This is the second part of an interview and visit I did with Griffin last year. Enjoy!
My soapbox with respect to private press publishing, and to a lesser extent fine press publishing, is that so much of what is published is the writings of the same old men from the western canon. I think we need more women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ writers, as well as more literature in translation. You’ve done a better job than most with your books by Kuzmickas, Adichie, Diadchenko, Le Guin, de Beuvoir, Zecchini, etc.
Thoughts?
I think many collectors share your frustration in this regard. And I certainly do. Another dead white guy? Why, in particular, Poe again and again, Biblical texts again, the same male typographers and woodblock artists and writers again and again. Mostly, this represents the genuine love of private press proprietors (myself included). Poe, again, because we simply love Poe that much. However, it’s also important to remember that all of the business incentives are aligned toward public domain work (that is, pre-1920s). Dead white guys are a cheap date. Dead white guys don’t need paperwork. And, perhaps most of all, dead white guys are popular. Despite some grumblings about “Yet another Poe…” both of the No Reply Poe editions were fully reserved within a month of being announced, whereas I may have copies of the Kuzmickas or Diadchenko editions you mention for years to come. And as you might guess, these were an order of magnitude more work to bring about than the Poe editions. I’m at peace with it, but I do see firsthand why private presswork is so canon-focused. Follow the money: the canon pays. (Now we’ve jumped off your soapbox and onto mine, so I’ll return to your question and maybe we can discuss more about this later.)
I had coffee last year with a high school teacher of mine, who writes English textbooks. We were discussing my collaboration with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and he mentioned that he and his co-authors had wanted to include a passage of hers in their next textbook, but the publisher’s fee was too high, so they couldn’t. Thus, another generation of students reading an English textbook which features not a single writer from Africa, a continent with well over a hundred million English speakers. One of the unintended consequences of a copyright system which makes the distant past free is a continuous dwelling in that distant past.
I think diversifying the output of private presswork will come with time. You say, “I’ve done a better job than most.” I’m also just younger than most. And by the standards of my generation I’m a card-carrying old fogey. You say we need more women represented in private press output. I agree, and wonder what about our community makes it so very male. The finest proprietors today are women. Name a better printer than Jan Elsted. Name a better bookbinder than Peggy Gotthold. Our most prominent book artist? Claire Van Vliet. The biggest fine press? Run by Savine Pontifell. And yet, men in private presswork certainly outnumber women. To boot, the community of collectors is overwhelmingly male. I just ran down my list of orders to fulfill. I have 243, of which only 26 (give or take, as I’m judging from names alone) are for women. Ten percent.
Ultimately, I think a diversifying private press community will bring about a diversified output. We each publish literature that speaks to us, and identity certainly plays a strong role. I mean, stop the presses: Young man prints The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
I empathize enormously with each person’s struggle with their own identities, and their desire to have those identities recognized, celebrated, and reflected back. Nothing taught me this more powerfully than when my youngest sibling, who was born in Ethiopia, showed up for her first day at a nearly all-white elementary school and saw at the entrance the portraits of Setti Warren, mayor of Newton, Deval Patrick, governor of Massachusetts, and Barack Obama, president of the United States. To the only Black girl at this school, those portraits and that representation sent a clear message: to be Black is to be powerful and respected. Representation is important. In the earnest work of better representing our fellow travelers in publishing, I do hope we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Some of these old white guys were incredible thinkers, sometimes incredibly radical, sometimes even visionary. If I want to give my sister a positive vision for the future and the work that needs doing, I’d have her read William Blake, certified old white guy, before Alice Walker. I also think it’s incumbent upon all of us to elevate admirable voices with which we disagree as much as those of our co-partisans. You can probably guess my politics based on my age and where I’m from. So, my press’ commitment to arch-conservative T. S. Eliot is a bit of a mismatch! I think Eliot’s writings (both his poems and his critical work) represent the very best of conservatism, what makes it admirable, even exciting, what really challenges liberal suppositions. I think we’d do well by elevating the honorable opposition more in contemporary life. More so than committing to publish a diversity of work, actually, I try to maintain a commitment to tolerance. Tolerance, after all, isn’t respect and civility for those with whom you agree but for those with whom you vehemently disagree. This year I’ll be spending months printing by hand Simone de Beauvour’s The Ethics of Ambiguity, of which I disagree with nearly every sentiment.
Along those lines, I know you are involved with this new experiment with the Consensus Press. I was hoping we would address some of the above mentioned inequities when members submitted their proposals, but the book that was voted in for the first publication was Flowers for Algernon. I must admit that when copyrighting and other issues arose, I was very happy to see the membership vote to move to The Tale of Sinuhe, a text both outside the Western Canon and in translation.
