Books. It all begins and ends with books here at St Brigid Press.
Personally and professionally, my life has been significantly shaped by the encounters I’ve had with literature ~ I bet many of you have similar stories. Early in my continuing apprenticeship to traditional printing and book-making, kind friends and mentors in the craft directed me to essential volumes about letterpress, typography, printing history, and more. Those folks and the books they recommended got me started on the right foot, and I return again and again to their wisdom.
Over the years, through the generosity of others and through my own acquisitions, the library at St Brigid Press has grown into a rich repository of texts. I thought it might be fun for us all to take a brief look at some of these volumes ~ from type design to press maintenance, printer’s biographies to sewing books.
Here’s the second installment of “Book Looks” ~ short spotlights on some of my favorite volumes from the Press library. Enjoy! (If you missed the first Book Looks post, read it HERE.)
BOOK LOOKS, PART 2
A Short History of the Printed Word, by Warren Chappell & Robert Bringhurst
This is a good, concise introduction to the history of the origins and development of printing in the West. Warren Chappell’s original text from the early 1970s was revised and updated by Robert Bringhurst in the late 1990s to extend and expand the book’s scope. Beginning with the development of alphabets and cast type, Chappell and Bringhurst then give us a brisk, well-illustrated tour of the 15th-20th centuries: the innovations of type designers and typographers like Aldus Manutius, Simon de Colines, and Bruce Rogers; new techniques in printing illustrations from woodcuts to intaglio methods to electrotyping; and the rise and revolution of newspapers, periodicals, and, in the last chapter, digital production. This book helped me begin to get my head around the complex history of printing in the West, and introduced me to some of the brilliant people who forged new innovations in letterforms, book design, and production processes. Original edition of A Short History of the Printed Word was published in 1970; second edition published by Hartley & Marks, 1999.
2. Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press & Protest in the 19th Century, by Jane Rhodes
One of the many delights of delving into traditional printing and bookmaking has been the discovery of the individuals and communities who built the presses, designed the type, made the books, and passed along the printed word. One of those individuals was Mary Ann Shadd Cary — the first Black female publisher in North America. Cary (1823-1893) grew up well-educated, in a family of free African-Americans in Delaware. Her family was very active in the antislavery movement and in the movement to relocate Blacks to places where slavery had been abolished. One of those relocation areas was what is now Ontario, Canada, and Mary Ann moved there with her brother, first establishing a school and then becoming a journalist and publisher. In 1853, Cary founded The Provincial Freeman, a newspaper “Devoted to anti-slavery, temperance, and general literature.” It also supported women’s suffrage, and it served the region’s African-Canadian community for 4 years. She traveled widely, wrote essays about racial and gender equality, and, after the Civil War and the death of her husband, she moved back to the United States and got a law degree from Howard University. Cary was an amazing woman blazing trails in publishing and civil rights in the 19th century. Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century by Jane Rhodes is published by Indiana University Press, 1998. If Rhodes’ full biography is not for you, then here’s a newspaper article that hits some of the highlights.
3. Against the Grain: Interviews with Maverick American Publishers, edited by Robert Dana
City Lights. Godine. Copper Canyon. New Directions. These now-legendary independent poetry publishing houses were started by likewise legendary personalities: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, David Godine, Sam Hamill & Tree Swenson, and James Laughlin. In the mid-1980s, the poet Robert Dana interviewed these and a few others who worked on the leading edge of small press publishing in 20th century America. It’s a fascinating read, ranging from the inky details of typesetting to the state of the then avant-garde. I particularly enjoyed “listening” to one of my letterpress heroes, the fine press typographer and designer Harry Duncan: “I print books for somebody who is going to discover the text of the book—poems, stories, and so on—with the same delight that I discover it as I am working on the book.” Against the Grain was published by the University of Iowa Press, 1986.
“There are only two ways to publish. One is to try to figure out what everyone else will like, which I’ve generally found to be totally unsuccessful, because nobody knows. And the other is to know what YOU like... So what I like is what I publish.”
Stay tuned for future installments of “Book Looks,” friends. In the meantime, be well and read on!
Emily
