the genial humiliations of a reluctantly bestowed, strictly stereotyped, and poorly remunerated j-o-b?”

Among the papers I found a study Bill had made of an uppercase alphabet, with a few lowercase letters as well. They were rough drawings, but I thought it appropriate to scan them and convert them into an equally rough digital font. George was thrilled by this, and we used “Bill Clarke’s Caps” on the book’s cover and title page. The body type is Adobe’s Garamond Premier Pro, a digital revival of types designed by the French punchcutter Claude Garamont (c. 1490–1561) designed for Adobe by Robert Slimbach.

All the sheets for Red are printed, and we’ve begun folding and sewing the book blocks for binding tomorrow. As usual, it feels like a race to the finish line, but also, as usual, it’s a joyful race to be running.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Bowling up for Two Alberta Literary Awards

2011-04-13T05:50:00.000-07:00

Gaspereau Press is pleased to announce that Tim Bowling has been shortlisted for two Alberta Literary Awards, organized by the Writers Guild of Alberta.

Bowling’s memoir, In The Suicide’s Library, has been shortlisted for the 2011 Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction. In the meantime, his poetry collection The Annotated Bee and Me has been nominated for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award.

Awards jurors have deliberated 164 submissions to select 25 finalists in eight categories. Finalists represent extraordinary literary work written by Alberta authors and published in 2010. Winners will be announced and awards presented at the Alberta Book Awards Gala on Saturday June 11, 2011.

Celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, the Writers Guild of Alberta is the largest provincial writers’ organization in Canada, and was formed in 1980 to provide a meeting ground and collective voice for the writers of the province. Its mission is to inspire, connect, support, encourage and promote writers and writing, to safeguard the freedom to write and to read, and to advocate for the well-being of writers.

I’m quite fond of both of Tim’s nominated books, and am pleased to see them recognized in his home province. But I’m especially excited about In The Suicide’s Library, which I think is one of the most engaging and original books of prose Bowling has produced to date. It’s release was somewhat overshadowed by the clattering for The Sentimentalist, but somehow I suspect that that Bowling’s book might have a more lasting impact and a longer shelf life, building its audience slowly by actually being read more than by being read about.

Why do I think so? Well, In The Suicide’s Library is as good a book about books and the literary life as I’ve ever read, and everyone I’ve recommended it to agrees. It chronicles Bowling’s strange eight-month quest into American literature of the 1940s and ’50s and the world of book collecting, a journey branching into a wealth of subjects ranging from the relationship between fathers and daughters, suicide, masculinity, the Internet, the history of printing, bibliomania and the strange effects of midlife and obsession on an otherwise rational mind. At the book’s centre is Bowling’s astonishing discovery of a particular book. One day, alone in the Modern Literature stacks of a university library, Bowling opens a tattered copy of Wallace Stevens’s poetry collection Ideas of Order and, on the front flyleaf, finds the elegant ownership signature of Weldon Kees—an obscure American poet, painter, photographer, filmmaker and musician who vanished mysteriously in 1955, an apparent suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge. As the story unfolds, Bowling faces two central questions: the one that Weldon Kees put to his friend, Pauline Kael, on the day before he vanished—“What keeps you going?”—and, perhaps even more important, is it ever acceptable to steal a book for your own collection?

Not to overshadow The Annotated Bee and Me! Interestingly, it also takes another book as its departure point, this time, a slim volume which Bowling’s great aunt had privately printed in 1961—a memoir of her family’s beekeeping adventures in Edmonton between 1906 and 1929. The first section of the book weaves Bowling’s own verse together with excerpts from The Bee and Me, resulting in a sort of long poem which is part tribute to kin and part lament for modern life. In the second section, titled “Out of the Hive, Into the World” Bowling wrestling with the “confusion of loving too much the world.” Its poems touch on family, literature, salmon fishing and beekeeping lore, hinting at how in facing the unvarnished facts of one’s brief life one might honestly annotate their experience: “You build an immunity over time to Time / or you fall among the dried husks of the bees / on the grass.”

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

A few Alcuins for Gaspereau Press

2011-04-11T05:06:00.000-07:00

The Alcuin Society announced its list of the best-designed books in Canada last week, and a few Gaspereau Press productions merited a mention. This year four of my book designs were selected – one first, a second, and two honourable mentions.

One of the categories we usually do well in is the poetry category. While you’d think that poetry would be the very heartland of well-designed books, I’ve come to believe that the opposite is true. Of all the genres, trade publishers seem to invest the least money and attention in the design and production of poetry books, sending many of our culture’s most astonishing literary accomplishments into the world in rather shabby, thoughtless dress, ill-equipped for their journey through the ages. But not so at Gaspereau.

This year, the design of Paul Tyler’s poetry book, A Short History of Forgetting, was awarded first prize by the Alcuin judges. It is set in my customized version of Fournier, accompanied by my own Memorial Hall ornaments. (Fittingly, the ornaments are based on the borders of the stained-glass windows in Memorial Hall at the university of New Brunswick, windows I first noticed while attending Ross Leckie’s poetry weekend a couple of years ago.)

The jacket for Paul Tyler’s A Short History of Forgetting

A spread from Paul Tyler’s A Short History of Forgetting

We took second place in the Reference section for a very different sort of book, St. Andrews Architecture, 1604–1966 by Fredericton architect John Leroux and photographer Thaddeus Holownia. Vancouver type designer Ross Mills was kind enough to let me use a pre-release version of his new type face, Huronia, for this book, which had just the right wonky and warm arts-and-crafts feel about it to bring the text alive on the book’s coated paper. One of the challenges with a book like this is (as usual) to balance form and function. It was important to me that it occupy a place between a compact guidebook and a large-format photography book, drawing on the strengths of both approaches to arrive at a book that was portable, function and beautiful all at once. (This book also has a Memorial Hall flower on the title page, given that John Leroux was the one who pointed me to the windows in the first place.)

The Cover of St. Andrews Architecture

The title page of St. Andrews Architecture

A spread from St. Andrews Architecture

The honourable mentions were both in the Prose Non-fiction category (in which the judges awarded no second or third place prizes). Tim Bowling’s In the Suicide’s Library and Peter Sanger’s Through Darkling Air are quite different books, and not typical of the books which usually win in this category.

Bowling’s book is a memoir about mid-life, bibliomania and 20th century American poetry, with special attention to the life of the poet Weldon Kees. Jack McMaster made a beautiful illustration for the jacket, and I set the book in one of the best-ever American book types, Electra, designed by W.A. Dwiggins. I’ve designed a number of books in Electra, but I think that this is the first one in which I’ve actually managed to use the type in the media of offset printing with anything approaching the impact that it has in letterpress. I’ve given this book to a number of bibliophiles and booksellers, and every one of them have raved about it. I think time will demonstrate it to be one of those Gaspereau ‘classics’ like Clarke’s Execution Poems, McKay’s Vis à Vis, or Terpstra’s Falling Into Place.

Jack McMaster’s illustration for the jacket of In the Suicide’s Library

The illustration spun into a pattern for the inner cover of In the Suicide’s Library

The wordy title page of In the Suicide’s Library

A chapter opening from In the Suicide’s Library

Sanger’s Through Darkling Air is an unconventional publication as well, being Sanger’s extensive study of the life and poetry of Richard Outram. It was casebound by hand at Gaspereau with colour plates illustrating many of Outram’s rare broadsides and books issued by his Gauntlet Press. Set in Minion Pro, this is the most extensive publications to be issued by Gaspereau – other than the forthcoming edition of Jan Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy.

The jacket and wrapper for Through Darkling Air

The printed cloth cover for Through Darkling Air

The printed endpapers for Through Darkling Air

A spread from Through Darkling Air

For a complete list of this year’s Alcuin winners, and a list of locations where the books will be exhibited in the months to come, you can visit the Alcuin Society’s web site.

In the meantime, we’re all hard at work on this year’s new crop of books, starting with poetry books by Sean Howard (Incitements), George Elliott Clarke (Red) , and Jan Zwicky (Forge). George and Sean will be reading in Toronto at our annual Poetry Tra-la on April 20th, in conjuction with Coach House Press, Signal Editions, and Ben McNally Books (info to follow).

By the way, if you are wondering why you haven’t seen a Gaspereau Press catalogue, it’s because we didn’t issue one this spring, opting instead to invest time and resources in overhauling our web site (coming soon!) and, well, recovering from last fall’s Sentimentalists shenanigans, which left us extremely behind in our regularly scheduled work. We’ll be issuing a larger catalogue in early summer to get things back on track.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

A Trip to Goluskaville

2011-04-07T09:42:00.000-07:00

Glenn Goluska in his apartment

For a number of years now, and almost without fail, Montreal-based typographer and letterpress printer Glenn Goluska has been making an annual fall trip to Kentville to attend the Gaspereau Press wayzgoose. Year after year I’ve promised Glenn that I’d drop in and visit his printshop near the Lachine Canal in Montreal. As a carrot, Glenn’s been holding a promised copy of one of his more famous letterpress broadsides as bait, insiting that I come by and collect it in person.

The Goluska Printshop

It’s no simple thing to escape the responsibilities of our under-staffed and overworked printshop. But at the end of March, I finally made good on my promise, driving up to Montreal for a two-day visit and taking Rod McDonald – designer of the typefaces Laurentian, Cartier Book, Slate Sans, Smart Sans … – as my copilot. No surprise, type and design occupied at least 75% of our conversation over the duration of our 20-some-hour round trip.

Glenn Goluska, I should mention, is one of the most astonishing typographic designers I’ve encountered in this country. His portfolio of trade design work includes a veritable library of literary books designed during his heady early days at Coach House Press in Toronto, an incomparable collection of posters and catalogues designed for the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and countless book jackets designed for McGill-Queens Press. A few examples (taken quickly, in poor light):

Glenn’s also an accomplished letterpress printer and Linotype operator, and his Imprimerie Dromadaire and Nightshade Press are responsible for many stunning private press publications. Some of my favorites include Alexander Urusov’s The Cry of Distant Ants (1978), Margaret Atwood’s Unearthing Suite (Grand Union Press, 1983), Scott Joplin (1983) and Robert Kroetsch’s Liebhaber’s Wood Type (1987). By amd large, the type for these books was composed on Glenn’s Linotype model 31 caster using and his excellent collection of Linotype typefaces – Electra, Falcon, Palatino, Optima, Metro Black, Trump. He has also handset many pieces from the hundreds of drawers of lead and wood type he has collected over the years, including a number of rare fonts of Cyrillic.

The cover of bpNichol's continuum

A spread from Alexander Urusov’s The Cry of Distant Ants (1978)

Cover of Scott Joplin (1983)

A spread from Robert Kroetsch’s Liebhaber’s Wood Type (1987)

We spent most of our visit sitting around in cafes, restaurants and in the printshop talking about printing and type, but Rod and I also made contact with a few other folks who are active in Montreal’s typographic scene. On Friday, we visited Judith Poirier at the University of Quebec at Montreal. Judith made a short animated film called Dialogue by printing directly on the filmstock using lead type and a vandercook proof press. Her book about the film, also called Dialogue, won an honourable mention at the Alcuins and was shortlisted at the 2010 Leipzig Book Fair. Judith’s letterpress work uses type playfully, more as a graphic element than as a system to construct words, paragraphs and books.

Judith Poirier & Rod McDonald at UMAQ

The work of typographer and Dawson College instructor George Vaitkunas is more of my ilk. Vaitkunas joined us for a chat and Linotype demo in Glenn’s shop on Saturday afternoon. He’s designed some great award-winning books over the past few decades for publishers like Douglas & McIntyre and UBC Press. I expect that we’ll soon find an excuse to invite him to speak at a future wayzgoose.

George Vaitkunas & Glenn Goluska in Goluska's shop

Paper maker David Carruthers also dropped by for a quick visit, though a plan to tour the St. Armand paper mill didn’t work out due to time constraints.

Well, it was a quick trip, but an inspiring one. On the drive home, Rod and I talked at length about the influence Glenn’s work and friendship has had on our own careers and the impact his work would have on the next generation of designers if his work was actively used in the teaching of graphic design in Canada. Like so many of the best typographers, his work is not as widely known as it could be, mostly because Glenn has worked away quietly all these years, perfecting his art, not drawing undue attention to himself or his work.

In encountering Glenn’s typographic design I have often found, as in Thoreau’s writings, unanticipated companionship in the confirmation of things I had long been muddling through and sorting out on my own, discovered that my own peculiar ideas and seemingly idiosyncratic methods of working them out had previously – with equal peculiarity and idiosyncrasy – been worked out, and sometimes in an uncannily similar fashion, by Goluska on his own journey of learning the art of book design. This discovery is not unlike overhearing the dialect of your native village spoken by a stranger in on the other side of the world: your head turns involuntarily toward its familiar music; you recognize it, and it recognizes you, and you are suddenly at home.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Edible Book Day

2011-04-01T10:05:00.000-07:00

Gaspereau Press celebrated International Edible Book Day today, lunching on book-themed treats prepared by Basma, Trina and Ceri. Our special surprise guest was musician and Gaspereau author Bob Snider who just happened to wander in for a visit as festivities were getting underway.

The menu included: Trina’s rice paper wraps (with poems written on the rice paper); Ceri’s cracker, cheese and carrot booklets and ‘book choy’; and Basma’s super sweet chocolate type, complete with chocolate-dipped graham crackers ‘leads’.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

A Meagre and Imperfect Picture

2011-02-28T09:31:00.000-08:00

If you do much digging into the history of printing and publishing in Nova Scotia, one of the characters you will encounter is Joseph Howe (1804–73), printer, newspaperman, politician, and reformer. Howe is perhaps best known for defending himself against charges of ‘seditious libel’ in 1835 in a case that is now widely credited as establishing the of freedom of the press in Canada. One of Howe’s best-selling authors was Thomas Haliburton (1769–1865). Haliburton is best known for his literary character Sam Slick, an opinionated Yankee clock peddler who travels Nova Scotia.

I was recently looking over some photographs I took of one of Howe’s publications, Thomas Haliburton’s two-volume An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, which Howe issued from his Halifax press in 1829. This handsome title page indicates that Howe was stocking a range of types, which are tastefully set by his compositor. Notice, however the awkward spacing between the V and A in “NOVA-SCOTIA,” and superfluous comma as well. This problem could easy have been fixed by optically spacing the capital letters, as is done below with “HALIFAX”. The subtile ornaments make a valuable contribution to the arrangement of this page.

The chapters headings of Haliburton’s book employ an out-dented and italicized summary at their head listing each chapter’s major themes. This once-common technique is now rarely used in contemporary books.

At first glance, the title page to Volume Two looks like it was printed from the same form as Volume One, but it is not. There are many differences. To name a few: the ornaments are different; the title line NOVA SCOTIA is set with a completely different font (though with no better treatment of the spacing of V and A); and the second volume shifts the word “by” to the final line of the publisher’s notice.

One of the things that caught my eye when I first looked at these volumes was a notice printed on a piece of paper and bound into the book before the title page. The notice reads:

The Publisher has to apologize for the appearance of the View of Halifax, which he regrets is not equal to his wishes. The person by whom it was politely furnished, not being aware that the engraver required a plain ink drawing, coloured the view; and as it was executed by an American Artist, quite unacquainted with the scene, it makes rather a meagre and imperfect picture.

An American Artist, quite unacquainted with the scene? It was not uncommon in those days for printers to commission steel or copper plate engravings to illustrate a work, and for these to be executed based on paintings or sketches provided to the engraver. Let’s have a look at this “meagre and imperfect picture.”

I wonder what fault Howe, or perhaps Haliburton, found with it – and how that fault might have been the result of the local artist providing the engraver with a “coloured” view instead of a “plain ink drawing.” Also, if it distressed Howe to the extent that he felt the need to alert the reader to its shortcomings, underwriting the added expense of printing the errata note and binding it into the book, why did he not simple omit the engraving from the work? Was there author-publisher politics at play here?

One of the other fine illustrations in the book (which was apparently not misrendered) is this one of the provincial House of Assembly in Halifax.

I also can’t resist these step tables illustrating various travelling distances. Composing these tables using type, metal rules and leading required a degree of typographic sophistication that does Howe’s Halifax print shop credit.

I also noted the binder’s ticket on the inside of the front cover. “Phillips. Binder. Halifax.” The only Phillips I’ve come across who was a Halifax book binder was William Phillips, born in 1841 in Connecticut. If it’s in fact his ticket, it would imply that Phillips rebound or repaired these books at some point in their travels.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

On CBC Radio’s Canada Reads

2011-02-16T05:33:00.000-08:00

This was the first year ever that I have had the distinctly puzzling experience of listening to all the episodes of CBC Radio’s Canada Reads, the national public broadcaster’s well-intended attempt to cultivate a broader consumer base – er, I mean readership – for Canadian authored novels. To my ears, Canada Reads bore a closer resemblance to the CBC’s comedy program The Debaters than to anything I would consider an engaging discourse on books (other than the fact that it wasn't funny); that is, it was simply light entertainment.

