Goudy & Christmas

Okay, well the only typographical element in these images is the street number on the house – Bruce Roger’s Centaur which I cut in pine with a scroll saw. Click on the photo to see an enlargement.

Speaking of American types, I’ve always had a soft spot for the work of Frederic Goudy (1865–1947), most of which was issued by the Lanston Monotype company. There’s something warm and lyrical about many of his designs. When I went back and looked at many of the illustrated books I had read in my childhood, I was surprised to discover that my favourites had more often than not been set in one of Goudy’s many types. I suppose that makes Goudy’s letters my typographic comfort food.



One of the best examples of this is a copy of Richard Scarry’s The Animals’ Merry Christmas, which I still own. Originally published in 1950, it marries one of Goudy’s types with Scarry’s colour illustrations. My copy is a forth printing, given to my family one Christmas by a Great Aunt living far away in London, Ontario. Perhaps the excitement of reading these stories in the days leading up to Christmas as a child has become mixed up with my adult response to the typeface.



the Canadian type designer Jim Rimmer also loves Goudy. His Amethyst typeface is very much in the spirit of Goudy, and he has digitized a number of Goudy’s metal types. Both Amethyst and Rimmer’s revision of Garamont (which Goudy based on a type by Jean Jannon) are employed with some frequency at Gaspereau. Now that I think of it, Rimmer issued a letterpress edition of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol in 1998, set in Lanston's Caslon 337 with Goudy's own Lombardic initials and Goudy Text for display. It is illustrated with Rimmer’s trademark colour linocuts.



Maybe there is something about Goudy that is inherently Christmassy afterall.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Thoreau for Christmas

Thoreau at last! Gary Dunfield and I decided we could stand the delay no longer and took a run at bringing the first few copies of our letterpress edition of Thoreau’s Walking into being before the end of 2009 (given that the title page reads 2008). By the time we close up tomorrow, there should be a dozen or so copies completed. Hip, hip!

The book – which includes Thoreau’s 1851 lecture “Walking, or the Wild,” three wood engravings by Wesley Bates and my annotations – has been in progress for a number of years now. I handprinted the text and Wesley’s engravings on Hahnemühle Biblio paper about a year ago, and folded and collated the sheets. This autumn, Gary finally found time to make the paper for the first 50 jackets, but we simply couldn’t free up the labour to assemble the parts until this week.

Jack McMaster and I made these snazzy ornaments, which are based on those found on a wrapper used by the Thoreau family pencil factory.










This paper-covered edition will total 150 numbered copies and should be generally available in January. It sells for $200. There will also be a lettered edition of 26 books. These will be casebound and placed in a little pine box with copies of Wesley’s three wood engravings. The lettered edition sells for $600. Its completion date remains murky. I’ll let you know when I’ve bought the lumber for the boxes.

Merry Christmas Henry.


ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

That Jolly Old Elf St Cubbins

Well, well. Just when I was thinking about knocking the old boy off the payroll for good, Randolph St Cubbins checked in today. This was the first we’d heard of him since we received an order for books we’d never published scrawled on the stationary of the Temple Bar Hotel, Dublin, accompanied, as usual, by an assortment of Guiness-stained meal and taxi receipts. But I digress.




Today a package arrived from our long-absconding, fiddle-footed book traveller Randolph St Cubbins. Interestingly, the return address on the package is for the ‘North Pole’, but the package was postmarked in Toronto. This further fuels our suspicion that Randolph is having us on. Likely holed up in the Black Rooster on Bathurst or some other such scheme. Blackguard! Well, say what you will, he does occasionally make a book sale or two, and he certainly knows how to butter up the old employer with a Christmas gift. So here’s to you, St Cubbins, wherever you may be. Merry Christmas!

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Handwork

Today I had a visit from three young boys from the neighbourhood who showed a great deal of interest in the inky arts. After helping me print the last colour on a broadsheet commission I was completing for their father, I showed the boys around the shop and explained how the machines were used to make trade books. I’m told that these industrious fellows like making their own books at home, so I showed them a simple technique for binding chapbooks using a three-hole stitch. Perhaps I’ll have some summer help in the bindery in a decade or so, what?




The keepsake we printed featured (along with Miss Dickinson's poem) the first press trial of my new Memorial Hall ornaments. They worked very well in letterpress.

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I’ve been thinking about calligraphic title pages, perhaps because I photographed a few good ones during recent book scouting adventures.




This one is from the opening pages of Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle, which I’ve been exploring in the special collections room at Acadia University.




Another hand-lettered title page I like opens David Jones’s The Tribune’s Visitation (1969), a copy of which I’ve been coveting at my local antiquarian bookseller, The Odd Book. (It’s not expensive, I’ve just got a stack of other books to pay off first.) This particular copy was once owned by the New Brunswick poet Douglas Lochhead and includes his marginalia and line numbering. It’s a very handsome title page. I’m particularly fond of the choice and use of colour.




The ornate, William-Morris-influenced title pages found in Dent’s Everyman’s Library series, like this copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s In the South Seas & Island Nights’ Entertainments, were hand lettered and added a real sense of ceremony to what were otherwise mass-produced objects.




Being typographically inclined, I’ve not employed hand lettering on the title pages of many Gaspereau Press productions. The exceptions are the work of calligrapher Jack McMaster, such as this title page from Harry Thurston’s Broken Vessel (2007).

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER