Punch-cutters further streamlined the alphabet to make it easier to produce in lead type. Practicality won out over beauty. With handwriting, each a a person writes is unique, distinct in subtle ways from every other a that person has written. With a printed character, each repetition is an exact and faithful facsimile. In making the transition from the human hand to the mechanical press, however, aesthetics were not entirely ignored. As movable type was being developed, the illuminated manuscript was reaching its peak of perfection, providing an exquisite model for the printer’s art. In a similar way, the best of today’s mechanically printed books are providing a high aesthetic standard for digital type.
Typeface design is barely part of the conversation when Erik and I discuss the inside design of the ebook version of The Paradise Project.
“We choose the typeface, but the reader can change it, and they can make it any size they want. That’s the beauty of ebooks,” he says.
As a writer, I believe in the saying that a book isn’t finished until it’s read, until the explosions that go off in my mind are set off in a new way in the mind of the person reading my words. Now, a book isn’t fully designed, either, until it is in the reader’s hands, until they’ve gone to Settings and adjusted the face and font to suit themselves.
In the digital world of endless scrolling, my stories can be as long as I want them to be. Print, on the other hand, is a zero-sum game. The space for words on the page is finite. In the eworld, I can blather on unchecked, making additions and subtractions and substitutions to my heart’s content, right up until the ebook is “published” and beyond. In traditional publishing, there inevitably comes a moment when the editor says, “Stop!”
I used to beg to make changes in the typeset text of my books, only to be told, No, it would affect the line length or the turn of the page. Sitting in Hugh’s studio, I finally get it. I’m proofing a typeset page, wincing at words I’d love to replace, but I say nothing. I know firsthand the work involved in picking out the bits of type, repositioning them again. Hours and hours. I swallow hard and move on, setting my sights on misspellings and only the most grievous grammatical errors.
Months later, when I prepare the text for the digital versions of my out-of-print books, I breathe freely again. When I come upon an infelicitous phrase, I try this word and that, choosing the best one I can think of, not the one I was content with all those years ago when I first wrote it. Already there are collaborative writing platforms, including Wikipedia, where a person can nip in, pulling out words, adding others, mixing them up, the notion of text suddenly organic, fluid, as endlessly free-flowing as a river.
A THOUSAND WORDS
I contrive for Hugh to meet Erik at Christmas. “We’ll come to the studio,” I tell Hugh. “I’ll bring the Grand Girls.”
Hugh is on to me. “You want to get him hooked, that’s the idea, am I right? Once printer’s ink has entered his veins, he’ll become immediately addicted to these desperate activities.”
My son started sketching and painting as a young boy. By the age of twelve, he was producing accomplished oils. By nineteen, he was in Berlin, apprenticed to the provocative figurative painter Attila Richard Lukacs. As a mother, I was worried sick. As an artist, I was more jealous than I dared to admit.
When Erik returned from Berlin, he found a gallery to represent him and had show after show. His paintings were selling well enough that he could live from his art. He married a designer, they had a baby girl, and bought and renovated an 1880s row house in Toronto, all within a year. He was twenty-five years old.
In July 2001, the gas company sent a notice to its Toronto customers saying that if there were old gas lines in a house, the company would remove them free of charge provided they were contacted within a month. My son and his wife were eager new homeowners; they called almost immediately. Early one morning, a gas man showed up. They directed him to the pipes. A moment later, the house was engulfed in flames. The gas man had cut into a live pipe with a Sawzall and sparked a firestorm. He bolted up the stairs and turned off the main gas line before he collapsed on the grass. My son and his wife grabbed their baby and fled. The fire department arrived within minutes, but it was too late. The young family lost almost everything.
For Erik and his wife, their life divided into BF and AF: before the fire and after. As well as all their furnishings, their wedding presents, and photograph albums, Erik lost the paintings he’d been developing for two upcoming shows. He lost the file that held the names and details of all the paintings he had produced up to that moment. And he lost his boxes of stimulation, the bits and pieces that would have inspired his paintings of the future.
He hasn’t painted much since. Ten years after the fire, the insurance claim was finally settled. For the lost paintings, he received time and materials in compensation for works he had presold for $3,000 and more. When I ask him why he doesn’t paint, he says, “I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem important anymore.”
He has lost heart. Hugh is all heart. I can’t wait for the two of them to meet.
Hugh has been pondering the possibility of illustrations since he first proposed publishing The Paradise Project nine months ago. He was his own first choice.
“I wasn’t the world’s greatest speller, and my printing wasn’t great either, and I didn’t really read books until I moved to Kingston when I was twenty-seven or so, but I was always able to draw. I was good at that,” Hugh says. It’s about as boastful as he gets.
The first book to come off Thee Hellbox Press, A Letter to Teresa, is illustrated with linocuts of aboriginal dancers and portraits. Underneath the text itself are soft, pale ochre images inspired by the rock paintings and petroglyphs of the Great Lakes first peoples: birds, spiny-backed fish and animals, human figures, boats, teepees, and turtles.
Hugh made these floating images not by cutting them into wood or copper or linoleum, the traditional block-printing materials. Instead, he used contact cement to glue a thin sheet of medium-density, closed-cell, cross-linked polyethylene foam to a piece of plywood. Using a surgical scalpel, he carved into the foam, removing everything but the image. The foam-topped block was set in the press a bit higher than the type to account for compression.
“I wanted to produce images with fading edges, a softer image than I could produce with hard-edge lino blocks. A ghost image. I called them soft-block prints. As far as I know, it’s the only new method of image reproduction since linocuts.”
He refined the technique further in a print he titled “Free at Last,” published in commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on the steps to the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. The print was Hugh’s 1985 contribution to the Wayzgoose Anthology, an annual collection of work from Canadian letterpresses. To create the effect of skin on the portrait of an African-American, Hugh sandpapered the foam, exposing the cellular structure, which traps more ink, darkening that part of the image.
Hugh has been talking about making soft blocks for The Paradise Project. He sends me an early trial of “Stone,” printed over three soft-block boulders in shades of yellow and orange. I’m not enthusiastic. Nothing more is said about soft blocks or illustrations until a month later, when he tells me he has approached Gerard Bender à Brandis, a well-known Canadian bookwright and engraver.
“I received a long letter from Gerard, handwritten with a proper square-nib pen,” Hugh tells me in an email. “He is a magnificent engraver, especially of botanical prints, and he is in favour of us using some of his existing blocks. His offer comes with a lot of conditions, which I can meet, but rather than using black wood engravings, my preference leans to using multicoloured objective abstract prints. I think this brings life and depth to the pages, not that they need it, but to celebrate the text.”
Hugh has assumed there will be pictures. Me, I’ve never been comfortable with the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Why a
thousand? Why not five words or fifty or five thousand? Can a picture really replace my words? For Hugh, words and pictures amount to the same thing: lines to be inked and printed on a page.
Erik’s visit goes well. He likes Hugh and loves the press. At art college, he studied printmaking with George Walker, famous now for his wordless books of wood engravings: The Wordless Leonard Cohen Songbook, The Life and Times of Conrad Black: A Wordless Biography, and, most recently, Trudeau: La vie en rose. I see a new spark in Erik’s eyes.
Hugh plans to make a trip to Toronto to look for cover stock. “I’ll wait until Erik has a chance to read the manuscript. Then perhaps I can meet him for lunch and we can conspire against you. (<;)- Did you notice that I use a hyphen on my smiley face as the petite tail of my beret?”
In early January, Hugh sends me a list of promotion points for The Paradise Project. “I was starting to self-intimidate regarding the potentially high price of the book, however once I made this list I’m reassured that we have a unique object that may well be underpriced.” The stories, the endpapers, the Salad paper, the hand-printing and hand-typesetting are all on the list. And now, Number 6: ten engravings by Erik Mohr.