I’d have no problem with this fact had the celebrity panelists actually succeeded at being entertaining, or had they had not, with every other breath, made such embarrassingly earnest and self-congratulatory declarations about their important role picking ‘the essential book’ which might tempt our nation of non-readers (really?) back to reading Canadian novels (graphic novels need not apply). First off, I can tell you with some degree of certainty that this is a flawed, foolish notion. This ‘essential’ book does not exist in any culture; a literature is built from many books. I can also tell you that if the nation’s literature (as distinct from its book trade) were ever actually in real peril, I hope to God that we could muster a better rescue squad to send to its defense than these five celebrities.

Is this the best we can hope for from the CBC with regards to its coverage of literature on the radio? Eleanor Wachtel’s Writers & Company is an excellent program that may point the way, and while I’d be the last to complain about its largely international focus, its contribution to the discussion of Canadian texts is slim. So where is its domestic equivalent? Do Canadian books not also merit this level of engagement, or will they forever be relegated to the fluffy coffeebreak chit-chat of Shelagh Rogers’ The Next Chapter and the gameshow nonsense of Canada Reads? Afterall, shouldn’t the CBC’s coverage of this important aspect of our culture aspire to be more than a vehicle for light entertainment and commercial book promotion?

Let's go, CBC. Step up your game.

ANDREWS STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Marginalia, Judges, Poets

2011-02-16T04:45:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine is a library technician at the university library. Recently, he’s been cataloguing the sundry textbooks which have been donated to the achieves over the years. From time to time I’ll drop in and see what’s on his cart. One day I spotted a reader I used in grade school, The Dog Next Door, published by Ginn & Company in 1971. I like rediscovering books I used as a child and looking to see how well (or more often how poorly) they were designed. What effect does the typographic landscape have on you in your formative years?

Another day, my friend at the library told me that while cataloguing a little textbook he’d stumbled across a student’s drawing of his professor, the poet Charles G.D. Roberts (1860-1943). Which book? I wanted to know. Did you take a photo? Did you include this detail in the bibliographic entry? He pursed his lips and said he’d have to get back to me. He’d been through a lot of textbooks, you have to understand.

A week or two later he emailed to say that he’s turned up the book again. It was a tiny Greek primer, The Alcestis of Euripides, with short English notes for the use of schools, published by Oxford in 1864. The book seems to have moved through the hands of a number of students, but the last owner (and the apparent cartoonist, based on the handwriting) was one Asa James Crockett (1870–1966). Crockett was born in Wine Harbour, NS. After graduating from the Pictou Academy, he earned a BA and an MA from Acadia, which is most likely where he aquired this textbook and encountered Roberts.

Almost every available space in the tiny book was filled with annotations and drawings, including this fist.

Crockett went on to be a juvenile court judge in Pictou County, Nova Scotia. And I have to wonder if, from time to time, he did not resume his old habit of doodling while taking notes while on the bench.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Danger Pay

2011-02-14T10:53:00.000-08:00

Martin Levin at the Globe & Mail invited me to write a short piece for My Books, My Place, a regular feature in the paper’s Saturday Arts section. This required sending a photographer to the back corner of snowy Kings County to take a picture of me where I read. Lucky for me they sent a fellow New Brunswicker, Halifax-based freelancer Sándor Fizli. While shooting from the outside of the house looking in, Sándor ended up wallowing in thigh-deep snow.

You can see some of Sándor’s other work at his web site.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

The Joyful Printer

2011-01-31T07:06:00.000-08:00

I suppose it’s time to emerge from hibernation and resume posting on the Gaspereau Press Blog. I have plenty of interesting type and book related tidbits stockpiled for posting, but better to start with the joyful task of kicking off a new publishing season. I always love seeing books that have long been perking away in vitro suddenly take more obvious physical form as ink hits paper and design goes from theory to execution. At Gaspereau, the 2011 book season starts with Norman Ravvin’s new novel, The Joyful Child, which he’ll be launching next week in Montreal. Next week? Hmm. Better get some ink on the press, I guess.

Norm’s book jackets will be printed letterpress, featuring an image by Melanie Boyle. Melanie’s illustrations also decorate the chapter headings.

Norm’s Montreal launch will be at 5:30 pm on Monday February 7th, hosted by the Department of Religion, Concordia University, Room H 767 (Hall Building), 1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.

There will also be reading at 5:00 pm on February 13th at Shaika Cafe, 5526 Sherbrooke St. West, Montreal. Thanks to Librairie Paragraphe Bookstore who will be selling books at that event.

You can also check out Norm’s own book page.

By the way, a long overdue overhaul of the Gaspereau Press web site is presently in progress. We’ll be launching that by spring if everything works out as planned.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Jim Rimmer Talk

2011-01-17T11:39:00.000-08:00

On January 29, Rod McDonald and I will be giving a talk about Jim Rimmer at the AGM of the Graphic Designers of Canada, Atlantic Chapter.

Ukes & Books

2010-11-26T05:32:00.000-08:00

Gaspereau Press’s unofficial ‘artist in residence’ and skilled bindery hand Basma Kavanaugh is presently wandering around in Alabama doing a little bit of printing. She sent me this wonderful Youtube link of Peter Thomas which features Ukes and books. Peter, be sure to come see us if you ever travel this far north.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Gaspereau at work

2010-11-24T13:07:00.000-08:00

Once the dust started to settle last week, Canadian Press reporter Michael Tutton and photo journalist Andrew Vaughan came down and shot some nice footage of Gaspereau's staff at work on The Sentimentalists. You can see that video on the Globe and Mail site.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER &PUBLISHER

Finding the Way Through

2010-11-16T03:43:00.000-08:00

Well, Scott McIntyre at D&M and Gary and I here in Kentville spent a lot of yesterday on the telephone and standing in front of cameras, talking about the plan to get The Sentimentalists out to Canadian Readers quicker, without compromising all the things we stand for as literary publishers. CBC's The National did a nice job of summing up the story on their broadcast last night.

Gary and I want to thank everyone who has expressed their support for Johanna and the work of the press. Literature, at the heart of it all, only thrives where there exists a community of shared interests, shared concerns, and shared fates. What I'm saying, I suppose, is that Johanna's story, and our story, is also your story, because you engaged it and helped make it all so.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I still have a hell of a lot of books to make, and I'd better get back to it if I want to make as many people as possible happy before Christmas.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Skibsrud checks in from Turkey

2010-11-15T12:05:00.000-08:00

Earlier today, Giller winner Johanna Skibsrud issued the following statement for the press through her agent, Tracy Bohan, at Wylie UK:

I am really pleased wıth the Gaspereau/Douglas and McIntyre deal -- am so glad that a solution has been arrived at that allows the books to be distributed widely wıthout sacrıfıcıng any of Gaspereau Press's practıses and ideals, whıch make them so unıque and special to work with. One thing that I really apprecıate is that Andrew and Gary took into account my own personal feelıngs and interests when makıng this business decision. Not many publishers would do that -- it makes me feel very grateful to be working wıth them.

Johanna is presently travelling in Turkey.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

The Giller Plan

2010-11-15T03:35:00.000-08:00

DOUGLAS & McINTYRE ACQUIRES TRADE PAPERBACK RIGHTS TO THE 2010 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE WINNER, THE SENTIMENTALISTS, FROM GASPEREAU PRESS

Responding to the high demand of Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, Gaspereau Press licenses Canadian trade paperback rights to Douglas & McIntyre, an imprint of D&M Publishers, who plan to ship stock by November 19

November 14, 2010 – VANCOUVER, CANADA -- Before Scott McIntyre’s head hit the pillow Tuesday night following the Giller gala, he sent a long email to his friend and colleague Andrew Steeves, co-publisher of Gaspereau Press, reporting on the extraordinary evening. McIntyre and Steeves immediately hatched a plan to make Johanna Skibsrud’s debut novel widely available to the Canadian book trade, while still honouring Gaspereau’s craft.

Andrew Steeves commented:

“It was important to us that no copy of the book would say 'Gaspereau Press' on the spine unless it came directly from our own hands; that’s simply the way we work. But when Johanna won the prize it was clear that our method of printing and publishing books wouldn’t meet the demand. It was critical to find a partner who shared our values. Douglas & McIntyre was the obvious choice.

“We’re delighted to be working with Douglas & McIntyre and Friesens to produce a new edition of The Sentimentalists for the wider marketplace. This alliance will ensure that our author’s accomplishment will be honoured, and that readers across the country will have ready access to well-made copies of the book.”

The first 30,000 copies of the Douglas & McIntyre edition of The Sentimentalists (ISBN 978-1-55365-895-5, $19.95, paperback), printed on high quality FSC eco-paper, will be shipped from the bindery on November 19, less than 10 days after the Giller was awarded. Paper is on hand for an immediate reprint of 20,000 copies. The e-book is already a bestseller on Kobo and Douglas & McIntyre will make it available through other e-book retailers, including the Apple iBookstore, Amazon Kindle, Sony eBook store, eBooks.com and Barnes & Noble’s NOOK Store. Gaspereau Press will continue to issue copies of its original edition ($27.95, 978-1-55447-078-5, sewn paperback with letterpress-printed jacket), giving readers a choice of two quality editions of the book.

McIntyre added:

“I have huge respect for Andrew and Gary’s dedication to their craft. This includes putting their author first. With our sales, marketing and distribution system onside, an exceptional novel will quickly reach the wide audience it deserves.

“Three proudly independent Canadian entities – Gaspereau Press in Nova Scotia; Douglas & McIntyre in Vancouver and Toronto; and Friesens in Manitoba – have combined forces to celebrate a remarkable writer, a wise and beautiful novel, and the gift Jack Rabinovich gave Canada when he launched the Giller Prize and dared us all to elevate our game.”

Giller night Gaspereau Party

2010-11-10T11:34:00.000-08:00

Jack on the Giller Script

2010-11-09T05:13:00.000-08:00

The National Post carried a thoughtful article on the Scotiabank Giller Prize today written by Jack Illingworth, the Executive Director of the Literary Press Group of Canada. In the article Jack makes an excellent explanation of the clash of cultures that takes place when literary presses find themselves nominated for prizes like the Giller, which are usually dominated by the giant multinational book factories in Toronto.

Says Illingworth: “This may seem like willful eccentricity on the part of Andrew Steeves and Gary Dunfield, Gaspereau’s co-publishers. It’s actually something much more interesting: a commitment to a thoughtful, rigorous, refined mode of publishing. While publishing is usually discussed as a business, or an industry, all of the finest small press publishers practice it as an art form. The books that they choose to publish aren’t chosen to fill out a season with a handful of products that stand a reasonable chance of selling. Their lists are cultural projects, embodying a few individuals’ ideas of what literature can be.”

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTERS & PUBLISHERS

Gaspereau Press at Windsor Castle

2010-11-08T07:22:00.000-08:00

At one time, if a Maritime literary publisher mentioned that something was going on at Windsor Castle, he was most likely referring to the poet Alden Nowlan’s nickname for his Fredericton home, but in this case I’m talking about the real thing. Gaspereau Press was pleased to learn that one of its printed pieces is not only in the collection of her majesty Queen Elizabeth II, but that is also presently on display in the gallery her offical residence, Windsor Castle.

This month, Windsor Castle is exhibiting the broadside "The Last Post" along with portraits of the two last surviving British First World Wat vetrerans, Henry Allingham (1896–2009) and Harry Patch (1898–2009) Mr Patch served with the 7th Battalion, Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry as a Lewis machine-gunner and Mr Allingham with the Royal Air Force as an aircraft mechanic. Both participated in the three-month Battle of Passchendaele in 1917: Mr Patch in the trenches, and Mr Allingham repairing the aircraft damaged in the fighting.

Vancouver Island University’s Institute for Island Studies commissioned us design and print this boardside in the fall of 2009 to mark a visit by Britain’s poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. The commission required a quick turnaround and there was some difficulty getting enough sheets of ‘old masters’ handmade paper from Montreal’s Papeterie Saint-Armand. But in the end all turned out well. I hand-printed 133 copies of the 18 × 38 cm broadside. Jack McMaster and I collaborated on a stylized poppy fleuron specifically for the project too.

You can view the the boardside and the portraits and hear a reading for the poem on The Royal Collection’s web site.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

We're getting Sentimental

2010-11-02T06:41:00.000-07:00

It is simply too busy to write a proper post at the moment, but here’s a quick glance behind the scenes into some of the work that’s going on right now as we race to put together more copies of Johanna Skibsrud’s novel, The Sentimentalists, which is shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The awards gala is a week away. Gary, who will be representing the press at the event, has been measured for a tux. He is threatening to get his wiskers trimmed even. Oh, the humanity!

I set up two Vandercook proof presses and printed jackets straight through the night last Thursday in order to have books at the International Festival of Author’s readings in Toronto on the weekend.

This clip shows Basma and Gary binding the sewn book blocks on a three-pocket Sulby binder.

Laura stayed late trimming books one night and it seems that trimming so many of the same book for so long drove her to some pretty creative stacking. Perhaps she is considering a jump to a career in setting up endcap displays in bookstores.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Globe & Mail Visits Gaspereau

2010-10-26T05:28:00.000-07:00

The Toronto Globe & Mail published a reasonable little piece on Gaspereau Press and its even-keeled, principled approach to the Giller madness in Monday’s paper. I think on the whole the article captured the story pretty well, though I wish it had tried to communicate the philosophical underpinnings of our approach. I talked a long time with the G&M’s Kate Taylor about the balance between local economy and global market forces, about the ecosystem of Canadian literary culture and the things literary publishing has in common with substance farming and the slow food movement. Newspaper articles infrequently have space for this sort of context, and reading the article may leave some readers asking “Why the heck would anyone want to do things this way?”

Perhaps the short quotation from Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience which we printed as a broadside during our weekend wayzgoose will begin to answer that question, though I’m anxious, once things quiet down again, to write more extensively about Gaspereau’s philosophical underpinnings and their pragmatic application to our day to day work:

How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, & enjoy it? Is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved? […] Action from principle — the perception & the performance of right — changes things & relations; it is essentially revolutionary & does not consist wholly with any thing which was. It not only divided States & churches, it divides families; aye, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.

Every time we make a book here, we change the world a little, not only because of what those books have to say, but because of what the way in which we make those books have to say too.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Wayzgoose!

2010-10-25T05:53:00.000-07:00

Gaspereau Press hosted another successful wayzgoose and open house this weekend. I spent most of the day stuck back in the casting room showing off the Ludlow hot metal casters, so I’m grateful to those who took pictures. Below are a few snapped by Jack McMaster.

Our special guest artist, Alabama letterpress printer Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., had a great time printing a keepsake on our Vandercook Universal 1 press.

Ellis Clayton and Adam Steeves manned a parlour press.

Gaspereau’s pressman Matt McLean talks to a visitor about the operation of the Heidelberg KORD 64 offset press – or perhaps about the ongoing relevance of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience.

Matt again at the Heidelberg. That's author Susal Haley in the foreground, leaning on the press.

Laura MacDonald and Nic Dunfield (in a Tim Inkster like top hat) help a visitor ‘couch’ a sheet of handmade paper.

Nic Dunfield and Laura MacDonald beating scraps of old blue jeans into ‘stuff’ for papermaking.

Adam Steeves and Ellis Clayton setting up the parlour press with Basma Kavanaugh.

Here I am explaining the workings of the Ludlow hot metal linecaster.

And here I am helping a visitor to set a line of matrices for casting.

Letterpress printer and photographer Thaddeus Holownia of Anchorage Press, Jolicure, New Brunswick, talking to visitors about the Vandercook 219 letterpress in my office.

Thaddeus Holownia and author Peter Sanger printing a wayzgoose keepsake in my office.

Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., signing posters for visitors.

We'll post some more photos and videos as the week goes on. Right now, we're busy setting the shop to rights again, and setting up to get some more The Sentimentalists bound.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Bruce at the Goose

2010-10-21T12:47:00.000-07:00

As well as binding some copies of The Sentimentalists (cut and paste that statement into any Gaspereau blog posting in the forthcoming months ...) we were collating copies of Bruce Johnson’s novel Firmament this afternoon, which will be launched at the Wayzgoose on Saturday. Here’s a short clip of me messing up what had been an otherwise orderly bit of table walking by Basma, Laura and Connie by introducing a camera into the mix.

Each of the sections they are picking up is a sheet folded three times to make a 16 page ‘signature’. After they are thus gathered, they are sewn together into a book block and bound in a cover.

Note the gumdrops on the table. Very important.