What are your hopes for Consensus Press? What would you like to see happen?
I love the experiment of Consensus Press. They say a camel is a horse designed by committee, and I basically agree. However, I think there is something wonderful about democratizing the fine press process and seeing what happens. Camels are wonderful too. I personally don’t care about the outcome – i.e. what edition gets made. And I think the experiment is bound to fail unless its members take up that position as well. If members leave because they don’t like the outcome, then the press’ membership is just bound to dwindle until it isn’t feasible to continue. And that’s fine! So, to answer your question: I’d like to see Consensus Press foster a membership whose commitment and interest is to the process and craft itself. I hope the members are there to participate in and learn about how this all works, whatever editions come out of that process. It may not always please every member, but that’s democracy.
That said, I think the balloting did indicate the possibility that this process could also help break the mold of fine presswork. I agree with you completely on The Tale of Sinuhe. It’s an excellent choice, and I’m excited. My academic background is in the textual criticism of ancient literature, so it’s right up my alley!
I have to give kudos to Reed, Alex, Byron, and Anna for their work getting Consensus Press going, and to a few others – most notably Mark of Chestnut Press and Sinuhe’s proposer Richard – for going above and beyond. That said, I think Consensus Press’ management should be recalibrated going forward. If the members are satisfied with the first edition and decide to go for a second, then I’m hoping to significantly step back myself. If there are funds leftover after Sinuhe is produced, then I think I’ll propose that (some of) the remaining funds be used to hire a press manager who can make sure things run like clockwork. It’s a lot of work for an all-volunteer team.
With what you’ve learned in the past few years with No Reply Press, is there anything you’d like to talk about with respect to private press and the readers and collectors that buy their books?
The community of fine and private presswork is marvelous. You couldn’t ask for a lovelier group, collectors and proprietors alike. Remarkably generous, patient, curious, tolerant. Nobody comes to this community for a reason other than their love of literature and/or craft. Naturally, that makes for something really special.
One thing does worry me – a sort of economic, collective action problem. And let me preface this by saying that I’m primarily reflecting on how I want to go about my own work. I’m not criticizing anybody. There’s no wrong way to conduct or collect fine and private presswork; it’s an unadulterated good however practiced. My worry is that the incentives in our community are increasingly pitched against actual publishing.
The verb “publish” comes from the Latin publicare, “to make public,” often used in the sense of literally nationalizing private property. So, if I make another Poe edition, am I really publishing anything? The literature is already public. Am I increasing the public access to Poe by even one iota? No, of course not. As we talked about earlier, we are canon-centric and, I worry, increasingly so. Major publishing endeavors – say, Thornwillow’s Seven Towers or Hand & Eye’s A Far Away Country or Greenboathouse’s Arranging Furniture – seem fewer and farther between. Often now when we say “publish” we really mean “print” – our verbs are sliding into a certain complacency.
This isn’t only a trend in output, but retrospective, in which past presses we celebrate. See, for example, the booming (and well-deserved) appreciation for the Allens, who made incredible editions of established works, but the complete obscurity of the Trovillions, who dug through European manuscript archives to find new and unusual texts for rediscovery – who wrote their own pieces – who even went so far as to use their private press as a force against growing fascism in rural Illinois, with actual risk to their own lives. Nor were the Trovillions a blip on the screen, either. They published continually between 1908 and 1958 – fifty years! By the end of their careers they were America’s oldest private press. They too used gorgeous handmade paper, they too printed damp on a hand-press – but the Trovillions remain nearly unknown, mostly, I think, because they actually published.
“Why should I pay hundreds of dollars for a book which I may not even enjoy reading?” – That is, as my man T. S. Eliot put it, an overwhelming question. There’s no adequate answer, and more power to those who spend their hard-earned money collecting beautiful editions of works they love. In many ways, their hands are tied. The trend in our community toward printing and away from publishing is a consequence of economic forces. The expense of bookmaking is increasing, and as fine and private press books become more expensive, collectors necessarily must be more conservative with their acquisitions, and presses, in turn, more conservative with their selections. And perhaps it is right that fine and even private presswork should be the domain of the well-loved. New work can flop, and a private press edition of mediocre poetry can be like putting a five hundred dollar saddle on a five dollar horse.
Still, I think we should cherish rather than castigate the proverbial “poetry by someone I’ve never heard of” – and be willing to take a risk on it. Remember, private presswork has always been a refuge of the new. William Blake engraved his poems and prophecies by hand because he could have never found a publisher for them – they were too radical. The Hogarth Press was founded to publish “short works of merit, in prose and poetry, which could not, because of their merits, appeal to a very large public.” One of these meritorious but obscure short works was The Waste Land, its author, T. S. Eliot, meritorious but obscure – a poet you’d never heard of. It turned out to be the most important poem of the twentieth century. It found refuge, and became the well-loved canon. If we don’t maintain our commitment to the new, the experimental, the cutting edge – to publishing, in short – then we’re just in the business of collectibles. Ezra Pound said, “Poetry is news that stays news.” So too is private presswork. It has always been reactionary and revolutionary. It’s a glorious thing.
In this regard, I greatly admire Jason Dewinetz (Greenboathouse Press), Chad Oness (Sutton Hoo Press), Gaylord Schanilec (Midnight Paper Sales), Mr. Anthony Baker (Gruffyground Press), and the Pontifells, whose “Patron’s Prize” has wed their commitment to accessibility in fine publishing to the new.
Now, I’m definitely a villain in my own little Greek tragedy. While at Thornwillow I pushed for projects like Sherlock Holmes, Pride & Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Frankenstein. By my count, only seven of No Reply’s twenty-three announced editions are of never-before-published literature. In fairness, all but five contain something new, and I consider much of this – take Christopher Ricks’ contributions to T. S. Eliot, for example – to be great literature in its own right. Still, going forward I hope to really commit to the new, to the news that stays news.
With that in mind, I have a few projects in the fridge. Microcuentos, never translated before; a never-before-published piece by Samuel Beckett (this, again thanks to Christopher Ricks); some original (difficult to describe them) essays on the reform of punctuation; two new long poems by new poets; new short poems by a very established poet; projects from Hebrew, Japanese, Arabic, Greek, Italian, Irish, Spanish, German, Georgian, and French. And quite a lot of marvelous artwork floating around my workshop.
To begin their journey into fine and private press books, what would you tell a new collector branching into our little corner of the book world?
Collecting fine and private press books is like going to a restaurant. You can appreciate the food without knowing anything of what goes on in the kitchen. “This tastes good to me” is a perfectly wonderful experience. However, as with any art, that deeper Ommm of satisfaction comes from knowing enough to drop the “to me” and to know confidently the qualities of a thing regardless of personal taste. I’m learning more every day. Fine and private presswork rests on a pyramid of crafts, the more of which you know intimately, the greater one’s appreciation becomes. To know, for example, how to spot the difference between hand- and machine-marbled papers. Or the signature qualities of hand-set versus digitally-set type. I think a new collector would do better to acquire a few books which they learn intimately – highlights and flaws – than shelves of books for which they are fuzzy on the details of how they’re made.
Setting price and availability aside, what four books would you recommend as their “textbooks”?
An impossible question! To make it easier, let’s not set price and availability aside. Four books, currently available, for under $500 altogether.
Thornwillow’s Genesis (Paper)
Tallone’s Genesi
Nomad Letterpress’ The Hill (Standard)
Greenboathouse’s Light & Char
These four, more or less, cover a huge swath of our community – styles of presses, actual presses used, typesetting methods, papers, editorial approaches, design aesthetics, etc. Plus, the differences are fairly obvious.
It’s a tricky thing, because it is simultaneously true that different craft methods can produce an identical result (different roads lead to the same place) and that each craft method carries markers which usually make them discernible. A piece of paper folded in half by hand appears pretty the same as a piece of paper folded in half by a machine. Sort of! Compounding this is the fact that there is earnest disagreement about what constitutes “good craft”. The famous “kiss versus bite” is an example that everybody knows, but there are many others. Some of the best bookmakers in the world do away with certain things I consider orthodoxy (tracking on majuscule type, for example, or preserving every deckle) while I’m sure I toss some of their orthodoxies (page numbers, for example, who needs em?). Private presswork is dozens of crafts rolled up into one – and then some. It’s difficult, then, to communicate the craftsmanship behind these editions, because naturally not every collector and not every proprietor has knowledge of or involvement in all the related crafts. Here’s a sentence you either understand intimately or not at all: “I thought my registration issue was due to the furniture but actually my packing had become loose.” When there are so many crafts involved, involving so many different machines, communication about them becomes difficult, and we tend to hierarchize what we do know. Hand-made paper beats mould-made paper beats machine-made paper. Hand-set type beats hot metal type beats polymer plates. That’s a shame, because it really simplifies what goes on.
By the way, if any collector reading this wants to crack open a door onto the craft, I recommend Russell Maret’s ongoing series of zines. Start here.
I’m amazed every time I have a new assistant in the workshop, because even the rudimentary stuff must be learned. Take folding a piece of paper in half. You’d be surprised that many find it difficult to do perfectly. Reader: Grab a piece of paper and time yourself. How long does it take to get a perfect fold? You’ll need to do thousands of those for a typical private press edition. How many hours would it take to do just the folding?
I say, “Dozens of crafts rolled up into one – and then some,” because there is a lot of work behind the behind the scenes. For example, we are working with middleweight vintage machinery. It’s difficult sometimes to find a nearby mechanic to work on them, so much of the time press maintenance involves community troubleshooting and “asking around”. It’s a wonderful thing, really. In running a private press, you’ve got to become a decent mechanic. And a decent rigger. Maybe a decent electrician. Definitely decent stockist. A decent color theorist – know your rhodamine from your rubine, that sort of thing. A decent this and a decent that.
I think the craft questions of our community will become the great questions of the coming century. If the soul of hand-folded paper doesn’t move you (as opposed to the sterility of machine-folded paper) then what really is the difference between a masterpiece written by Bulgakov, Achebe, Bashō and one written by Meta, Google, Amazon?
Your website states that you have a large collection of Thornwillow Press books (about eighty percent of its oeuvre), and smaller but significant collections from St. James Park Press, Tallone Editore, Barbarian Press, Foolscap Press, Corvus Works, Greenboathouse Press, Arion Press, and Midnight Paper Sales.
Can you sum up what you love about some of those presses in a sentence or two?
Only a sentence or two?! To sum myself up in a sentence: “Long-winded. And then some!”
Thornwillow, today: Fine presswork as public service. The Pontifells commitment to mobilizing their presses and bindery for good is unparalleled. They offer affordable states of their editions, even when any business consultant would tell them not to. They publish aspiring writers. They offer fellowships, hire those who need a leg up, put their business squarely in a rust belt town that can use it – fine arts for, by, and of the people.
St. James Park Press: Ambition. James’ Nineteen Eighty-Four is the most ambitious private press edition since Foolscap’s Mandeville. He’s willing to commit to sprawling, multiyear projects as a sole proprietor.
Barbarian Press: LOVE! The Elsteds’ love of their work, of literature, of craft, of each other, is simply inspiring.
Midnight Paper Sales: Commitment to the spirit of private presswork. Artist meets author meets advocate meets publisher meets craftsman. Self-reliant, do it yourself. Consummately American. Gaylord Schanilec should be on the twenty-dollar bill. My dozen Midnight Paper Sales editions side-by-side on a shelf are moving in a way few collections of books are.
Tallone Editore: Commitment to craft. Consummately European. Perfect something, then maintain perfection for generations.
Foolscap Press: Exactly the opposite – diversity of bookmaking. Most private presses tend toward some unifying elements of their oeuvre. Tallone is an extreme example, but you can also spot Thornwillow or Old Stile or Clinker or Allen books at a glance. Foolscap books maintain such diversity at such a high degree of excellence, it’s really astounding.
Corvus Works: Contribution to the fine press tradition. Chris is explicitly pulling the fine press movement forward by building connections with its past.
Greenboathouse Press: Unrivaled taste. Jason’s books are probably the most elegant private press editions being published today; the perfect balance between flair and restraint.
Arion Press: Restless experimentation despite mainstream success. Arion is always trying new things, opinion be damned. They could churn out great editions of wonderfully well-loved public domain literature illustrated by wonderfully well-loved artists til the cows come home. Everybody would be happy with them, and their books would sell like hotcakes. Instead, we get scrolls, circular books, foam (!!), photography, weird translations, weird artwork, sheet music, “obscure” literature – a crazy quilt, really. Arion is scrappy, despite having a million dollar foundation and a factory in San Francisco’s presidio. More power to them.
And what about No Reply Press?
The best thing about No Reply is that I have a much glossier website than most private presses.
In the “about” section of your website, you give no reply to the question about where the name No Reply came from. So I will ask No Question in response to that.
It isn’t a very good story. “No Reply” has been the name of various business ventures of mine going back to when I was a teenager. Before it was a private press, it was a playing card company, and before that it was (you guessed it!) a record label. No Reply Records. (That’s got more of a zing to it than Press, sadly.) I was recording and mixing an EP for a dear friend of mine, now a prominent slam poet, Alex Dang. In designing the packaging, I realized we needed a name for the record label and emailed Alex to ask what he thought. His school email address had expired when he graduated, so I got back an immediate auto-responder with the subject line: “No Reply”.