LINE O’ TYPE
In high school, I wanted to be a journalist. I lived near Stratford, Ontario, and, every summer, the newspaper there took on a fourth-year university student as an intern. In grade eleven, I applied. In grade twelve, I applied again. When I applied after first-year university, the editor finally hired me.
My first day on the job, he led me through the newsroom, introducing me to women reporters who smoked and wore red lipstick and sportswriters with fedoras stuck on the backs of their heads, cigars fuming in glass ashtrays beside their Underwoods. I was in heaven. After I’d met the writers, he ushered me down a narrow hall to a dark, greasy room where men sat hunched on stools in front of clanking machines.
“Linotype,” the editor yelled.
I nodded, my hands over my ears. My boyfriend, who would soon become my first husband, was an artist. He had just finished a series of linocuts. I assumed the machines had something to do with linoleum.
“Line-o-type,” the editor shouted, spelling it out.
The compositor handed me a scrap of paper and mimed that I should sign my name, which I did. He tapped out the letters on the giant keyboard that sloped in front of him. There was a clattering, then whirrs and clunks as giant gears turned then ground to a stop. He opened a flap and pulled out a shiny, two-inch slug of lead, the mirror image of my name in bright italics, a quarter-inch high:
Every word of every article in the entire newspaper, all my reviews of plays, my profiles of actors and voice coaches and prop mistresses, my infamous piece that used the f-word, a joke the compositor and I played on the night editor who failed to catch my profanity so that it went uncensored into the breakfast nooks of the town’s matrons—every word I would write that summer would be typed into these behemoth machines and cast into lead slugs that would be fitted into the press and printed with smudgy black ink onto newsprint.
I loved the smell of that compositing room, a dark, smoky, inky scent. A muscular male musk that made writing seem important: not the feminine outpourings of fancy fountain pens on blue-lined paper, but words forged in hot lead by the clatter and stamp of brawny men with tattoos on their arms and rollies hanging from the corners of their mouths, the air bruised with cigarette smoke and words I wasn’t supposed to understand.
I had no idea so many hours and so many hands touched every letter I read in books, newspapers, and magazines. From Gutenberg’s day until the 1880s, every individual letter of type was put in place by a human hand, the way I would learn to set type in Hugh’s shop. Then in the 1880s, Ottmar Mergenthaler, a German watchmaker living in Baltimore, Maryland, invented line casting, which sped up the process exponentially. (Apparently he got the idea from the wooden moulds used to make springerle, German Christmas cookies that I stamped out by the dozen all through my sons’ childhoods.) The operator types a line of text into the seven-foot-tall machine. At the top of the machine, waiting in their narrow channels, are matrices—brass units impressed with characters on one face—that drop down in order as the line of text is typed. The operator checks that all the letters are correct, then pulls a switch and the line of type slides over to where molten metal is injected, casting the letters in a line. A line o’ type. The metal cools on contact with the matrices and the line of type is ejected to the galley tray. An arm swings down and collects the matrices, each of which is coded with a particular blaze that ensures it will slide into its correct channel at the top of the machine. Several lines of type are assembled in the galley tray, and when that’s full, the tray is taken to the proofing area, locked in a proofing press, and printed to check for errors. When the page of type is completely error-free, it goes to the press for printing.
Thomas Edison called the Linotype machine the eighth wonder of the world. It could set type six times faster than the human hand. Typesetters were afraid they’d lose their jobs, but, instead, the demand for print exploded once books, newspapers, and magazines could be produced so quickly and cheaply.
Mergenthaler wasn’t the only one looking for a speedier way to set type. At about the same time, James Paige developed the Compositor, financed by Mark Twain, who had started out as a printer and was a science and technology buff, a friend of both Edison and Tesla. Twain patented three inventions of his own, including an “improvement in adjustable and detachable straps for garments” (a surrogate for suspenders) and a history trivia game. He sank $300,000 into the Compositor, the equivalent of $8,200,000 today, drawing on his book royalties and his wife’s inheritance. A more complex machine—the Compositor had 18,000 moving parts compared to the Linotype’s 5,000—it was made immediately obsolete by Mergenthaler’s invention. Paige lost all his money and Mark Twain filed for bankruptcy, accepting an around-the-world lecture tour to pay off his creditors. On his return, he wrote the travelogue Following the Equator, published in Britain as More Tramps Abroad.