You can hear Bruce Johnson read from this new book on Saturday evening at 7:00 pm at the Kentville Rec Centre.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

The Goose Also Honks

2010-10-20T13:51:00.000-07:00

We’re getting all cleaned up for the Wayzgoose this Saturday. I know it seems like we’re all type, ink, and paper all the time, but we’re also pretty musical around here and we like to have some musical guests at the wayzgoose too. A frequent guest at the goose is author and musician Bob Snider, captured here in a perfomance at a wayzgoose:

This year, we’ve invited Wolfville’s Mud Creek Boys to perform on Saturday evening. They will be setting the tone for readings by Bruce Johnson and Peter Sanger and for the discussion with Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., and Sylvia Hamilton. I hope we’ll see you at the Kentville Civic Building at 7:00.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Helvetica with a twist of Caslons

2010-10-19T09:36:00.001-07:00

The Fundy Film Society will be screening the documentary Helvetica Wednesday evening at the Al Whittle Theater on Main Street in Wolfville, continuing their tradition of programming a type or printing related film in advance of Gaspereau Press’s annual wayzgoose. The film starts at 7:00 pm. General Admission is $8.

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type. The film was Directed by Gary Hustwit and written by Chris Greenhalgh and features typographic heavyweights (boldfaces?) Matthew Carter, Erik Spiekermann, Massimo Vignelli, Wim Crouwel and many more. Okay, so even if you don’t know who those people are and can’t pick Helvetica out of a line up, it’s still an interesting film.

Here in the printshop it has been a Caslony kind of day. Bruce Johnson’s novel Firmament is on both Matt’s Hiedelberg press and my Vandercook handpress right now. Matt’s got the first side of most of the lifts printed. The book is set in two digital revivals of Caslon, the body text in Carol Twombly’s version from Adobe (which is designed to withstand the rigors of offset printing in text sizes) and the display matter in Matthew Carter’s masterful Big Caslon. They make a good team, these types.

I’ve had a day of distractions thus far, but am working my way through printing the second colour on a stack of Hemlock-coloured felt-finish sheets of paper, what will be Bruce Johnson’s book jacket. I thought that I'd see how gold ink looked, though as I suspected it was too gaudy. Next I mixed some silver into a dark green ink and ended up with a mint-coloured concoction that works in the right tonal range on the paper. Sometimes you just don’t know until it’s all laid out in front of you whether it’s going o work, and I suppose that’s what keeps it interesting.

The top sheet is a makeready of the final colour (the first pull, so some of the stars are not fully inked yet); The bottom sheet shows the gold.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Amos Kennedy on CBC's Maritime Noon on Tuesday

2010-10-18T12:04:00.000-07:00

Soon-to-be Wayzgoose special guest Amos Paul Kennedy will be on CBC Radio's Maritime Noon tomorrow. CBC describes the program as:

"Ever dream of walking out of the 9 to 5 job, ditching the corporate world, and setting off on a bold new course doing something you truly love. Amos Paul Kennedy Junior did just that, in a most curious way: the Alabama man became a letterpress artist, turning out whimsical posters infused with wisdom and hilarity. His work is currently on display in Halifax. Never has a man in overalls been such an unforgettable example of a life lived fully and without regret. Amos Paul Kennedy is our guest as we ask 'What do you want to do with the rest of your life?'"

Phone-in: 1-800-565-1940

You can catch the program on-line by visiting CBC Radio's site and selecting the Halifax station between noon and 1:00 pm Atlantic Time.

Thanks to our co-hosts at NSCAD for arranging this public radio shin-dig for Amos.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Printshop notes

2010-10-18T10:41:00.000-07:00

Well, Tim Bowling’s In The Suicide’s Library is now beginging to circulate. The first copies arrived in Alberta last Tuesday for a reading, and Tim says they were well received and much admired (and that’s before he even read from it). I notice Gary’s got a copy flopped opened on his desk, reading it on break. That’s usually a good sign.

We’ve finally got sheets for Johanna Skibsrud’s Giller Shortlisted The Sentimentalists printed and folded and ready for the bindery, but they will to have to sit caged up in a couple of giant postal bins until after the weekend’s Wayzgoose and Open House. Perhaps, I opined to Gary, we should set the book out and get everyone who comes to the Wayzgoose to help gather them into book blocks for sewing? Where else could a whole community take part in the production of a Giller shortlisted book? But likely we’ll wait until after the crowds go away, lest some visitor spill his drink or some bump the table, endangering many thousands of dollars worth of soon-to-be books.

Another reason to wait until next week to bind Giller books is that Newfoundland writer Bruce Johnson is coming to take part in the Wayzgoose celebration, and we’re hoping that with a little luck we’ll actually have copies of his novel, Firmament, available Saturday. They just started on the press today, so it may mean bringing him from the airport to the printshop on Friday night to help us bind and trim books. I started the letterpress jackets today, so at least those will be ready.

If you’re in the area, remember to join us Saturday at the printshop for a wide range of events, including our special guest Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. I think Amos gets to Nova Scotia today, actually, and will be doing some things at NSCAD University through the week.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

What's good for the Goose is good for the Giller

2010-10-08T04:01:00.001-07:00

Wayzgoose is creeping closer. And somewhere in the midst of all the fall book production and Giller reprint madness we’re going to have to find some time to sweep the floors and clear off some tables to make room for our company.

In the meantime, Tim Bowling’s book is nearly ready to go out the door and Bruce Johnson’s novel is going to film first of next week in the hopes of having copies by wayzgoose. Norm Ravvin’s novel is ready to go right on its heels.

And we’re now also hustling to marshal the paper and resources to start an initial reprint of Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists. Whether or not Johanna actually wins the Giller Prize (and she’s got a great shot – it’s a pretty open field) it promises to be a pretty entertaining fall. It will be interesting to see how well the moneygrubbing corners of the book trade survive dealing with an independent literary press with it’s feet firmly planted on the ground, a press that deals with the world one book at a time off the tips of its publishers very fingers, where books are real things and made in-house and not simply widgets conjured into existence by the tens of thousands from corner offices with a cellphone call and a cheque book between meetings.

Yeah, I know we have an astonishing amount of work ahead of us if the ‘Giller bump’ actually pans out, a lot of labour, capital and material to get assembled and pointed in the right direction during what is already an overtaxed time of year here at the press. The reality is that people who want this book will most likely have to wait a bit for their copy. That’s the brute reality of making things the way we make things. But when they do get hold of a copy, they will get hold of a real thing, a book worth reading and rereading, and one equal to that task.

If The Sentimentalists does win, it will be the first time the Giller-winning book will also have been the winner of the Alcuin Society’s award for Excellence in Canadian Book Design (though if I remember correctly, Kong Njo got a third place Alcuin for Atwood’s Alias Grace and Spencer Francy Peters had an honourable mention for Richler’s Barney’s Version). So I feel that it is important that the 6328th copy of the book we manufacture (or, if you believe the numbers hype, the 20,328th) be every bit as well made as the first one, and not just a disposible rectangular hunk of woodpulp and glue temporarily propped into the shape of a mass market novel, a mere shadow of its beginnings. I’m not interested in that, whatever anyone else may think. I'm a crummy capitalist; I believe above all else that readers deserve books worthy of their content, and the content of this book is exceptional.

(And yes, for those indifferent to the physical world, we'll see about getting something out there for your ephemeral e-reader devices. When your eyes bug out, your thumbs drop off and your battery dies, we'd also be happy to sell you a real book.)

Okay, back to work!

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Skibsrud is on the Giller Shortlist

2010-10-06T04:47:00.000-07:00

Johanna Skibsrud is on the Giller shortlist. I'll write more later when I have a minute to sit down for half a second. For now, here's the text of our press release:

On Tuesday 5 October the Scotiabank Giller Prize unveiled the 2010 shortlist for Canada’s richest literary prize for fiction. Included on the list was Johanna Skibsrud’s novel The Sentimentalists. The prize, worth $50,000, will be awarded at a gala event in Toronto on 9 November 2010. The shortlist, chosen by journalist Michael Enright, American novelist Claire Messud and British novelist Ali Smith, includes:

David Bergen’s novel The Matter with Morris (HarperCollins)
Alexander MacLeod’s short story collection Light Lifting (Biblioasis)
Sarah Selecky’ short story collection This Cake Is For The Party, (Thomas Allen Publishers)
Johanna Skibsrud’s novel The Sentimentalists (Gaspereau Press)
Kathleen Winter’s Annabel (House of Anansi Press)

According to the Scotiabank Giller Prize web site (www.scotiabankgillerprize.ca) CTV has confirmed that it will be the official media partner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize gala for a sixth consecutive year. Seamus O’Regan will host the gala, which will be broadcast live on Bravo! and CTV.ca with the CTV network premiere the following day, Wednesday, November 10, 2010. Subsequent encore broadcasts and complete broadcast details to be announced soon. CTV will once again support the broadcast with a dedicated website, giller.CTV.ca.

About the Book

Johanna Skibsrud’s debut novel connects the flooding of an Ontario town, the Vietnam War, a trailer in North Dakota and an unfinished boat in Maine. Parsing family history, worn childhood memories, and the palimpsest of old misunderstandings, Skibsrud’s narrator maps her father’s past.

Napoleon Haskell lives with Henry in the town of Casablanca, Ontario, on the shores of a man-made lake beneath which lie the remains of the former town. Henry is the father of Napoleon’s friend Owen, who died fighting in Vietnam. When her life comes apart, Napoleon’s daughter retreats to Casablanca and is soon immersed in the complicated family stories that lurk below the surface of everyday life. With its quiet mullings and lines from Bogart, The Sentimentalists captures a daughter’s wrestling with a heady family mythology.

"The real beginning of this story," says Skibsrud, "was a summer that I spent working on Flagstaff lake, a lake that covers four now submerged townships in northern Maine, and served as the inspiration for the lake and the buried town in my book. That fall, with the beginnings of a story in my head, my father began to speak for the first time about his experiences in the Vietnam War. I am still not sure exactly why he told me his story when he did, but I think it had to do – it was 2003 then – with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which had been for some time stirring in him a deep anger toward a government willing to repeat the mistakes of the past at the expense of innocent people; soldiers as well as civilians. My mother thinks that my father told me his stories because he knew that I would do something with them – what I did write, though, was not my father’s story, but my own. And it is not a true story. At its root, though, there are two true things. One is my father’s testimony following Operation Liberty II in 1967, in which he spoke out against the murder of a civilian woman by the Captain of his squad. The other is the feeling I got floating over the buried towns of Flagstaff Lake: a feeling of the way that everything exists in layers, that nothing disappears; it just gets hidden sometimes."

The Sentimentalists, designed by Gaspereau Press’s Andrew Steeves, recently won first place in the the fiction category of the Alcuin Society’s 2010 competition for Excellence in Canadian Book Design. Typeset in customized version of Eric Gill’s Joanna types, the book prompted Alcuin judges to hail Steeves as "a modern day Eric Gill updating the medieval." The sheets were printed offset, folded into signatures, Smyth sewn and bound into paper covers. They are enfolded in a letterpress-printed book jacket features an illustration by Wesley Bates. The book retails for $27.95.

About the Author

As well as The Sentimentalists, Johanna Skibsrud’s first poetry collection, Late Nights With Wild Cowboys, was published in 2008 by Gaspereau Press and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her second poetry collection, I Do Not Think That I Could Love A Human Being, was published by Gaspereau Press in 2010. Originally from Nova Scotia, she now lives in Montreal.

Contact Information

For more information about the Scotiabank Giller Prize:
www.scotiabankgillerprize.ca

For general information, interviews, author photos, imposition advice … etc.

Gaspereau Press Limited
Gary Dunfield & Andrew Steeves, Printers & Publishers
47 Church Avenue, Kentville, Nova Scotia, B4N 2M7
e: info@gaspereau.com T: 902 678 6002 f: 902 678 7845
www.gaspereau.com

Lunch with Matrix

2010-10-04T03:41:00.000-07:00

Recently, Conundrum Press publisher Andy Brown sat down and interviewed me for the Montreal-based magazine Matrix. I’ll post a few excerpts from the interview below. You can find the full interview in Matrix 87, on newsstands now.

¶ On Wild Letterforms

ANDY BROWN: So here we are with Andrew Steeves in the King’s Arms Pub in Kentville, Nova Scotia. Wild Letterforms of Kentville Nova Scotia was a presentation I saw you give at the Wayzgoose last Fall and found it very interesting.

ANDREW STEEVES: The world we live in is full of letters. It’s so much a part of our lives that we forget about it. We pay more attention to clothes.

BROWN: Well I don’t! [laughs]

STEEVES: We forget that letters are this incredible system that’s married to language and the letters we deal with in society are, for the most part, prefabricated letters. Generally, people don't know how to form a letter with their hand these days, with a brush, pen, or chisel. Instead, we push a key and the letter magically appears. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but something is lost when you lose the connection with how things are made, with how the body shapes things. We have the same problem with hamburger and houses. We go to the grocery store and pull a cellophane-wrapped item off a shelf. We consume passively instead of create. Anyway, at the time I put this Wild Letterforms talk together, I was biking from Wolfville to Kentville everyday, traveling the back routes where there was graffiti …

BROWN: Well to call it graffiti would be misleading. It’s not even tagging really.

STEEVES: Well it’s not up to Montreal standards, no. It’s pretty bush league. There are other examples of hand-made letters around town. So I started documenting all kinds of stuff, from welded letters, to letters chiseled on old tombstones. There are examples of well-made local stones from the 1770s and '80s, letters made by some guy with a hammer and chisel and a unique idea about what a letter should look like. So I put a slide show together which talked about these spontaneously made letters, and about the ecology, the diversity, of letterfoms possible in a small town. From the stenciled “Don’t Park Here” signs to the crayon “Rabbits for Sale” notice. And what I discovered is that the wild letterforms were still holding their own against the commercial drone of pre-fab Tim Hortons and McDonalds signage. That stuff can really take over and kill out the native letterforms if you let it.

BROWN: What is the project your working on based on the old Planter tombstones?

STEEVES: That project was born of the methodology which got me into publishing and printing in the first place, the thinking being that if you want to learn about something, go back to its root form and figure out how it works. Don’t wait for the machine to break, just take it apart.

BROWN: You’ve figured out a way to import the letterforms off the tombstones into the computer to make a font?

STEEVES: When I got into printing and publishing I didn’t know anything about it. I came in blind. My background is actually in Criminology. [Laughs.]

BROWN: There are a lot of young offenders in publishing.

STEEVES: I’m not going to comment on your list, Andy.

BROWN: I publish a lot of them actually.

¶ On Cultural Funding

BROWN: A $15 paperback is the price of a movie now. Yet people still go to movies. You do need to be practical and have a market. Someone has to buy the $60 well made book.

STEEVES: But here's the question: Why is there no market in this country for Literary books? I wonder what effect the funding environment we function in here in Canada has on things when it comes right down to it. The government has its fingers in culture, and though it’s well intended it makes a mess of things. There seems, for example, to be this conception in government that if little presses had better marketing skills that they could sell all kinds of books, as if an ads ever sold a poetry book. It's nonsense. Culture doesn't work that way. This funding infrastructure has everything to do with supporting an industry and little to do with cultural at the grassroots.

BROWN: I would argue that the Canada Council’s mandate is not to support industry but rather culture.

STEEVES: The Council is constantly directing money into activities that they believe will help grow companies bigger and make them more like the big players. What we really need in this country is help fostering a readership. Think about hockey. Why do we view it as being a part of our culture? Because so many Canadians are involved in it when they are growing up in their communities. It dominates television culture for a certain portion of the year. It is hard to avoid. Almost every community had a hockey rink, most likely funded in part by public money. Even though few kids make it to the NHL, hockey is a part of their lives. Soccer is like this in other communities, or figure skating. But my point is that government invests in community sports infrastructure, and the result is a community of people who are interested in sport, both as participants and as consumers.

BROWN: How do you cultivate a culture of interest for esoteric beautiful books of poetry? How do you sell it to the average individual?

STEEVES: I guess to oversimplify the matter, I would suggest you invest heavily in the educational system, and in cultural infrastructure that everyone gets to use – not just in industrial infrastructure like publishing houses.

BROWN: But why would they be reading your $25 letterpress book? As opposed to The Twilight Series? There seems to be two things going on here. There’s reading and there’s the quality of the book. And those are two totally separate things. I think reading is being promoted but it’s middle of the road sold in vast quantities. There needs to be an appreciation of the book as opposed to ebooks or pulp, essentially just text, which is all going to go online anyway. For books to survive, any printed book, not just Gaspereau-style books, they will need to become an objet d’art since pretty much every piece of text will just be online.

STEEVES: That’s conjecture in the largest sense.

BROWN: That’s what I do. I’m a conjecturer.

STEEVES: I think books are only a small piece of the equation. What I’m really all about is getting people to pay attention. You take the small corner of the culture that’s devoted to books and writing and ask why no one is reading the types of books published by literary presses, the reflex response is that it’s because publishers are not professional enough about marketing and promotion. What I’m trying to suggest is that we dig deeper. If we build stronger communities culture will follow. Right now there are programs that fund the writing of book, the publishing of the books, the marketing of the books. Hell, governments fund everything except buying the books too. And yet despite all this investment in 'culture', very little benefit trickles down to the citizen in the street. Only the people directly involved in the industry (the writer, the publisher) really benefit. The average citizen has very little contact with this official literary culture. I don't like it. But let's say you take the same amount of money and instead of funding the arts from the top you fund it from the bottom. Let's say instead you gave every Canadian a voucher to buy one Canadian-published book this year. There are many problems with this suggestion, but the big advantage is that you have engaged the general populace with literary culture. Right now that’s kind of what’s missing. Right now we are propping up an industry that is dysfunctional. We all have a bunch of really great books in our warehouses that nobody’s reading, even though they helped fund their production through their tax dollars. I would rather get those books out there. Afterall, a good book is a ticking time bomb, it can sit there a long time. If it's well made, that is.

