I'm a little past the point in the Nin biography in which she and her little group of literary cronies finally get their hands on that long-coveted toy, a printing press:
"The bourgeois banker's wife who went to Elizabeth Arden for manicures discovered how much she loved setting type... the process mattered more than the content, for she ended the session feeling 'elation at producing printed matter.'... She refined her craft through trial and error and discovered how much she enjoyed printing. It was as soothing as rug hooking, but the final outcome was certainly more pleasing to her artistic sensibilities."
Later the same evening I came to this part of the book, in one of those dumb literary coincidences that are always happening to me, I found myself killing a bit of time in a lobby with Robertson Davies essay/speech on "Literature and Technology" in which he waxed rhapsodic about the lost art of printing with movable type. Pages produced that way are much more aesthetically satisfying in every way, Davies maintains, and while the barbarities of word processed work of which he complains -- hyphenations where they don't belong, artless machine-generated justification, etc. -- have to some degree been addressed by advances in technology since he gave his presentation in the 1980s, it's still easy to be elegaic for the analog, mechanical work of printing that has probably vanished forever except for small specialty houses and home-driven efforts like Nin's.
But a modern day Nin with aspirations to publish her own and her friends' work would probably never even think of spending the money and learning to use a printing press now. Far easier and cheaper to use the computers that grow ever cheaper, the desktop publishing software that grows ever more sophisticated (even as few users have even bothered to learn its original features) and print it all on the cheap at your friendly neighborhood Kinko's. Power to the little people, yes, but much less satisfying, I think.
Having as I do a lot of friends who are in varying stages of starving as visual artists (some fat and sassy, some expiring in garrets, most somewhere in between with day jobs as middle school art teachers or forest service fire lookouts or gallery coolies) as well as quite a few friends who've been known to scribble AND at least one old coffee buddy who is an honest-to-dog printer ("never start an argument with a guy who buys ink by the barrel," he still, somewhat archaically, quips), I've often thought about starting a small press of my own, publishing cool illustrated editions of works in the public domain that I especially like. I've even gone so far as to make a few stabs at drafting a business plan for same. I still might someday.
But first, I need something of my own to publish!
3 comments:
You talk about movable type. How about the wonderful popcorny clink of the linotype? It had its own soothing rhythm.
I only barely remember the Linotype, Maugham, but yes! Robertson Davies mentioned the Linotype in his essay, but strangely said nothing about popcorn or soothing properties -- but then, I don't think he ever used it.
You're talking about the big blue machine, right?
The big blue machine was neither soothing nor efficient. It was clunky and maddening.
A linotype is the big black machine that your old-time printer friend had decorating his front yard for many years until it finally fell apart.
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