The print shop’s loss was literature’s gain.
HERDING CATS
The pieces of the puzzle that is the printing of The Paradise Project are coming together at last. The manuscript is with Erik, and he is working on a series of linocut images to float under the text. Nothing is happening fast enough for Hugh. He’s as jumpy as a flea on hot type. He doesn’t want Emily to start work on the endpapers until the size of the book has been determined, and he doesn’t want to close the door on that until Erik has produced some drawings. All of which means Hugh is on idle, itching to start setting type.
His emails natter at me with questions I can’t answer. “I’m not sure how Erik wants to place the blocks on the page. Do we print the linocuts first, like soft blocks, then have the text overlap them to give the page depth and colour? This would mean printing the blocks in light colours and that might bother Erik. Do we wrap the text around them? Do we place them on separate pages? Do we place them at the beginning or the end of the text? The inclusion of illustrations may alter the number of pages, so I can’t even go ahead and order the paper.”
It is the end of February before the three of us can meet. My life is complicated by a renovation disaster that has forced Wayne and me to move out of our house for six weeks. The fellow smoothing the basement floor must have reversed the exhaust fan on his sander: within seconds, the house filled with fine silica dust that settled on our clothes, our food, the papers on our desks. The rooms look like Pompeii after Vesuvius blew. I have a festival to attend in Mexico. What with Pompeii and Mexico, I am home only two days that month. Finally, in the last week, I get a missive from Hugh:
“I hate to be the bug, but if we are intending to launch The Paradise Project in June of this year I need to get started post-haste, as I will have between 400 and 500 hours of work to do before June 1, when the books go to the bindery. Forgive my aggression but ‘herding cats’ so
metimes requires a whip.”
The process with the ebook couldn’t be more different. Erik and I determine a publication date, and he sends me a work-back schedule that clearly identifies all the tasks chronologically. He is his mother’s son. I suggest a few changes and, within the hour, a revised sked is in my inbox.
Is this a mark of efficiency, or do the two technologies demand different philosophies of production? Digital production renders certain decisions unnecessary or ridiculous. The number of copies is limitless. The size is infinitely flexible. The price is preset. There is no paper to select and order. No ink. No press. No bindery. I am beginning to wish letterpress printing were as simple.
Finally, the three of us meet by email to thrash out the details of the Thee Hellbox edition. Together we decide that Hugh will print 300 copies, to be sold at $150 each. Hugh and Erik come up with a size of 5 1/4 by 10 inches, and I agree to the content: sixteen stories and ten linocuts. When I suggest printing single broadsheets of the shortest flash fictions to sell separately, Hugh bristles.
“I distribute the type after printing each page, so we can’t do something like this as an afterthought. I think I will pass a new Barclay’s Law: ‘Authors, in particular those who are mad, must be obliged to spend a day or at least a morning setting type so that they have an understanding not only of what it means to set type but also what it means to experience the joy of this activity.’”
Clearly, I still have a lot to learn.
I’m just the writer. I used to think that was important, that the entire scaffolding of the publishing world was built on the foundation of the written word. Now that I am deep inside this architecture, I see that I’m just another two-by-four, doing my bit to keep the edifice from collapsing in a heap.
I spend the next week tweaking the stories, juggling them into an order that is aesthetically as well as narratively pleasing. These flash fictions are oddities, some of them so short they can hardly be called stories. I decide to work from the ground up, ordering the pieces the way nature orders a plant: “Root,” “Tendril,” “Petal,” “Seed,” “Fruit.” At the end of the book, the larger landscapes of “Stone,” “Garden,” and “Earth.”
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