BROWN: Look at John Donne. Hundreds of years.

STEEVES: Or even more locally a book like Rockbound, a long-forgotten novel which became an overnight success with CBC's Canada Reads. Books are patient. If you make them well enough they can be very patient.

¶ On Stepping off the Ladder

STEEVES: I think that if you want to occupy a place outside of the mainstream you need to adjust your thinking. You need to get yourself off the ladder of advancement, plant your feet somewhere and focus on perfecting your art. You have to slow down and pay attention to your craft. Mind your own business, you might say.

BROWN: And you’re going off the grid.

STEEVES: Yes, quite literally. My wife and I sold our house and bought 35 acres of woodland, about 20 minutes outside town near a place called Black River. We are building a house, and doing most of the work ourselves. It's a good piece off the road, so we’re going to use solar electric, wood heat and some propane backup. In the meantime, we're pretty much living in a tent for the summer. It's awesome.

BROWN: And your children will have to bike to town to use the Internet. Is this what you mean when you talk about going off the ladder.

STEEVES: What I mean is that we get sold this bland idea about what is normal, what is possible, and what is important. And we tend to go along with it because it's too much work to imagine things being any other way. Sometimes as we mature we can see that it's not really that simple, and we rebel to whatever degree we are comfortable with. Or, we step of the ladder. I get a lot of joy out of designing and making things, our of solving problems. I also get a lot of joy out of the natural world. So building a house in the woods is a way of combing these things, instead of just buying the suburban home and large screen TV.

BROWN: You once said that if anyone put a canoe in her submission to you that you would publish it. [laughs]. That’s your editorial process?

STEEVES: Well, yeah, canoes are an interest of mine. But what I’m really looking for is people who are paying attention. People who pay attention to the world around them and are able to condense what they discover down into something worth saying.

BROWN: How does that translate to your publishing list? What is your editorial mandate for Gaspereau. There’s poetry, non-fiction, biographies, novels. What’s the link?

STEEVES: The link is engagement. The link is paying attention and finding some useful or entertaining way to talk about what's discovered.

¶ On The Alcuin Awards

BROWN: You just won five Alcuin design awards. Why are you monopolizing these awards?

STEEVES: No idea. I just make these books. I don’t know who is going to love them or hate them. Bringhurst's Selected Poems won first place in the Poetry category this year. There are eight categories, and I submitted to three categories and took first place in all of them. Which doesn’t always happen, mind you.

BROWN: Well it never happens for me. [laughs]

STEEVES: I have to add that I don’t put much stock in awards. So I have to be circumspect when I win as well as circumspect when I don’t. Regardless, it’s always gratifying when your colleagues take the time to say, This is good work.

BROWN: Do you think your particular design aesthetic is exactly what the Alcuin Awards jury looks for? Just coincidentaly?

STEEVES: There is an element of that, perhaps. The Alcuin competition tends to have a nostalgic sensibility. My design aesthetic is informed by 1920s and '30s British book typography. Houses like the Nonesuch Press and early Penguin were great infulences on my work. At that time, people like Francis Meynell and Jan Tschichold were trying to figure out how to marry centuries of typographic tradition with mass production technologies in order to produce inexpensive books that were not 'cheap' crap. They often succeeded. And that’s at the heart of what we do at Gaspereau Press, take the strange mix of letterpress and offset and digital stuff and to bring it all together in order to make good, strong functional books that are reasonably priced. So maybe if a press is doing more urban, gritty, modern design it has less appeal for the Alcuins juries. It's possible to do that sort of design well, however; but it's rarely done well. Usually 'designers' for literary presses just slop some type over an interesting photograph and stir it all around.

BROWN: You are not using colour photographs.

STEEVES: Not often. It's often a lazy approach, I think, to rely on a photograph to carry a book cover. But I'm biased. I'm into type. And remember, the Alcuins are about the book as a whole, not just jacket design. The people coming out of art school and doing book covers, they aren't usually typographers. They are graphic designers. Type is a mere visual element to these people, not a system with a history and a tradition to be learned and understood before it's mucked around with. There are very few good typographers in this country. I can list the living one's I've encountered on one hand: Stan Bevington, Tim Inkster, Glenn Goluska, Robert Bringhurst, Will Rueter. There's a younger generation starting to get the hang of it, though, including people like myself and Jason Dewinetz, and some encouraging work coming from the generation or two younger than me who seem hungry to learn. So I'm hopeful for the future of typography in this country.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Wayzgoose Approaches

2010-10-04T03:34:00.000-07:00

Year of the Pig

2010-10-04T03:16:00.001-07:00

I came across this old photo recently, which dates to about 2000 or 2001. In it, friend of the press Hudson Trenholm regales Gary Dunfield with one of his shaggy dog stories in our old printshop at One Church Avenue. Gary is using the remelt furnace (between them) to melt old lead slugs into molten metal so that he can pour them into moulds (on the stacked pallets) and make ‘pigs’ or bars of type metal. Both Hudson and Gary have shorter hair these days.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Scoring Whylah Falls

2010-09-29T15:07:00.000-07:00

Automative trouble stranded me up on the mountain most of the day, but drove down into Kentville as the sun was setting to get a few things done at the print shop. Namely, I had to score the jackets for our new edition of George Elliott Clarke’s Whylah Falls. We have to ship a substantial order for a university course already underway, so I didn’t want the books to sit here an extra day just because I spent part of my morning ineptly crawling around on the wet ground under a truck.

This cover was printed offset in two colours (black and gold) on a felt-finish cover stock. The image is a duotone, which combines the gold and the black. In order to score the folds, I hand feed book jackets into a 1930s vintage Chandler & Price platen press. It is one of my favorite machines in the print shop. We bought this one from a shop that was closing down in Halifax back in 2000. When scoring, the ink rollers are removed and the chase has steel rules locked into it which score the folds in the jacket. These presses look dangerous, but they are perfectly fine so long as you rigidly adhere to some pretty common-sense safety practices (like keeping your back straight and not following a mis-fed sheet into the closing mouth of the press). This press sheet is about 10 × 20 inches in size, so it takes a little practice before you can feed them this quickly. You have to grab it in just the right place and use the air under the sheet to float it into place.

George’s book should be available for shipping, ohh, by mid-morning Thursday.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Press Notes

2010-09-28T08:34:00.000-07:00

Tim Bowling’s new book is now on the press. I think it has the longest title of any book we’ve ever published, that is if you include the sub-sub-title that I invented when I was setting the title page. Perhaps I’ve been reading too much about 17th century books lately. Their long run-on titles have always amused me.

Bowling’s book is uses a version of Dwiggin’s Electra type, which are contemporary to much of the the subject matter in Tim’s book. Electra is a type that always looks gaunt and underfed without the ink swell of letterpress, so this book introduces a tuned up version of the face that’s a bit heavier and replicates the warmth and colour I have always had trouble achieving with it in offset printing.

Wolfville artist Jack McMaster did the illustration for the book jacket. Jack, Tim and I were putting the finishing touches on the jacket today.

Also sneaking through the pressroom early this week is a short catalogue for an exhibition of Thaddeus Holownia’s photographs at the Windsor Gallery in Vancouver which is opening next month. It contains a nice essay by Peter Sanger.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Skibsrud on Giller Long List

2010-09-21T04:32:00.000-07:00

Johanna Skibsrud: Pre-Giller Long List

Gaspereau Press is pleased to discover that Johanna Skibsrud’s novel The Sentimetalists is on the Scotiabank Giller Prize long list. The list, selected by CBC’s Michael Enright, American writer Claire Messud and UK writer Ali Smith, looks something like this:

David Bergen, THE MATTER WITH MORRIS (Harper Collins)
Douglas Coupland, PLAYER ONE (Anansi)
Michael Helm, CITIES OF REFUGE (M&S)
Alexander MacLeod, LIGHT LIFTING (Biblioasis)
Avner Mandelman, THE DEBBA (Random House)
Tom Rachman, THE IMPERFECTIONISTS, (Random House)
Sarah Selecky, THIS CAKE IS FOR THE PARTY (Thomas Allen)
Johanna Skibsrud, THE SENTIMENTALISTS (Gaspereau)
Cordelia Strube, LEMON (Coach House)
Joan Thomas, CURIOSITY, (M&S)
Jane Urquhart, SANCTUARY LINE (M&S)
Dianne Warren, COOL WATER (Harper Collins)
Kathleen Winter, ANNABEL (Anansi)

Johanna is over the moon, of course (and in Paris, which never hurts). Everyone here at Gaspereau is pleased too, but circumspect as usual. Long lists can mean very little for actual book sales, though the soft benefits are critical.

When we are running behind (and this year, we are running very behind) an award nomination can mean that we end up having to decide whether or not to delay fall books in order to print more copies of the nominated book in case there is a sudden demand that exceeds our present inventory. And what if you reprint a book and then the sales are illusionary? That can quickly take a book from break-even to loss. We have to consider whether it is better to fill big retail orders for the promotional displays that have been organized around the award instead of filling orders from small booksellers, and whether shorting the chain stores will preempt the inevitable returns or hurt sales. There's a lot of balance, and a lot at stake.

In fact, when all is said and done, we’ve often found that long lists and short lists only result in increased book returns (unless the book actually wins). Sometimes it feels like we’ve only loaned the big retailers stock to fill out their displays. But why would we think that a retail system that does a poor job of selling literary titles to the public all the rest of the year will suddenly succeed during awards season?

So where is the line between careful management and simply being an awards wet blanket?! When you run a literary press, and you run it on a shoestring, you have to be careful not to drop the ledger, the dictornaty, or the ink knife while you’re strapping the party hat under your chin and blowing up the balloons. You have to keep things in perspective.

Johanna Skibsrud: Post-Giller Long List

Having books on long lists or short lists can be reassuring and amusing too. Nominations bring us into contact with many aspects of the publishing trade from which working in a small Nova Scotian town usually insulates us. People who are usually disinterested in our press suddenly act as if they are diehard supporters. We get calls from journalists in Toronto who have determined the story’s angle (small regional press is dark horse nominee for important national award) before they even call, and boy are they frustrated if you suggest a more complex reality. Agents, editors and publishers come fishing for rights knowing little or nothing about the book, the author, or the press other than that it was on the Giller long list. And organizers and publicists call, working so hard to convince us all that something very, very important is afoot. Nice as some of these people are, these encounters reassure me that I'm not missing much by working outside the mainstream of the publishing world.

I know that for some authors who win major awards, the experience has a transforming influence on their career. Winning a prize can be the thing that lands you an agent, or a better publishing deal, or a deal in a foreign territory – to say nothing of the monetary prize and the psychological boost of approval. These are good things as far as they go. And as embarrassing as the boosterism of national awards can be, and as corrosive as their cattle-shoot effect can be on our thinking about literature, I think we sometime expect a little too much of these awards. They are what they are.

The Sentimentalists won first prize in the fiction ctegory of the 2010 Alcuin Awards for Canadian Book Design. Illustration by Wesley Bates

Why wouldn’t the Giller Prize be any less complex and contradictory than the culture and the literature it aims to promote? The Giller short list will be announced on October 5th, and I would like very much to discover that The Sentimentalists is on it. And we’ll happily wrestle with whatever complications, challenges or indignities come with it, approaching them with the same grin and tenacity as everything else we deal with around here. Because at the end of the day, I feel that we ought to take Mr. Rabinovitch and his ilk at face value as wanting simply to promote good fiction. While I wouldn’t want to live in the media cycle and trade publishing culture surrounding such awards indifferently, or engage them as my guide to literary excellence, The Giller Prize is at least doing something positive in aid of a cause that is important to me. I’ll embrace their way of helping literature, as I trust they also embrace mine.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Shopwork

2010-09-16T04:58:00.000-07:00

The fall list is well underway here in the shop, but I wiggled some time free yesterday to print a broadside commissioned by Halifax poet Matt Robinson. We’ve been doing a fall broadside for Matt for a number of years now, and I always look forward to trying to give his poems some sort of typographic presence. Sometimes we use an image, but more often than not we simple play with type. This year we used Rod McDonald’s type Slate.

I had some trouble with pin holes in my polymer. Sometimes no matter what you do you can’t get the dust out of wherever the dust is hiding. I ended up taking different letters from different plates and cobbling the form together, just as I would with wood type. The ink on the large type is a mix of blue and silver inks. Maybe 40% silver. I didn’t exactly measure things where this was a one-off.

Speaking of Matts, our own Matt has the first side of the sheets for the new edition of George Elliott Clarke’s Whylah Falls printed and will likely be printing the second side today or tomorrow. This page has a trumped-up newspaper clipping. George and I both get a kick out of small town-newspaper-speak, especially corrections and notices. For me, this interest goes back to my short career in journalism and my life-long interest in newspapers.

Today, I’m working on the jacket for Clarke’s book. We wanted to echo the imagery of the earlier editions of the book while doing something that was uncluttered and clearly in the Gaspereau look. The type is Jonathan Hoefler’s high renaissance flavoured Requiem. (Jonathan, like me, turns 40 this year.)

I’ve been blustering around the printshop like a dog with a bone, muttering, keeping odd hours, making strange utterances. Must be Fall. Gary, like me, is trying to juggle too many things all at once, managing the shopwork, dealing with orders and accounts, fixing broken equipment. Let’s just say I haven't seen the cribbage board out at lunchtime in a while. Well, we'll have to change that when Laura the queen of cribbage gets back. She is still away on her Nashville road trip. Basma has been filling in for her, helping Connie and Gary keep things moving through the bindery. Matt, our pressman, seems remarkably calm for a fellow who’s about become a father for the first time, and any day now. And speaking of firsts, the other day he quizzed Gary and I up about the upcoming wayzgoose (Saturday October 23), and seemed excited by the idea of the shop being full of curious people. But there's a lot to accomplish before then.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Michael Winter declared Honourary Gaspereau Press Author in absentia

2010-09-15T08:53:00.000-07:00

In this clip, Newfoundland author Michael Winter takes a page from that old Marx Brothers ‘cut the deck’ gag and demonstrates a high degree of editorial acumen. If you weren’t a fan of Mr. Winter’s work, you would of course add a quip or a barb here, but I like the man’s work. And I like the the way he cranks that chainsaw to life with one pull. (Likely warmed up in rehearsal.) Anyway, given his keen sense of humour and skill with the Stihl, well, by the power invested in me I hearby declare Michael Winter an honourary Gaspereau Press author, with all the rights and privileges conveyed with that high office (invitations to Christmas parties, scrap paper, typographic advice, free parking in downtown Kentville...). Michael, drop by the next time you’re in Nova Scotia and we’ll discuss your grand future as an honourary Gaspereau Press author.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Two Editions of Bringhurst’s Selected

2010-09-15T04:26:00.000-07:00

Hard-core collectors and bibliophiles will be interested to know that our colleagues at the storied publishing house Jonathan Cape in London (now an imprint of Random House) recently acquired UK rights to Robert Bringhurst’s Selected Poems, which was originally published by Gaspereau in 2009. Cape's edition is now out, and was recently reviewed by Erica Wagner in The Times.

Jonathan Cape’s new edition of Bringhurst’s Selected Poems has a simple and attractive offset-printed cover. The colours are reproduced using a CMYK process. The book has cover flaps and a black end sheet. A pretty spiffy edition for a big trade publisher.

Gaspereau Press’s original edition of Bringhurst’s Selected Poems. The jacket employs a black felt-finish paper handprinted in two colours on a letterpress. I’m not sure that it’s better or worse than Cape’s; it’s just a different process and it gets a different result.

When we resell rights to publishers in other territories, I'm always excited to see how they handle the material. Editorially, the Cape edition is a somewhat different selected. They wanted a slightly smaller selection. They were also unable to budget for the printing of Bringhurst’s polyphonic works in multiple spot colours. Much of the polyphonic work was simply omited, but a few things, like “Conversations with a Toad,” appear in monochromatic form. Robert has only rarely been able to convince publishers to shoulder the expense of his experiments, so he is used to this problem. In the Gaspereau edition, however, we used a fair amount of spot colour.

The Cape setting of “Conversations with a Toad.”

The Gaspereau setting of “Conversations with a Toad.”

Neither Robert nor I had any hand in the design of the Cape edition, which was done by a firm in England. And Cape has a house style for its poetry series. On the whole, the typography of the Cape edition is clean, simple and workmanlike. The type is Bembo, which generally works well, though wonky spacing is a problem here and there. The generally over-wide word spacing, for example, seems at odds with the modest leading. (Compare the word spacing in the two samples above.)

What’s Robert thinking in this photo? Perhaps he’s thinking “You could drive a bus between the word spacing in that bio! Would a hyphen have killed you?” I know I am.

Well, a few typographic differences of opinion aside, it is a great little book and a credit to its publisher. Hats off to the gang at Jonathan Cape for bringing Bringhurst to the United Kingdom.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

John Terpstra on Art Waves

2010-09-09T05:03:00.000-07:00

Two interviews with Gaspereau Press author John Terpstra have recently been posted on-line. The interviews are from the program Arts Waves, hosted by fellow Hamilton poet Bernadette Rule.

I first met John when he was touring his poetry collection The Church Not Made With Hands, published by Wolsak and Wynn in 1997. Anyway, we became fast friends. It was John who introduced me to the wood engraver Wesley Bates and to the thriving arts community in Hamilton. When I was myself touring in Ontario in 1998, one of the best readings I gave was actually to an audience gathered in John and Mary Terpstra’s living room on Herkimer Street in Hamilton.

I’ve always agreed with the Canadian publisher Jack McClelland’s notion that a publisher publishes authors more than he publishes books, and I’ve been lucky enough to have formed great friendships with many of the writers and artists I’ve worked with. When you believe in someone’s vision and skill, you want to do everything you can to help them on their way. John is one of those writers who is the heart and soul of the Gaspereau Press list – like Pierre Berton or Farley Mowat were to McClelland’s M&S. I befriended John at a point when he was at a sort of crossroads as a writer, working with great uncertainty on what was to become his first major prose project, Falling into Place, a book that is a sort of meditation on the Iroquois Bar – a giant glacial sandbar and present day transportation corridor in Hamilton. I think John brought it to Gaspereau because he knew that we understood what he was trying to accomplish and trusted our commitment to his literary vision.

This relationship has resulted in some pretty astonishing books, including Restoration (2000), Falling Into Place (2002), Disarmament (2003), Brendan Luck (2003), The Boys, or, Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter (2005), Two or Three Guitars: Selected Poems (2006), and Skin Boat (2009).

The first interview was broadcast on December 21, 2008. In it, John talks about making the move from poetry to prose with his first Gaspereau Press publication, Falling into Place, about the balance between writing, cabinetmaking and carpentry, and about his celebrated memoir about his brothers-in-law, entitled The Boys or Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter.

The second interview was first broadcast in September 13, 2009. John’s talks about his most recent book Skin Boat, a book which tries to understand the appeal of faith and faith communities in the modern world.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Wayzgoose Time is coming!

2010-09-02T09:30:00.000-07:00

Gaspereau Press is pleased to announce that it will hold its 2010 Wayzgoose and Open House on Saturday October 23rd. This year’s wayzgoose will feature guest letterpress artist Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., of Alabama. Amos will be whooping it up in the print shop with Gary and I during the day on Saturday. We’re also pleased to announce that Saturday evening’s Book Arts talk will consist of a discussion between Amos and Nova Scotia filmmaking sensation Sylvia Hamilton, moderated by yours truly. I suspect that the discussion will touch on such things as film-making, making art, rural communities, the impact of race and cultural differences on artistic expression, and the secret to making a sandwich which can sustain you through to suppertime.

Here are two links if you wanted to find out more about these extraordinary people:

Also, on Wednesday October 20th, the Acadia film society will be screening the film Helvetica in honour of the Gaspereau Goose. Please visit their website for details. Below is the film trailer:

I suppose a tentative schedule would be useful? So far, this is what we have planned:

SATURDAY MORNING
9:00 to noon: Bookbinding workshop with Ruth Legge. (30$ registration fee. Space limited. Email info@gaspereau.com to reserve.)
9:00: Author’s Brunch. An informal gathering at a local restaurant for writers of all sorts. Details and ‘host’ to be announced.

10:00 to noon: Drop in for some printshop chicanery: Take advantage of the offcut paper sale, participate in an informal papermaking symposium with Gary Dunfield, or chat with Amos Kennedy, Jr., and Andrew Steeves as they set up equipment for the afternoon’s open house. Free admission.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON
2:00 to 4:30: Open House at the printshop, with demonstrations and entertainments of all sorts, featuring Amos Kennedy, Jr. Free admission.

SATURDAY EVENING
7:00: Author readings (TBA) and Annual Book Arts talk, featuring a conversation with Amos Kennedy, Jr., and Sylvia Hamilton. Free admission.

Well, that’s the shape of it so far. I’ll post details as the evolve.

Amos is being brought to the province in partnership with the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the organizers of the annual wayzgoose in Newfoundland, so if you can’t catch him in Kentville, keep your eyes peeled for events in Halifax and St. John’s.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

What happened to August?

2010-08-31T03:49:00.000-07:00

What happened to August?! For a good portion of July I seemed merely to be a Vandercook proof press mechanism, hand-cranking sheet after sheet through the press to complete a number of big jobs. August, on the other hand, has been hour after hour at the desk, putting the final touches on our fall books. Being understaffed as we are, the year’s been one long unrelenting production deadline for a while now, so I’m thankful that the work is rewarding.

For about a week and a half I found myself submerged in typesetting the 900-some-page, two-volume revised edition of Jan Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy. The text is a persnickety one to set, partly because of Zwicky’s exacting sensibilities, but also because of the broad range of material that LP references. It seemed that several times a day I was shutting down InDesign and opening FontLab to modify the typeface or create missing glyphs. I love a book that demands that level of engagement, but I could have used less of it all in one sitting. Those interested in the process of editing Zwicky should read Clare Goulet’s essay “Reading Thisness” in the recently published Zwicky tribute book Lyric Ecology (Cormorant Books). It talks about the work Clare and I did with Jan on Wisdom & Metaphor and stars that oft abused punctuation mark, the em dash.

After packaging the Zwicky proofs up for their transcontinental trek, I turned to finishing up four other books. One is another revival of a book initiated at another press: a new George Elliott Clarke’s Whylah Falls, which we’re trying to have available in time for fall university courses. We’ve also got two novels which couldn’t be more different. Norman Ravvin’s The Joyful Child takes a narrative approach to tell the story of a father and his young son, while Bruce Johnson’s Firmament has more in common with an impressionist painting than it does with your usual novel about a Newfoundland outport. Rounding out the list is Tim Bowling’s powerful look at middle-age bibliomania, Twentieth-century American poetry and a particular copy of Wallace Steven’s Ideas of Order which was owned by the lesser-known poet and Golden-Gate bridge jumper Weldon Kees.

These books are due to start appearing in Mid-September, likely starting with Clarke and Ravvin in September, Bowling and Johnson in October, and Zwicky, well, that book’s like 60 lifts through the press, eh? Maybe in time for under Jan’s Christmas tree. Not all of these books will preceed the catalogue, but it’s been that sort of year.

I was disturbed to arrive at work one morning to discover that former Humber College intern and present bindery überchick Laura MacDonald had perhaps taken the term “bed of the press” too literally. After suggesting that safety requires the removal of cleaning bottles before bedding down for the night, she reassured me that while she was indeed a rambling hobo, between apartments, that she was not actually sleeping in the printshop, but merely preparing for a road trip to Nashville next week. Time off was granted on the condition that she visit Hatch Show Printers and bring us back a nice poster.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Journaling

2010-08-13T06:47:00.000-07:00

Well, I scored the jackets for Parenthesis on the big Golding jobber yesterday. When scoring, I'm able to feed a 26-inch-wide sheet into the Golding so long as the impression area is well back from the edges. Now that my part in the production of the Fine Press Book Association’s publication is complete, I’ve moved on to catching up on some administrative work and starting in on the backlog of typesettinig I have to complete on our own fall books. But Parenthesis is still occupying much of our time as we work to ship copies early next week.

Laura and Basma have been feeding journals through the three-pocket Sulby binder while Gary and Connie have wrestled with a very grumpy Smyth sewer.

Novelist Susan Haley came in to fold Parentheis jackets behind a mountain of untrimmed copies of the journal.

Susan was also hand-inserting an original silkscreen print (produced at Tara Books in India) into each copy of Parenthesis.There’s an article on Tara Books in the Presses section of the journal.

Meanwhile, we’ve got other print jobs to keep moving, like printing the summer issue of the Blomidon Naturalists Society’s quarterly newsletter (with a cover that features enlarged leaf ornaments by Jack McMaster) and typsetting a paper on the stratigraphy of the Lower Paleozoic Goldenville and Halifax groups in southwestern Nova Scotia for the journal Atlantic Geology. I’m beginning to feel like all we ever get to do around here is produce journals. Time to get back to some books!

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Blue

2010-08-09T09:35:00.000-07:00

Today, I started printing the final colour on the jackets for Parenthesis. I mixed this blue by eye using mix of yellow, rubine red, reflex blue, and transparent white. I usually ignore colour matching systems like Pantone® when I’m mixing inks for my own letterpress jobs. I neither need nor desire perfectly matched colour. I don't want to be able to reproduce this again, exactly the same, six months from now. A letterpress printer never dips his pallet knife in the same ink twice, Heraclitus might have said.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Press-side design

2010-08-06T04:50:00.000-07:00

I’m still chained to my press today, cranking out Parenthesis covers. Hand-cranking 1200 sheets of paper through a Vandercook, watching the same inked form flash by over and over, gives you time to think about things. If there are problems with the job which are beyond your control to repair, it makes for a long and depressing run, knowing that what you are making falls short of your intentions. But if the work is sound and the press is running well, there is joy and fresh discovery to be found in each sheet through the press.

Although I had originally intended to print the body text in black, the decision to run the text in a separate pass from the ornaments (which required massive amounts of ink) opened up the opportunity to introduce a third colour. I’ve selected Warm Grey no. 4. This flexibility, this ability to alter a design to suit what occurs on the press, is one of the reasons that I like printing the things I design personally. This is not to say that you shouldn't plan a job carefully, only that you should be attentive and responsive to opportunities and challenges as they present themselves.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Jackets for Parenthesis 19

2010-08-05T04:51:00.000-07:00

One of the great challenges this month is balancing the editorial work with the shop work. My next few days will pretty much be spent printing letterpress jackets for the next issue of Parenthesis, which is presently moving through the bindery. This jacket will be printed in two colours, but will require three press passes. The black text will be printed separately from the Memorial Hall ornaments in order to avoid over-inking the type. Sometimes it’s these invisible little bits of extra effort that make the difference on a job.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Hired Hands

2010-07-28T10:51:00.000-07:00

Unlike computers and cellphones (and even, to a lesser extent, printing presses), paper cutters hold their worth. If, as at Gaspereau, your sensibilities and your budget tend to lean toward to bargain bin, you’ll wait a long time before you see a cheap used paper cutter for sale. We’ve been watching for a while now. We have three paper cutters in our shop, one guillotine style and two with manual fence and clamps but motorized blades. Trimming books has always been a bit of a bottleneck in our production process, so we’ve been looking for a cutter more modern programmable cutter. This one came available recently when another printer in the region upgraded. There’ll be some welding to do and a motor to repair, but perhaps we’ll have this fella up and running in time for the rush of fall books. The big question isn’t whether Gary can fix it. The big question is ... where the heck are we going to put it!

Presently in the bindery is the most recent North American edition of the International fine books journal Parenthesis. The sheets are printed and folded and ready to gather, sew and bind.

I spent part of the day making polymer plates for the cover, which I will handprint on a Vandercook proof press. Given it’s subject matter, I feel that at least some part of this journal ought be hand printed.

I also managed to escape to the basement of the Acadia University library this week and spent some time lollygagging around in copies of The Nova Scotia Royal Gazette, published at Halifax by John Howe and Son in 1813. John Howe (1754–1835) was a Boston-born Loyalist printer who came to Halifax after the American Revolution. In Nova Scotia, he was appointed the King’s Printer, publishing The Nova Scotia Royal Gazette and the Debates of the Legislative Assembly. As interesting as his life had been, John Howe was eclipsed by the fame of his son, Joseph Howe (1804–73), journalist, publisher, and politician, who successfully defended himself against charges seditious libel in a landmark case that helped establish freedom of the press in Canada.

Tucked in among the proclamations, sales notices and notes from foreign correspondents was this example of an early Canadian book ad for a sea captain's narrative published by Howe.

I have always loved the stories of everyday life an old newspaper can tell. Perhaps a careful investigation of the 64th Regiment’s paperwork from this period might reveal a sudden shift in the quality of the handwriting sometime after this ad was printed. It might even tell us whose hand was hired. But the fate of the red heifer at Nine Mile River is likely to remain a matter of conjecture.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Alcuin Awards Exhibit

2010-07-20T10:32:00.001-07:00

The Acadia University library and art gallery in Wolfville are hosting an exhibit of the winning books from the 2009 Alcuin Awards for Excellence in Canadian Book Design, and they asked me to speak at a reception last Friday. I gave a very rambly talk, riffing off the books in the display and discussing type history, manufacturing and many elements of book design. I had printed some letterpress invitations for the event on ends of Saint Armand’s ‘Old Masters’ paper.

When I was in St. Andrews last weekend, Hugh French (Director of the Tides Institute & Museum in Eastport, Maine) slipped me a tube which contained, among other things, a wonderful letterpress poster by David Wolfe. The poster was printed as part of the Hand Line Press’s series of posters and broadsides and features some of the traditional design motifs used by contemporary Passamaquoddy artist David Moses Bridges. The text is in English, French and Passamaquoddy.

If you happen to drop into the printshop this summer, one of the people you're likely to meet is our press operator in training, Matt MacLean. Matt is pictured above, cleaning one of our Heidelberg KORDs.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

A Day in St Andrews

2010-07-18T06:48:00.000-07:00

The Old Courthouse, St Andrews, New Brunswick

I made a whirlwind road trip to St. Andrews, New Brunswick, where we held a very successful launch for our new book St. Andrews Architecture. I left the Annapolis Valley at dawn on Friday loaded with as many books as we’d been able to finish on Thursday. I drove my pick-up in a long arch around the Bay of Fundy, making numerous quick stops along the way to visit writers, artists and family. I ended up in St. Andrews around 9:30 that evening. Where I ended up, to be exact, was the terrace of the storied Algonquin Hotel, sitting in the cool salt-sea air with a glass of scotch in my hand, in the company of a couple of New Brunswick’s most creative minds, toasting the success of their book.

Thaddeus Holownia and John Leroux in the dock. The charge: attentive engagement with their community and their respective art forms. The verdict: Guilty!

The launch on Saturday was a great success. Hosted by the The Nature Trust of New Brunswick, the event was held at the Old Courthouse on Fredrick Street. It seemed like half the town showed up. John and Thaddeus both spoke well, John being emotionally overwhelmed at a few points as he spoke about the town, its people and its astonishing buildings. When I saw that people were buying books by the fist-full I realized that the 170 or so books I’d delivered would certainly sell out – and they did. The event ended with Thaddeus making a group photograph using his old-timey view camera.

Thaddeus Holownia makes a group portrait with his large format veiw camera

I had an excellent time. It’s always gratifying to see many months of hard work come to such a successful result and authors and artists being celebrated by their community. But I was anxious to get back to my lumber pile at home and to the stacks of books yet to complete in the printshop.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

How the summer slides into fall

2010-07-15T03:37:00.000-07:00

The tumble toward fall begins! Our fall list is in pretty good shape editorially (other than that the fall catalogue is late, again), and production work on fall books is well underway. The first fall book to take form is St. Andrews Architecture, 1604–1966 by John Leroux and Thaddeus Holownia. The Nature Trust of New Brunswick is hosting a launch for this book in St. Andrews on this coming Saturday morning. Given that the first copies of the book were bound only this morning, it’s going to be a pretty crazy day in here today as we gather, sew, bind and trim enough books for me to drive up to the event tomorrow. Ahh!

There was a nice article about this book in the Telegraph Journal last weekend, which you should be able to fine at this link.

In the mail bag this week were copies of the The Alcuin Society’s catalogue for its 28th annual awards for excellence in Canadian book design, which includes a number of Gaspereau Press productions. I went into Halifax last week for the opening of an exhibition of this year’s winning books at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. I’ll be speaking another opening of the same exhibit at the Acadia Art Gallery in Wolfville on Friday July 23rd at 2:00 p.m.

We’ve had a lot of interesting commercial work moving through the shop too. Of course, there's the usual dog’s breakfast of invitations, programs and flyers, but we’ve also been involved making some interesting books and journals. We did a slim volume by Sackville, NB, poet Michael Thorpe entitled About Thomas Hardy. And a family memoir by Stanley Havill with the delightfully direct title Some Happening of the Havill Family of Nova Scotia. And last week I found myself typesetting a geology paper on an Early Triassic camptonite dyke in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the online journal Atlantic Geology. All of these projects come with their own unique challenges and rewards and they keep me on my toes.

On the letterpress front, I recently designed and hand printed a short catalogue for an exhibition of photographs by Thaddeus Holownia which is presently showing at the Tides Institute in Eastport, Maine. The text is an essay by Paul Griffin. The type was Garamount.

We got involved with one of the other local arts organizations this summer, designing and printing a suite of promotional pieces (posters, cards, etc.) for Two Planks and a Passion Theatre’s production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. The posters and cards were printed offset and included an original scraper board illustration by Wesley Bates. I used a revival of the Fells types to do this fun letterpress broadside, co-writing the copy with the play’s director Ken Schwartz. The next big letterpress project is a 96 page book celebrating the painter Alex Colville’s 90th birthday in August. The editorial and design work is complete, and I’m waiting for paper to arrive so that I can begin printing.

By far the most intensive typesetting job I’ve done in the past few weeks has been the Autumn 2010 issue of the international book arts journal Parenthesis, for which Gaspereau Press is the North American printer of record. Edited by Paul Razzel in Vancouver, the issue hosts a special feature on fine printing and the book arts in the state of California, as well as numerous articles and reviews. This issue is set in Ross Mills’ snazzy new typeface Huronia, accompanied by my own Memorial Hall ornaments. I’ll be printing the jackets on my letterpress later in the month.

Summer is always a busy time for visitors in the printshop. Recent drop-ins have included Jeffrey Macklin from Jackson Creek Press in Peterborough, Ontario, from Jack Illingworth of the Literary Press Group of Canada, illustrator and letterpress printer Basma Kavanagh, just to name a few.

(Oh, yes, and I'm still spending evenings and weekends working away at building a house.)

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Useful Shelves

2010-06-22T13:09:00.000-07:00

Whenever we take on a student intern (which is not that often), I always suggest that they read Richard Kennedy’s memoir A Boy at the Hogarth Press (1972). In the memoir, Kennedy recounts, before heading off to intern with Leonard and Virginia Woolf, his uncle’s story about a successful intern in his architectural firm: “[He] never lost a plan, he replenishes stocks of drawing materials, and he put up Useful Shelves.” I have to say that I am yet to have hosted an intern who has erected Useful Shelves, but we have have had a number of exceptional people move through our doors over the years.

Since January, Gaspereau’s been hosting Laura MacDonald, an intern who studied book publishing at Humber College in Toronto. It seems Gaspereau Press came up in one of her classes, and she was hooked. Technically speaking, her internship ended months ago, but she’s been hanging around the printshop, finishing up her letterpress project and picking up some paid work in the bindery (as well as playing crib with Gary at lunch break). Interns be warned: a job in literary publishing ruins you for normal work.

Laura’s letterpress project is a chapbook of poetry which she designed and hand set in 18 point Bembo. It was printed on a Vandercook proof press.

She’s also been learning how to make paper by hand. These sheets will be used for the cover of her book jacket.

Not to give you the wrong impression, I should add that most of Laura’s time here has involved running paper cutters, folders, binders and other production equipment, helping us to produce our trade books. But we also made sure that she’s had some time to muck about and learn some of the rudiments of the traditional book arts, at least the little we know about them here.

*

Speaking of people moving through our doors, Emily Leeson is leaving the press at the end of June in order to pursue other interests. Emily started with the press in the fall of 2008 and her energy and enthusiasm have been a great asset in the promotion of the press’s authors and their books. We are presently considering our options with regards to this vacancy, and may in fact take this opportunity to reconfigure the position altogether. In the meantime, all promotional queries may be directed to Gary Dunfield or myself.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Blogslacker

2010-06-15T03:25:00.000-07:00

The Gaspereau Press blog has been silent as of late thanks in part to the untimely death of my camera, but also due to my partial distraction. In short, my wife and I sold our house and moved our family into a tent for the summer while we build an off-the-grid house in the woods. Our perpetual shorthandedness at the press doesn’t really allow for a summer-long disappearance on my part to build said house, so I’ve been essentially burning the candle on both ends. Blogging seems to have been a casualty of this, but I’ll see what I can do to reinstate the Gaspereau Press blog as a part of my week. Much is, after all, afoot!

Even on the construction site, I see grids and letters.

Speaking of grids, letters, and buildings, I’ve been madly working away designing a book by architect John Leroux and photographer Thaddeus Holownia on the architecture of St. Andrews, New Brunswick. Combining text and images in a way that looks seemless is always a tricky thing, but rewarding when it falls into place. John and I have also been collaborating on maps which help the reader should they wish to use the publication like a guidebook. As well as being a Gaspereau Press publication, the book is a fundraiser for the Nature Trust of New Brunswick. There will be a launch in St. Andrews on July 17, so, umm, I better quit this and get back to work.

Also on my desk at the moment is the next North American issue of the fine press journal, Parenthesis, published by the Fine Press Book Association. I’m typesetting it in a pre-release version of Vancouver-based Tiro Typeworks’ new pan-American type, Huronia, designed by W. Ross Mills. I’m liking Huronia very much. Ross, Like Rod McDonald, knows how to design a type that stands up to a range of applications. It’s got, well, tensile strength and character. You can see samples and read more about Huronia at the Tiro Typeworks web page. This is the third issue of Parenthesis to be produced at Gaspereau Press. (Every alternate issue is produced in the UK.) Magazines are a whole different kettle of fish than books, and I always look forward to doing this project for that reason. For one thing, it's chop full of wonderful colour images.

Dump it in, sort it out. How will all this fit on a spread!?

Novels by Norman Ravvin and Bruce Johnson are simmering away in the editing process and soon to be typeset, as is an astonishing book by Tim Bowling about book collecting and mid-life. We’re also up to our necks in setting and proofing a new edition of Jan Zwicky’s epic Lyric Philosophy, and designing missing anglo-saxon glyphs to set a bilingual edition of Old English poems translated by Christopher Patton. Did I mention that we’re also releasing a Gaspereau edition of George Elliott Clarke’s classic Whylah Falls?

Soooo ... it’s busy. Especially if you’re also trying to wrap your head around the 2010 changes to the building code.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Review: The Annotated Bee and Me

2010-06-01T05:09:00.000-07:00

Tim Bowling's new collection of poetry, The Annotated Bee and Me, was recently reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press.

Reviewer Jennifer Still called the book, "a quirky, shimmering, stingingly sharp work of lyric wonder." Click here to read the full review.

Spring Poetry Tra-la

2010-04-26T09:51:00.000-07:00

If you're in Montreal, be sure to come out to the Gaspereau Spring Poetry Tra-la at Drawn & Quarterly.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

More Spring Books

2010-04-22T04:20:00.000-07:00

The spring rush seems to be quieting down a bit as the last of the new titles finally shipped yesterday – George Sipos’ memoir The Geography of Arrival. George is the former the owner of Mosquito Books in Prince George, British Columbia. His memoir tells of his experience immigrating to Canada from Hungary in 1957 and of growing up in London, Ontario, in the 1960s. It's a lovely, smart book.

Memoirs written by ‘ordinary’ people, people who are not household names, can be tricky books to sell, especially if they don’t have a grand thematic angle involving heroism, extraordinary achievement or whatnot and simply recount everyday experiences. When I first read George’s book, however, I knew that I wanted to publish it regardless of the financial risks because it was insightful and well written. It was exactly the kind of book I felt that people should be reading. A publisher who merely follows the demands of the market is not really a publisher at all, not in the humanist sense anyway. There is a sense in which a book publisher must help direct the culture as well as reflect it.

George’s memoir fits well with the other memoirs Gaspereau Press has published over the years in that it transcends local and personal interest and becomes literary thanks to the craftsmanship, sensibility, insight and skill of the author. Harrison Wright’s Probing Minds, Salamander Girls and a Dog Named Sally is an example of another memoir that does this, as are John Terpstra’s Skin Boat, The Boys, and Falling Into Place.

As usual, we had a little bit of fun with the inside cover. Illustrator Sydney Smith of Halifax (brother of the poet Alison Smith) did the artwork for George’s book jacket. Before we settled on the streetscape, Syd sketched out a number of other objects which appear in the book, including a row of glass eyeballs. While we decided not to use them on the jacket itself, we snuck the eyeballs inside, printing them in silver on the black cover stock. I think they look like fried eggs.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Peter Sanger launches Outram book in Toronto

2010-04-12T05:41:00.000-07:00

Peter Sanger was at the fabulous Arts and Letters Club in Toronto last Friday evening for the launch of Through Darkling Air: The Poetry of Richard Outram. My sources report that there were over fifty people in attendance and that the book was well received. Of course, back home in Kentville, we’re still madly binding books and filling orders. (Event photos by Peter Newman.)

Peter Sanger and Amanda Jernigan

Antiquarian bookseller Hugh Anson-Cartwright with Sanger

Sanger Signing Books after the reading

Jeffery Donaldson

Happy bookseller, Ben McNally

This book has been, in a sense, a long time coming. It was instrumental in my meeting Peter Sanger for the first time back in 2000. Peter blew into my office one day, quite insistent that Gaspereau should publish a book he was writing about Richard Outram, and publish it right away (there was some sort of event planned in the coming months, so time was of the essence). I admired Peter’s writing, but was indifferent about Outram and his work, and so I declined.

“So what will you do now?” I asked Peter, and seeing that he would proceed regardless I offered to help him to produce an affordable but elegant privately-published edition of his text. And this is exactly what we did, producing a short run of “Her Kindled Shadow …”: An Introduction to the Work of Richard Outram for The Antigonish Review Press in 2001.

This curt rejection tempered with a small act of generosity launched a friendship and professional association which has resulted in a very productive decade for Peter as a writer. Since that first meeting, Peter has published numerous books and chapbooks with Gaspereau Press, including the poetry books Kerf (2002) and Aiken Drum (2006) and prose projects such as Spar: Words in Place (2002), White Salt Mountain: Words in Time (2005), and The Stone Canoe (2007). I've also colaborated with Peter and Thaddeus Holownia on a number of Anchorage Press projects. These books have helped cement Sanger’s literary reputation.

After the death of Richard Outram in 2005, the time seemed right for Peter to revise and expand his book on Outram’s life and work. As he embarked on this task, I decided to reconsider Gaspereau’s role. Regardless of our difference of opinion on Outram’s importance as a poet, I knew that Through Darkling Air was to be a key book in Peter’s own writing career and I wanted to support Peter by publishing it.

In the long haul, what the reading public will make of Through Darklinig Air, or Peter’s poetry, or Outram’s, is anyone’s guess, but I do know that we have produced a book that honours both the author and his subject matter, and which demonstrates one way in which the culture might engage a poet and his life’s work.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Hydration and Straw Hats

2010-04-01T12:31:00.000-07:00

Laura and Gary were madly making cases for Peter Sanger’s literary biography of Richard Outram, entitled Through Darkling Air, which launches at Toronto’s Arts and Letters Club in, umm, well, a week’s time. Much to do! Much to do, indeed!

Laura and Gary cutting cloth

Printing silver ink on cloth

Laura tipping on headbands

Laura and Gary making cases

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

A Few More Design Awards

2010-03-31T04:46:00.000-07:00

Gaspereau Press just got word that it has been awarded five prizes in 28th annual Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada. I designed all of Gaspereau’s winning books, with the exception of one which I co-designed with Robert Bringhurst. All the books were produced here at the printshop by Gary Dunfield and I and our small but able staff. According to the Society’s press release, judges Marian Bantjes, Linda Gustafson, and Peter Koch selected 30 winning titles in eight categories from the 252 entries published in 2009. Gaspereau Press submitted books in three of eight categories and was awarded first place in all three.

You can find out more about the Vancouver-based Alcuin Society and read their full press release by visiting their web site.

GASPEREAU’S WINNING DESIGNS

Robert Bringhurst’s Selected Poems
(First Prize, Poetry)

I always enjoy working with Robert Bringhurst on design projects. We manage to keep the cross-continental arm wrestling to a minimum, and I think that the only thing either of us like nearly so much as typesetting a book ourselves is watching what typographic solutions the other fellow can come up with. Robert is one of the most able typographers on in the country, and the author of the modern typographer’s bible, The Elements of Typographic Style. On Selected Poems, Robert did the heavy lifting on the text design, setting as he selected and edited the poems, with input from me along the way. I took the lead on the jacket and cover, which are printed letterpress, black and silver ink on black felt-finish paper. It's one of my usual tricks, designing an object that plays with light. You hold the book in your hands in order to get the full effect. A photocopy or photograph won't cut it, nor will Kindle. The main type used in this book was Robert Slimbach’s Arno, issued by Adobe.

Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen’s Lean-To
(Second Prize, Poetry)

Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen’s Lean-To posed some interesting problems, namely that some of the poems set quite wide. I used Rod McDonald’s Laurentian types to set the book, which is narrow without seeming so and reads well between 9 and 10 points. The jacket was printed letterpress on paper that was handmade by the good folks at Saint-Armand in Montreal. I’m always reluctant to introduce ‘pictorial elements’ to collections of stories or poems as I find them too documentary and reductive. Images have a tendency to take over, after all, and only rarely can one image represent a whole book of poems. There is a lazy stock-photo approach to poetry book covers that presently dominates the trade. I’ve written about this tendency in a book about design and literary publishing that I'm slowly putting together, entitled Smoke Proofs (likely release date to be 2012). In this book, I employed a simple tent-shaped triangle as an icon, and a ‘lean-to’ splash of yellow on the title page. The triangle on the jacket is printed in white ink on yellow paper, an unusual move in a world where most printing start with white paper and print the yellow on top of it. This book is also nominated for the Atlantic Poetry Prize.

Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists
(First Prize, Prose Fiction)

Last summer, I found myself reworking the off-the-shelf digital version of Eric Gill’s typeface Joanna, which I intend to use in a letterpress book we’re producing about the artist Alex Colville. Basically, I was reviving some of the elements (like a set of taller capital letters) which were present in Gill’s 1930 foundry version of the type but which were not adopted when the typeface was revised for commercial release by Monotype. I decided to use this tuned-up version of the type in Johanna’s The Sentimentalists. Wesley Bates had met Johanna at our wayzgoose in 2008, and was keen to work on her next book. We printed his pencil drawing on a letterpress using a photopolymer plate, which gives it a really gritty look. The book is set with a ragged right margin, with a nod to Gill’s Essay on Typography. The jacket paper is Neenah Classic Laid Camel Hair.

Anne Simpson’s The Marram Grass
(First Prize, Prose Non-Fiction)

Anne Simpson’s collection of essays, The Marram Grass, is set in a digital version of Fournier. I made a slightly heavier version of the Fournier for use in the footnotes. Anne provided wonderful drawing for the book, which we printed in blue. The one pictured above depicts the cemetery in Great Village, Nova Scotia, near the Elizabeth Bishop house. I designed this book in one of my favorite trim sizes (5 × 8 inches), a size that nestles nicely in the hand, and even fits in some pockets. The jacket was printed letterpress in black and silver ink on Domtar Feltweave Blue paper, which gives the effect of a night scene.

Soren Bondrup-Nielsen’s A Sound Like Water Dripping
(Third Prize, Prose Non-Fiction)

Last by not least is Soren Bondrup-Nielsen’s A Sound Like Water Dripping, the story of his adventures search for the Boreal Owl in the woods of Northern Ontario and Alberta when he was a young graduate student. This book was typeset in a digital revival of F.W. Goudy’s Garamont types which was made by my late friend, Jim Rimmer. For me, Goudy’s types are a sort of comfort food, and, when handled carefully, they work every bit as well in the world of offset printing as they do in traditional letterpress printing. The jacket artwork was executed by Wolfville artists and calligrapher Jack McMaster. It was great fun to elbow Jack away from his usual style and see what resulted.

I must admit that I view awards and prizes as a bit of a mug’s game. I don’t put much stock in their importance when we lose, so I ought not put much more stock in them when we win either. However, it’s always gratifying when your peers recognize that the work you are doing has some merit. What the Alcuin Society is saying by running this competition and awarding these prizes is that the design of books can make a significant contribution to our culture, and that’s a statement I can agree with wholeheartedly.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Ecology and Economy

2010-03-30T15:55:00.000-07:00

National Poetry Month is upon us, and the number of books we have to get through the press and out to events, launches and bookstores generally in the next few weeks is a bit overwhelming. We’ve always run a bit of a ‘just in time’ approach to manufacturing, though it sometimes gets the better of us. For small firms, it’s just not really possible to print books months in advance of their release dates (particularly when the big retailers can take months and months to pay for the wares once they get them). We simply can’t tie up the capital, or the labour, too far in advance of the sale. So it’s a constant balancing act.

While all the necessary parts to make a book are usually designed and printed together – sheets, cover, jacket, wrapper – we may only assemble 100 or so books at any one time; whatever is required to meet the demand. The rest of the parts are stored until orders merit producing more books. There are pros and cons to this approach. Every once in a while we get caught with a big order on a backlist book and find ourselves low on salable stock with no openings in the press or bindery schedule for several weeks running.

When this happens, I envy the mainstream publisher who has 1000 finished copies of a book stockpiled in some warehouse outside Toronto, ready to ship in an instant. But that sort of system has problems as well, namely that it is wasteful, expensive, wrongheaded, and, ultimately, destructive.

Think about it like this: A west coast publisher has 2500 copies of a hardcover book printed and bound and ships them to a distributor in the east. The distributor ships them to wholesalers and retail stores all over the country. Over 18 months, perhaps half the copies are sold and the rest are returned to the warehouse. The returned books are often damaged or otherwise unsalable. They may be remaindered and reshipped to retailers to be sold at a lower price. Or they might be stripped of their cases and rebound as paperbacks, or simply pulped. No matter how you look at it, its a wasteful system both economically and ecologically. It relies on high volume to maintain a profit. The only people who seem to do the best by it are the shippers.

These problems are hidden from the consumer, of course, who only knows that they can order a book through a major online storefront and get it quickly. What they don’t understand is that the distribution and wholesale system of mainstream publishing privileges the instant gratification of the consumer over sustainable economics and ecology.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve no interest in thwarting anyone’s desire to purchase a book. I want to get as many books into as many hands as is practicaly possible. But what does it cost society to have millions of books produced and standing at the ready each year, many of which will never be purchased? And what sort of reader will not wait a few weeks for the book he or she truly desires to read?

We are not an assembly line producing consumer goods or a fast-food drive-thru. As literary printers and publishers, we are cultural agents, purveyors of complex, hazardous, and often subversive goods. Our manufacturing process ought match the cultural and intellectual integrity of our wares. Commerce is a by-product of our activities, not its motivating force or guiding principle, and we employ the mechanisms of capitalism where they will assist us in our objectives, and bristle and baulk otherwise.

These are the sorts of things you think about when you are putting in a double shift, racing the clock to assemble books in time for the last courier pick-up of the day. I’m not a contrarian or an ideologue. I’m simply interested in understanding how a small literary publisher – manufacturing on a craft level but thinking and marketing on a global one – can evolve business practices that efficiently work within the broader world of commerce without being subsumed by its problems. These questions are every bit as interesting and every bit as tricky to resolve as the ideal proportions of a book page. At least it’s good to know that we did not enter a field where every problem has already been fixed.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Break-time Cribbage at Gaspereau

2010-03-17T06:25:00.000-07:00

In a shocking come-from-behind victory, Laura, Gaspereau Press’s Humber College publishing intern, comes from behind to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, narrowly beating Gary Dunfield with a 17 point hand. When the above footage was captured, victory was far from certain.

Laura displayed the story of her victory on her cribbage score pad while Gary retreated in a blur to his office; all the while, the rivalry intensifies. They’ve been hanging these score sheets around the shop like kill notches on their rifle stocks. The question is, what horrid jobs will Laura the intern be assigned as payback for her for her gutsy trouncing of her host?

In the meantime, back to our regularly scheduled book production panic.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Spring Books in Production No. 1

2010-03-15T13:34:00.000-07:00

Not that things ever gets slow, but we’re kicking into overdrive for the next few weeks as our spring list moves through the presses and bindery in anticipation of the many launches and events planned for April. As usual, we’re running behind, and even with the help of a very able intern from Humber College named Laura (who keeps beating Gary at lunchtime cribbage), it’s going to be the usual race to deliver all our spring books to events and stores on time.

Today I letterpress-printed jackets for Tim Bowling’s new poetry book, The Annotated Bee and Me. We all worked on this book today, actually. Marilyn finished printed the last sheets this morning, and in the afternoon Gary folded these sheets into 8vo signatures which Connie gathered into book blocks ready for Smyth sewing.

Tomorrow, I’ll print the second colour on the jacket and score the folds with a platen press. In the meantime, we’ll sew, bind and trim the first batch of books and enfold them in their jackets for shipping later in the week. Tim is launching the book with a reading at Audrey’s Books in Edmonton on March 23rd.

We’re also putting together Peter Sanger’s epic book on the life and work of Toronto poet Richard Outram, entitled Through Darkling Air. This book is gigantic! At 512 pages, it’s the longest book we’ve ever produced.

We printed this book in January to beat the rush, but we are only binding it now. The binding will be a red cloth over boards with a snazzy jacket made with paper from The Japanese Paper Place in Toronto. These materials were selected to evoke the spirit of the little private press books and broadsides produced by Richard Outram’s own Gauntlet Press in its heyday.

I decided to carry the title information and the other insignias of commerce on a horizontal paper wrapper. This untrimmed book block made a quick test of the idea. The first fifty books are sewn and waiting to be cased later this week. Peter will be launching the book on April 9th at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto.

… and there are three more Gaspereau books coming along fast on the tails of these two. Stay tuned for shop updates (and cribbage scores).

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Drag Race at the Dawson Printshop

2010-03-09T15:34:00.000-08:00

“I’m PRINTING something tonight, for Pete’s sake!” I growled when I landed at the Dawson Printshop for the regular Monday night meeting of the Letterpress Gang. The last few meetings had been dominated by admittedly pleasant chit-chat and some productive sorting and organizing of pied type and cuts, but lacked something fundamental. If you never get around to slathering ink on type and slamming some paper into it, what you have is a museum, not a printshop. And after a day teaching the basics of Vandercook cylinder press operation to our intern student back at Gaspereau Press, watching her carefully print a few hundred one-colour invitations from photopolymer plates, I was ready to get my hands dirty.

I jumped in and started cleaning and oiling a rather grumpy and worse-for-wear SP15, leaving the better maintained Universal I for Paul Maher, and everyone aligned themselves with one press or the other. While I revived the press, my crew set a nonsense arrangement of wood type to serve as the background of our poster.

I had an ink that was a mix of half metallic silver and half slate blue. We ran the sheet through twice, spinning it head to tail on the second pass. The opaque ink looked great where it overlapped, and we printed it fast an loose, letting the ink vary and the type distress.

Over this we printed the main text in black, which announced the Letterpress Gang’s weekly meetings. Paul’s crew was printing a two colour poster too. It felt like a race with two Vandercooks cranking out posters.

The poster my crew typeset was a long way from a polished piece of letterpress printing, but it was striking and spoke to the informality and fun of the letterpress evenings. I pointed out the upsidedown and backward characters, but the crew decided to let ’er stand. Yahoo!

Of course, I couldn’t mind my p’s and q’s. Someone picked up my camera and caught me in the act of pointing my blue-gloved fingers into Paul’s press, blathering on about the inking system on that press and how it works.

If you’re in Halifax and you’re interested in letterpress printing, you should come and check out the Letterpress Gang. We’re in the printshop at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design most Monday evenings during the school term.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Beauty in Saint John, New Brunswick

2010-03-07T05:15:00.000-08:00

Last Friday I travelled up to Saint John, New Brunswick, with my friend and frequent coconspirator, Thaddeus Holownia. We had been invited to give a talk at In Print, the University of New Brunswick’s downtown bookstore in Saint John. In Print is an excellent bookstore, housed in a stunning heritage building near the waterfront on King Street. The talk was well attended, thanks to the efforts of Anne Compton and Pat Joas, and the crowd seemed genuinely interested in the dog-and-pony show that Thaddeus and I put on.

One of the highlights of any trip to Saint John is the architecture, particularly the grand brick and stone facades of the downtown. But typically, while I had a camera in my pocket I didn’t snap a single picture. It’s more fun to watch Thaddeus making pictures than to make them myself.

I had the same problem when Thaddeus, Harry Thurston and I were working on our last book project, Silver Ghost, a book about the rivers and the habitat of the Atlantic Salmon. So when I went to put together slides for this talk, I discovered that I lacked illustrations for many steps in the process. I decided simply to draw a few ink-wash cartoons to fill the gaps. (In my adolescence, I dreamed of a career as a political cartoonist, and was appointed cartoonist on my junior high school newspaper on the strength of my collection of rejection letters for Newsweek and Time; no one else had been rejected by such prestigious publications.) The illustration above depicts one of the many lunch meetings Thaddeus and I had while working out the details on the Silver Ghost project. That’s me on the right, sort of. And Harry Thurston below.

We also had the pleasure of hanging out with one of the Passamaquoddy region’s great cultural trailblazers and international impresarios, Hugh French. Hugh has been one of the prime movers behind the Tides Institute & Museum of Art in Eastport, Maine, and instrumental in fostering exchanges between the cultural communities in New England and the Maritimes. In 2005, the Tides Institute installed a Vandercook No. 4 on the third floor of their building and has been slowly developing a small studio for printmaking and letterpress printing. Over supper, we discussed a number of beautiful ideas for various collaborative projects, and I left with the distinct impression that it was high time I invested in a passport.

Although the talk we delivered in Saint John was largely a show-and-tell about the making of Silver Ghost, one of the ideas I tried to stress was that beauty is not simply a question of aesthetics. In the talk, I made these three observations:

1. Making a beautiful book is a cultural act, and therefore necessarily a collaborative act. That is, making a beautiful book requires a community. This community might be as small as the writer and the reader, but is often much larger.

2. A beautiful book, though global in reach, is the product of a local economy where decisions are made within a community about the allocation of that community’s own resources. That is, making a beautiful book is a sort of economic act.

3. A beautiful book thrives where there are shared concerns and a shared sense of responsibility. That is, beauty is also a sort of ecology.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Gunvaldsen Klaassen nominated for the Atlantic Poetry Prize

2010-03-04T11:04:00.000-08:00

Gaspereau Press is pleased to announce that Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen’s poetry collection, Lean-To, has been nominated for the Atlantic Poetry Prize.

The Atlantic Poetry Prize is awarded to the best collection of poetry written by an Atlantic Canadian and published for the first time in the current calendar year. The winner of the award will be announced at the 2010 Atlantic Book Awards celebration on Wednesday, April 14 at the Alderney Landing Theatre in Dartmouth, N.S.

The 2010 Atlantic Books Awards and Festival runs from April 10 to April 18 with literary events taking place in all four Atlantic provinces. For more information, or to find out where you can hear Tonja read from Lean-to, check the festival website.

For Promoting Useful Knowledge

2010-02-19T17:39:00.000-08:00

I recently had the opportunity to peruse a somewhat battered copy of Transactions, of the American Philosophical Society, Held at Philadelphia, for promoting Useful Knowledge, Volume 1, compiled between January 1st 1769 and January 1st 1771.

This particular book was printed by William and Thomas Bradford, a father and son firm in Philadelphia. William Bradford (1719–91) was born into a family of printers – don’t confuse him with his namesake grandfather (1663–1752), a colonial printer in Philadelphia and later in New York. (Grandfather Bradford is thought to have been the first printer in America to have fought a legal battle in defence of the freedom of the press. The trial, which took place in 1692, resulted in a hung jury, but contributed the Grandfather Bradford’s decision to leave Philadelphia for New York, where he later established the state’s first newspaper, the New York Gazette.)

Our William Bradford learned the trade from his uncle, Andrew Bradford, who was the only printer in Philadelphia from 1712 to 1723, and has the distinction of having briefly employed Philadelphia’s most celebrated printer and publisher, Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), when Franklin arrived in that town in 1723. On the completing his apprenticeship, William Bradford visited England in 1741, returning the next year with the equipment he needed to open his own shop. He became the printer of record for the first Continental Congress which met in Philadelphia in 1774, and was one of a number of printers who brazenly printed Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence in July 1776. He also served as colonel in the Pennsylvania militia during the American Revolution, leaving the business in the hands of his son Thomas. He was wounded at the Battle of Princeton and, though he lived until 1791, he never fully recovered. His dying words to his children are said to have been, “Though I bequeath you no estate, I leave you in the enjoyment of liberty.” No estate, eh? Seems some things about printing and publishing never change.

Introductions thus dispatched, there remain three threads to weave together in order to arrive at my point, and if I don’t proceed with the upmost brevity, I fear, dear reader, that I shall lose you entirely.

Thus:

1. The American Philosophical Society (whose proceedings, printed by Bradford, we consider here) was founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin. It fizzled and faltered within a year, but in January 1769 it was reborn and merged with the American Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge. Franklin was elected first president of the group and no doubt had a great deal of influence over the editing and publishing of this volume.

2. Benjamin Franklin, you may recall, started in the printing trade at a young age, fled to Philadelphia at the age of 17 to escape his apprenticeship to his older brother, and there was employed for a time by William Bradford's uncle. After gigging around Philadelphia printshops awhile, Franklin travelled to London to aquire printing equipment and further training on the strength of promises of support from Pennsylvania Governor Sir William Keith, support which never materialized. He was back in America by 1726 and began his career as a successful printer, publisher, author, inventor and statesman. What interests us at present, however, is the fact that between 1757 and 1763 Franklin was in England again, this time on a diplomatic mission on behalf of the elected assembly of Pennsylvania. He failed to effect the reforms he sought, but certainly profited by his time abroad. Such as joining the Birmingham-based Lunar Society, a sort of scientific salon which likely fueled Franklin’s later revival of his defunct American Philosophical Society. One of the people Franklin would have met at the Lunar Society was …

3. The legendary Birmingham printer and type designer John Baskerville (1706–75). Coming to printing in mid-life after a successful career as a writing master and Japaner of wares, Baskerville brooked no traditions and spared no expense, daring to ‘improve’ press, ink, and paper that they might better reproduce his new types design. His printing and types caused quite a stir when his books started emerging in 1757, the same year Franklin arrived in England. By and large, the English didn’t care for Baskerville’s type, preferring the late Baroque letterforms cut and cast by William Caslon (1692–1766). Critics said that Baskerville’s fine types and bright, smooth paper caused blindness. Franklin, however, loved Baskerville’s types, becoming Baskerville’s greatest advocate and booster, introducing his type to America.

And so, when I picked up this volume printed by a Philadelphia printer in 1771 and opened it at random to a page spread, I started and muttered to myself, Hey, isn’t that … BASKERVILLE?!

And so it was. Baskerville’s wonderful Neoclassical type shimmering across the pages of an American book, and the story of Franklin’s connection to it simmering in the background, giving context to the discovery. Was this useful knowledge, I wondered, thinking of the book’s title? What does it mean to make connections between such varied elements?

And a few more connections if you’ll permit me.

In a time when the decoration of book pages with boarders, rules, and fleurons ran rampant, Baskerville was known for his quiet design which, with a few exceptions, relied entirely upon the beauty of the typography. (This is one of the things I admire about his work.) While the first two pages from Bradford’s setting reproduced above take this model, many of Bradford’s pages tend to show a more decorative bent. Reproduced directly above, for example, is a chapter-ending bouquets of printer’s flowers and sorts.

Notice the capital I misused as a lowercase l in the word “Public” in line 7 of the text.

This page shows a strong French influence in its decoration. It seems to be emulating the design of the great punchcutter Pierre Simon Fournier (1712–68), whose neoclassical types share much affinity with Baskerville’s own, but whose pension for excessive decoration befuddles the modern eye. Fournier published his impressive two-volume Manuel Typographique in 1764 and 1768, and I wonder whether Bradford was familiar with it. Seeing the sorts he’s used to create these decorations, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the materials were imported from Fournier’s foundry.

More decoration. And you’ll notice the use of end punctuation in the heading, which was common at that time – an ugly convention we’ve since dropped.

Bradford, Franklin, Baskerville, Fournier … stories of political and typographic revolutions … not a bad little afternoon wander into the vast forest of the past, especially considering that the departure point was a book plucked at random from a library reshelving cart.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Sylva: Cruising Timber & Type

2010-02-14T06:08:00.000-08:00

Part of the joy of hounding around in the library is the accidental nature of discovery. This is also one of the things that attracts me to birding and walking the woods. No matter what you know of bird song, habit, or field marks, you’re still reliant upon the luck of being in the right place at the right time with your eyes and ears open.

It helps to know where to look, however, and since the sociological side of literature and research interests me as much as books themselves, many of my bibliographic adventures begin with cruising the library’s re-shelving carts. When I go into an archives, I want to know what other people are curious about and see what items were recently requested for viewing. It’s a bit like looking for salamanders, though. You can turn over a lot of rocks before you find anything interesting.

Recently, at the bottom of a stack of more contemporary books, I spied a battered copy of the third edition of Sylva, or, A Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesties Dominions (1679) written by the English horticulturist and diarist John Evelyn (1620– 1706). I wonder who had been looking at it, and why?

I knew of this book from Thoreau, who refers to it briefly in Walden and mentions it again at greater length in his journal a few years later. On 6 June 1852 Thoreau comments:

Evelyn has collected the fine exaggerations of antiquity respecting the virtues and habits of trees and added some himself.[…] If the oft-repeated glorification of the forest from age to age smacks of religion, is even druidical, Evelyn is as good as several old druids, and his “Silva” is a new kind of prayerbook, a glorifying of the trees and enjoying them forever, which was the chief end of his life.

Evelyn’s Sylva is a practical guide to arboriculture intended to improve the understanding and practice of forestry. It was first published as a paper presented to the newly constituted Royal Society in 1662. This third edition was printed for the noteworthy London bookseller and publisher John Martyn (d. 1680), whose shop was located in St. Paul’s Churchyard under the sign of the bell. Martyn, in partnership with John Allestry, had acquired the lucrative monopoly as printer to the Royal Society in 1663.

A couple of different text types were used in Sylva. The two types used in the pages reproduced above, while similar in structure, are quite different. Most obviously, the first one has a more lively italic which makes liberal use of swash capitals.

In the days of handcut punches, each size the punchcutter cut was essentially a variation on a theme as he made countless little refinements and alterations in order to achieve the best visual result at each size. One such variations is clearly seen when these two roman types are scaled to the same x-height and similar words are set side by side. Note how the extenders are taller on the first type than on the second. Types cut for smaller sizes tended to have shorter extenders, even when the structure of the letters was otherwise similar.

Whatever Thoreau made of Evelyn as a botanist, he certainly found Sylva fertile ground as a work of literature. Her wrote in his journal on 23 March 1953:

Evelyn and others wrote when the language, was in a tender, nascent state and could be moulded to express the shades of meaning; when sesquipedalian words, long since cut and apparently dried and drawn to mill, – not yet to the dictionary lumber-yard, – put forth a fringe of green sprouts here and there along in the angles of their rugged bark, their very bulk insuring some sap remaining; some florid suckers they sustain at least. Which cords, split into shingles and laths, will supply poets for ages to come.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

The Planter Typeface

2010-02-10T04:37:00.000-08:00

When I first arrived in the Annapolis Valley back in the mid 1990s and started looking into the history of the place, I was attracted to the work of a primitive stone cutter whose sandstone markers were found in many of the local graveyards. The decoration caught my eye first, but the lettering was what really hooked me.

Known only as ‘The Horton Carver’ (his name has not yet turned up in any period documents, such as invoices or probate records), his stones start appearing in the 1770s in burial grounds all around Nova Scotia’s Minas Basin – places like Kentville, Wolfville, Gaspereau, Chipmans Corner, Horton, Cornwallis, Onslow, and Londonderry, for example. Previous to this, if you were important enough (i.e., wealthy) to have your final resting place marked with a cut stone (instead of wood, or nothing), the stone was most likely carved in New England and imported. With the arrival of the New England Planters in the 1760s, the economy and population grew to the point where a local market for stone cutting evolved. You can read more about the Horton Carver and Nova Scotian gravestones in Deborah Trask’s excellent book Life How Short, Eternity How Long: Gravestone Carving in Nova Scotia (1978), or in her article “Remember Me As You Pass By,” which is available online. You can also see more Horton Carving stones by visiting the Farber Gravestone Collection website.

At any rate, I was attracted to the purposeful but amateur letterforms made by this local carver and started to hunt down and document as many of his stones as I could find. Most of Trask’s study has concentrated on the imagery, decoration and the text written on the stones, and less on the structure and form of letters themselves. Before long, I started thinking about making a digital typeface based on the Horton Carver letterforms, but there were many problems. I had to learn how to use the tools, for starters. While I had a significant sample to work with, many characters were not existant on the stones. And these letters were ‘purpose built’ for large size display, not for continuous reading at 10 or 12 point (which is my typographic neighbourhood). So I kept studying the stones, honing my skills and stewing over the Horton letters.

Last spring, Gaspereau Press was hired to design and print a small series of books for the Kings-Hants Heritage Connection, a group of local historical societies. Written by Julian Gwyn, the books commemorate the arrival of the New England Planters to Nova Scotia in 1760. These were the people the Horton Carver lived with and carved for. It seemed like the perfect excuse to invest some time on the Horton Carver project. Within a couple of weeks, I had completed a working set of capital letters and a rough draft of a lowercase roman. I decided to name the type Planter and use it to set the display headings in the Planter history books we were preparing to produce. It mated well with Adobe Caslon, which I used to set the body text.

These history books have been coming off the press this past week. The version of the Planter type I used in the books is still rather preliminary – as rough, illfitted and wonky as its handcut models, yet beautiful too. For all its imperfection, it was gratifying to see printed sheets coming off our presses that employed a letter which was first cut in sandstone with a chisel 250 years ago – and not in New England or Holland or Italy, but right here in this backwater place. And how many books can boast a type that is quite this apropos? It makes me grin to be able to carry on the work started by this unknown lover of letters, paying my small tribute to his craftsmanship.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Two Books from Klanak Press

2010-02-07T16:01:00.000-08:00

I wandered over into the Canadian Literature stacks at the library the other day to browse around for interesting books, and had the good fortune of reacquainting myself with William and Alice McConnell’s Klanak Press, a private press active in Vancouver between 1958 and 1990. Two of their books coincidentally came to hand during this particular outing. (I could always seach the on-line catalogue for the press's books, but foraging is more fun.)

The first Klanak Press book I found was Klanak Islands: Eight Short Stories (1959), which was designed by Takao Tanabe and printed by the Morriss Printing Company of Victoria. The emblem was designed by the renowned Haida artist Bill Reid. I'm particularly fond of the asymmetrical typography of the title page.

The table of contents is also clearly organized. While designers generally like to show off their skills on covers, title pages and chapter openings, I tend to think that you can tell more about a designer by looking at how they handle more workmanlike elements like lists and appendices. If they are alert and wily here, handling the more prosaic pages eloquently, you know they are truly on top of their game.

The chapter openings are also lovely, returning to the asymmetry established on the title page. The drawing is by Vancouver artist Don Jarvis.

The second Klanak Press publication I admired that day was Ralph Gustafson’s Rocky Mountain Poems (1960). This book was designed by Ben Lam and printed at Morriss. The cover is a spirited mix of traditional elements (like the Caslon type and the boarder design which anchors the page) and a nontraditional flush-right justification of the title type. The use of colour and space are simple but excellent.

On the title page, the title typography remains in Caslon all-caps, but it is now left justified and cantilevered out over the balance point of Reid’s emblem and the publisher’s information at the bottom of the page.

One of the things I love about the design of this particular book is the way in which the poems are aligned to the bottom of the page, not to the top. This is a tricky technique to carry off successfully; it requires a sympathetic text and is always in danger of becoming simply a gimmick. However, this is a short book (36 pages), and each opening feels fresh. Note the location of the folio (page number) in relation to the poem titles and the body text.

According to Robert Bringhurst’s short biography of the press in Ocean Paper Stone (a chronicle of publishing in British Columbia issued by bookseller William Hoffer in 1984), William McConnell began setting type and collecting books at the age of twelve, and while he went on to a career in law, it is clear from the beautiful editions he produced that his heart remained with books all his life. The texts of all but one of Klanak Press’s books were set in Intertype Baskerville and printed by Morriss.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Starting work at the Dawson Room

2010-02-01T20:02:00.000-08:00

Calligrapher, illustrator and Albion wrangler Jack McMaster and I drove into Halifax tonight to lend a hand at the Dawson Printshop, which is housed at the Nova Scotia College or Art and Design. There was a good number in attendance for this the second meeting of the loose association of letterpress folk and Dawson Printshop supporters. Type designer Rod McDonald kicked things off by showing off his copy of the beautiful of portfolio Wood Type of the Angelica Press, published in an edition of 200 copies by the The Angelica Press of New York in 1976.

So inspired, we set to work. The collection has been in a bit of disarray since its move from the care of one university to another. There are many galleys of type to sort and distribute, and much reorganization to undertake. The hard part with a job this large is just knowing where to begin.

While others sorted cuts and furniture, Jack McMaster and I started into the galleys of mismatched sorts and pied fonts of wooden type, trying to reunite lost letters with their kinfolk. Jack took on a saintly glow standing under the low fluorescent lighting of the type cellar.

Rod and I discovered an unopened package of 30 point Helvetica Medium foundry type, direct from Stempel in Germany. Everywhere I looked my suspicions about this collection’s interest, utility and overall value to the college and the community were further confirmed.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Reformers, Troublemakers & Outlaw Printers

2010-01-31T15:31:00.001-08:00

Back to the Baroque. Huguenot cleric Jean Claude (1619–87) entered the ministry in 1645 and moved through numerous teaching and pastoral posts in his native France, courting much controversy with his anti-ecumenical views. Toward the end of his life, he fled to Holland after Louis XIV revoked of the Edict of Nantes in October 1685 (which effectively made Protestantism illegal in France). While hiding out in Holland, Claude received a pension from über-Protestant English prince William of Orange, who commissioned him to write a book on the persecution of French Huguenots. On May 5, 1686, that publication and its English translation had the distinction of being publicly burnt by London’s common hangman, by order of William of Orange’s father-in-law and pro-Catholic King of England, James II. They were complicated times.

Recently, I looked at one of Claude’s earlier publications, pictured above. An Historical Defence of the Reformation is the English translation of Claude’s Défense de la Réformation (1682). The translation was made by “T.B. and M.A.” and was printed by “G.L.” in 1683.

Larkin! – George Larkin was one of London’s notorious underground printers who defied the Crown's oppressive censorship of the English press in late 1600s. Loosely connected with the Baptists, Larkin started his outlaw adventures in 1666, printing no less than the first edition of John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, an anti-clerical work by Ralph Wallis, and some satirical poems by Andrew Marvell. That’s a pretty formidable introduction to the book trade.

After narrowly escaping out the back door during a house search sanctioned by the Stationer’s Company in 1668, Larkin turned informant, ratting-out his fellow radical printers John Darby and Nathan Brookes to Sir Roger L’Estrange, overseer of the publishing trade by appointment of the Restoration court (and no stranger to publishing controversy in his own right). Even this alliance couldn’t keep Larkin out of harm’s way; his printing career was punctuated by surprise searches, fines and periods of imprisonment.

Back to this book. The type used by Larkin displays many of the same early-Baroque elements of those used in Mather’s A Sermon (printed at Boston in 1685) and D’Anvers’ A Treatise of Baptism (printed at London in 1674) which I discussed in earlier posts (See Older Posts).

One of the interesting attributes of this particular page is the way in which the sidenote is butted directly up against the main textblock with only a thin lead between them. However, in the upper right-hand margin you can see from the ghost of the note printed on the verso of this page that it is set with ample space between it and the main textblock. Notice the dagger used to mark the note in the main text (eleven lines down from the top) and that its form is slightly different than the dagger of the smaller-sized font used for the sidenote itself.

This font includes a number of ligatures, or single pieces of type which combine and link two or more letters. In modern digital fonts, ligatures for the combinations ‘fi’ and ‘fl’ are standard issue, but an extended pallet of ligatures for further f combinations (ff, ffi, ffl, fj, fb, etc.) and historical ‘discretionary ligatures’ or ‘quaints’ (ct, st, is, us) are often included with Opentypes fonts with extended character sets.

Speaking of discretionary, notice that one line uses the italic ligature for ‘us’ on two words, but not on the third. Is this simply an oversight on the part of the compositor?

Not only does the ligature save the compositor time, allowing him to set two letters while only reaching out to one compartment in the case, the single glyph is slightly more compressed than the combination of the single sorts ‘u’ and ‘s’, saving space. It’s also very beautiful.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Double-Daggers & Asterisks

2010-01-30T18:20:00.000-08:00

We had a pretty good blizzard on Friday, so I spent a great deal of the day at home by the wood stove, editing a book by Tim Bowling. In the book (due out this autumn), book collecting, bibliomania and the mid-life torments of the protagonist loom large, so it was no real surprise that by mid afternoon I had abandoned my post, bundled up in my back-country best and hoofed myself down to the special collections room at the university library to hang out with some old books. Alas, the room was closed due to the inclement weather. Seeing as I was there, I decided to roam around in the general stacks.

Now, while I had my heart set on spending that snowy afternoon with much older books, let it be said that there is a great deal of fun to be had in the general stacks. If nothing else, cruising the stacks reminds you that a well-designed book is a rare thing. As you run your hand along the spines of the books, what you see is more often than not the result of the lazy thinking, poor workmanship, and general meanness of the book trade. It can get depressing in a hurry. But every once in a while books come to hand which suggests cause for hope.

Two examples of such ‘ahh-ha!’ volumes from Friday come to mind. One is A Choice of Dryden’s Verse, published by Faber & Faber in 1973. In this volume, it was W.H. Auden doing the choosing. I generally like Faber’s designs from this era and earlier. They are almost always restrained and careful. Everything adheres to a simple hierarchy. There is no showiness here.

Well, almost no showiness. I snorted when I saw this uses of two double-daggers to bracket the folio (that is, the page number). I’d never encountered such a use of a double-dagger before. In fact, you rarely see this glyph used anywhere anymore, unless someone is typesetting using the traditional set of footnote markers to which it belongs. This use feels a bit unnecessary, calling undo attention to the folio, but the playfulness made me grin.

I also discovered a four volume set of The Complete Works of William Congreve which was published by the Nonesuch Press in 1923. It was issued in a limited edition of 900 sets, with this set numbered 470. One of the things that I like about the spine lables is the inventive use and arrangement of asterisks (another glyph from that traditional footnote set) to indicate the volume number.

Nonesuch Press was founded in London by Francis Meynell (1891–1975) in 1922, with its first book, John Donne's Love Poems, being released in May 1923. This Congreve set was also from that inaugural season.

One of Meynell’s ambitions was to demonstrate that modern composition and printing techniques and machines (Monotype casters and power presses) could produce books that was every bit as distinguished as (and a hell of a lot less expensive than) the books produced by the private press movement. His was an attempt to marry the skills and knowledge of the past age with the best technology of the present. By and large, Meynall succeeded in this goal. It didn't hurt that he was a gifted writer and first-rate typographer, with a knack for working with fleurons and ornaments. His example has been one that has had a great influence on the way we do things at Gaspereau Press.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Reviving the Dawson Print Shop

2010-01-25T19:22:00.000-08:00

Rod McDonald, Paul Maher, Steve Slipp, and Michael LeBlanc,
Chair of Design, NSCAD

A typographer can’t spend all his life hiding behind his own type cabinets. Occasionally he has to venture out and … look in other people’s type cabinets. This evening, I travelled into Halifax with designer and wayfinding whiz Steven Slipp to meet with a group of people determined to revive the Dawson Print Shop. Once hosted by the Library Studies program at Dalhousie University, the collection was assembled and maintained over the years by the late Bob Dawson and a dedicated group of volunteers. A few years ago, the collection was acquired by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and moved to its campus in Halifax’s Historic Properties. Following a short-lived attempt at operating it as a ‘commercial’ enterprise, NSCAD administrators pulled the plug last April and the collection’s future was left in limbo.

If tonight’s inaugural meeting of the so-called ‘letterpress gang’ is any indication, the Dawson collection will soon enter active use once again, having acquired some able and dedicated advocates. After all, this collection preserves an astonishing cross section of our print heritage; it is perhaps one of the most extensive collections of functional typographic material in the country. As well as a wide variety of presses and associated equipment, it boasts more than a thousand drawers of metal and wooden type.

I’ll post more details on the Dawson holdings in the future, as I plan to put in time working with the collection as a volunteer. What is important for now is that there seems to be interest and support from a range of NSCAD faculty, students and a few outside parties like myself for the revitalization and restoration of the Dawson collection. Personally, I think that it may be one of the most culturally significant assets that NSCAD possesses; I intend to do everything I can to help ensure that it is handled properly and used well.

Bookbinder and long-time Dawson Collection advocate Joe
Landry explains the state of the collection in the type cellar,
while type designer Rod McDonald nods in agreement

Rod McDonald holds forth on the collection’s significance

An unusal display face housed in the Dawson collection,
presently unidentified.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Puritans & Baroque Type

2010-01-24T08:30:00.000-08:00

To pick up from my last entry (in which there was much gratuitous finger pointing and some commentary on D’Anvers’ A Treatise of Baptism) I offer now, gentle reader, one of the hundred-some works which the Massachusetts-born Puritan preacher and Harvard president Increase Mather (1639–1723) published during his lifetime, and which I photographed on the same day I saw D’Anvers’ book.

This book was first published in 1675 under the title The Wicked Mans Portion, but it was the second edition I examined. It was printed by Richard Pierce at Boston in 1685 for the bookseller Joseph Brunning (a.k.a ‘Browning’) of Court Street. The second edition has a compelling title: A Sermon (Preached at the Lecture in Boston in New England the 18th of the 1 Moneth 1674 When two men were Executed, who had Murthered their Master) Wherein is Shewed That Excess in Wickedness doth bring Untimely Death. A cautionary tale in which comeuppance is central.

The quality of the printing and composition of Mather’s Boston-printed book are similar to D’Anvers’ book, which was printed in London – an impressive fact given that the first book to be printed in New England had appeared only four decades earlier, in 1640. Mather’s book occasionally slips into uneven inking and impression and lackluster justification, but it begins with a smart-looking if simple title page which is superior to D’Anvers’, and the handling of the ornaments at Mather’s chapter headings makes graceful use of simple sorts.

The typefaces employed by these two printers on different sides of the Atlantic are strikingly similar in form and style, suggesting common sources. They are Baroque in flavour, with a widely varying axis of stroke, a high degree of slope in the italic, large x-height, and a small aperture. Like the French and Dutch types of this period, their beauty resides partly in their irregularity.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER