She asks for pictures of my garden. I send her a stream of JPGs. She sends back image after image of new samples that look like gardens tossed in a summer breeze. Hugh and I both love what we see.
“Go for the gusto!” Hugh writes to Emily. It is June 30. He plans to put the press to bed in two weeks. How will she ever catch up? She says she can, and I believe her. Why not? This whole enterprise runs on a wild kind of faith.
It doesn’t matter that July 1 is Canada Day, a national holiday. Hugh is in the print shop, pulling pages. At the typesetting station, Richard is joined by a burly young man named Dominic. “Call me Mico,” he says when we are introduced. Hugh has finished the next-to-last signature, distributed the type, and is about to set the last eight pages. Emily has hired an assistant and promises the endpapers by July 10. The bindery is booked for July 16. I watch in awe.
I can almost hear the glee in the formal invitation that pings into my inbox late that night:
“Putting the press to bed will occur on Sunday, July 15, at eleven a.m. I am recommending that everyone wear their shirt inside out to show it takes crazy people to put these things together.”
LAST WORDS
The first mechanically printed books were marvels in 1450, but they look pretty strange today. There are no page numbers: book buyers were expected to number the pages as they read, not a bad way, really, to remember where you left off. The titles of current bestsellers may be long—Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time or Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—but they’re mere striplings compared to early titles, which weren’t so much titles as page-long blurbs describing the entire book.
The books produced in those first fifty years were called “fifteeners” and eventually “incunabula,” meaning “from the cradle.” Gradually, the printed page evolved to what it is today, with a running head across the top to remind the reader what and who is being read, and numbers neatly inset at the top, bottom, or side. Paragraphs arrived to break up the solid columns of text, even though this increased the amount of costly paper required for a book.
On the last page, the scribe traditionally signed his name, and printers adopted the same practice. After 1500, the printer’s name slowly moved from the back of the book to the front, along with the date and place of publication. When copyright laws were enacted, all the publication data was customarily gathered on the backside of the title page, on what is known as the imprint page.
Thee Hellbox Press has made it a policy to keep the colophon in the back. Actually, it’s more than a policy: Hugh is on a crusade.
“Perhaps you are not aware of the root of this word,” Hugh writes more than a year before we actually start to work together on The Paradise Project. He wants to make sure I know who I am dealing with. I should have paid attention.
“Colophony was a city on the Silk Road that had an army whose strategy was to make a big charge at the end of every battle. The colophon is the printer’s charge at the end of the battle of the book.”
I like Hugh’s version, but I check the etymological dictionaries just to be sure. The word “colophon” is Latin, derived from the Greek word kolophon, meaning “summit” or “finishing touch.” And where did the Greek word come from? From the Greek city of Kolophon, now in Turkey. In early classical times, the city was famous for its strategy of deploying its crack cavalry late in a battle, as a kind of finishing touch.
Hugh is right: there’s something back-asswards about putting a finishing touch at the beginning of a book.
In ancient Babylon and Assyria, the colophon was a clay tablet that came at the end of a series of tablets to indicate a piece of writing was done. From the sixth century on, the colophon was a personal inscription by the scribe, added at the end of a parchment scroll or codex. A colophon could be as minimalist as a printer’s logo, but most early colophons were chatty, explaining to the reader where the book was printed and introducing all the people involved. Colophons have always been intensely personal, the one place where a scribe (and later a printer) could address the reader directly.
Curses, I am surprised to discover, were an important part of early colophons. Clay tablets were easily crumbled; illuminated manuscripts were beautiful and rare. The curses were intended to warn off thieves and thugs bent on damaging books that took so much time and skill to reproduce.
One of the earliest book curses, found in a colophon inscribed in a set of tablets in Nineveh, warned:
He who breaks this tablet or puts it in water or rubs it until you cannot recognize it [and] cannot make it to be understood, may Ashur, Sin, Shamash, Adad and Ishtar, Bel, Nergal, Ishtar of Ninevah, Ishtar of Arbela, Ishtar of Bit Kidmurri, the gods of heaven and earth and the gods of Assyria, may all these curse him with a curse that cannot be relieved, terrible and merciless, as long as he lives, may they let his name, his seed, be carried off from the land, may they put his flesh in a dog’s mouth.
Wow. I’m glad I didn’t stumble upon book curses until after The Paradise Project was set and printed.
The earliest colophon found in a book printed on a Gutenberg press is in the back of the Mainz Psalter, published in 1457 by Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer, the financial backers who squeezed out Gutenberg before the psalter was completed. The colophon ignored the inventor and praises only his invention “fashioned by an ingenious method of printing and stamping without any driving of the pen.”
At the time the Mainz Psalter was printed, its last words were not referred to as a colophon. The term wasn’t coined until 1550, when Erasmus, a scholar whose books accounted for twenty percent of book sales in Europe in the sixteenth century, took to adding finishing remarks to his manuscripts, signing off with Colophonem addidi.
Once printing presses were mass-producing books, curses against the light-fingered were no longer needed. If someone stole a book, it could easily be replaced. The text itself, however, could be pilfered by an unscrupulous author. In the seventeenth century, copyright was invoked to protect such theft. Legal notice was moved up to the front of the book to warn readers right from the beginning of the consequences for stealing intellectual property. The practice of sharing details about the making of the book gradually disappeared except for some presses that, even today, include a note about the type in the last pages, a lingering vestige of the end-of-book colophon.
Erik and I agree on almost everything in the ebook design, but we come to blows over the colophon/copyright page.
“There’s too much front matter,” I say. “It takes too long to get to the stories.” In Erik’s digital design, the first eight pages of The Paradise Project are devoted to titles, copyright, contents, and such. I point out that on many ebook sites, the first ten pages are free to read. I want people to get as big a sampling of story as possible. My digital friends tell me a praise page up front is essential, too.
Eventually Erik agrees. He moves the copyright information to the last page of the book. There is no need for a colophon, front or back. The user chooses the font, there is no paper, no endpapers, no Hugh, no Thee Hellbox Press. Erik’s name is on the title page, together with mine. And I have become the publisher: Merilyn Simonds Publications.
With ebooks, colophons have all but disappeared, along with so many of the old trades involved in producing a book. Perhaps not disappeared, just evolved into something else. The rugged compositors are now pagemakers. There are still formatters and designers. There’s still Erik. And colophons survive on websites, where a dedicated page lays out the details of how the website was created, the designer’s name, and the technologies involved.
After the ebook is done and posted, I think, I should have written more on that last page, told the world how this digital book came about. I still can. That’s the thing about ebooks: text is fluid and infinitely accessible. I can return to the EPUB file anytime and fix Stupid Merilyn’s mistakes.
Hugh has been think
ing for months about what he will put in the colophon. It doesn’t occur to him to curse the readers or warn them against making off with the book. But he does consider the colophon a prod, a way to get the reader to appreciate all that has gone into making this reading experience possible: the selection of paper, type, and ink, the plant material embedded in the handmade endpapers.
“I think it would be a good idea to include a line in the colophon inviting the reader to consider how these materials and colours relate to the text,” he writes to me as we close in on our mid-July deadline. “All this is just food for thought at the moment, just a couple of ideas that crossed my mind during the day. I’m always afraid that if I don’t write them down or share them they will get lost or forgotten. Please don’t worry about getting back to me on any of this. The good will stay on the table and the not-so-good will just fade away.”
In 1976, Hugh was offered a job at Prince Edward Heights Hospital School for the Mentally Retarded, a facility in Picton, Ontario, for 1,500 developmentally challenged adults and children, many of them with foot problems. (The facility was closed in 1999.)
“I was paid the same daily rate as a physician, and I was obliged to dictate and sign the notes on my patients, the same as any doctor. I was taking liability, ownership for what I was doing. When I started the press, I thought, Well Hugh you should do the same with the books you print. Take responsibility!”
He started writing his colophons in the first person and signing each one personally, in much the same way as an author signs a book at the front. He tried to convince his fellow book artists and letterpress addicts to do the same.
“When I read a traditional colophon written in the third person passive—‘the type was set in 14-point Garamond’—I always want to ask, ‘So who set the type, your mother?’
“When a writer publishes a book, their name appears on the title page. This is not ego; it is taking responsibility for the words. Similarly, in an effort to take responsibility for the design and printing, I write colophons in the first person and I sign them.”
Hugh may blame Stupid Hugh in a moment of crisis, but in the colophon, like the scribes and printers of old, he owns up to his mistakes and writes paeans to the printing process he loves.
He also uses his colophons as a political platform. “In the last three or four books, I have included a critical statement about the Harper government, under the title ‘Press for Responsible Government.’ I am obliged to file a copy of every book I publish with Library and Archives Canada, and they are obliged to accept that book, at which point it becomes part of our national archive. It was my way of holding a finger vertical in hopes that Harper would see it.”
Not a curse, exactly, but close enough.
The colophon at the end of The Paradise Project describes the Salad paper, the Garamond type, the chocolate ink, and Emily’s endpapers. Like the earliest colophons in printed books, he acknowledges his proofreader, Faye; his apprentice typesetters, Richard and Mico; as well as the bindery that will put the pages together. “It is always amazing the number of people it takes with differing skills to produce a book of this stature,” he writes. “It has been a joy for me to take part in the process and you may find a few of my tears on page 31.”
He goes on to enumerate the size of the run, which, due to the challenges of the past few months, is now 290 plus the number of copies that will be HC (hors commerce: not for sale but kept in the archives of the printer and the author). The colophon ends with “This is copy number ______” and Hugh’s name. He will sign every copy as it is sold.
The colophon is on page 57. There are 58 pages reserved for text in the book. He sends me the colophon proof on June 28, with this note:
“Page 58 is blank. When you finish proofing this page, you can put your feet up and drink tea. And if you can manage a quick turnaround, there may be a bonus in your next paycheque. (<;)-”
PUTTING THE PRESS TO BED
The studio is so packed with people I can barely see the Chandler & Price. Hugh has invited everyone who worked on The Paradise Project to pull the last prints of the book.
We are putting the press to bed. It’s an odd image, tucking this mechanical behemoth under the covers. It makes more sense in the garden, where putting the gardens to bed entails raking a blanket of leaves over the stubble of summer growth. Whatever I’m putting to bed—a garden, a press, a child—it provokes the same feelings. Sadness tinged with relief that a season, a project, a day is coming to an end. Joy that a memory has been made, something is complete.
“The first time I came here, the place was hanging with arms and legs,” Antonino Mazza muses as we wait for the press to ink. Antonino is a Calabrian poet who has not entirely rerooted in Canada. He met Hugh when they both patronized the Italian Pastry Shop in downtown Kingston. At the time, Antonino was teaching English at Queen’s, and Hugh was working full-time building innovative orthotics, the ink only just beginning to seep into his veins. Antonino was in the process of translating a poem by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian poet, intellectual, and film director who was murdered in 1975 for being a communist or possibly for being gay. Hugh was immediately intrigued. He had found his next project: in 1985, he published The First Paradise, Odetta, the second book released by Thee Hellbox Press.
Antonino is here with his wife, Francline, and their son, Mico, the young man who spent last month typesetting with Hugh. Mico looks at the press the way he’ll one day look at the person he loves.
“He let me run this thing when I was fourteen, and, ever since, I’ve wanted to come back. It was a big mistake,” Mico says, shaking his head like a condemned man. “Now I never want to leave.”
“The goal is addiction!” Hugh declares to no one in particular.
Hugh is in high spirits. He loves being a rebel and feels his cause most keenly when his print shop is full of acolytes. He consults the list in his hand. “Antonino, you’re first. Don’t worry, you’ll all get a turn!”
We are not really printing the last page of The Paradise Project—it’s number 48 of 64 printed pages—but in the complicated ballet that is the folding of the signatures, this page is the final one to roll off the press.
After Antonino, Francline steps up to the press. Then my son’s wife, Tania, and their two girls, Astrid and Estelle. Then my husband, Wayne. Hugh has put us in order of the intensity of our contribution to the project. Next, Mico gets a turn, followed by Richard, the young neighbour who helped win back the six days that Stupid Hugh lost from the schedule. Emily couldn’t make it, but Agnicia, who helped make the endpapers, steps up.
Now Erik comes up. The label on his shirt bobs as he bends to the press. We are all wearing our shirts inside out, as Hugh directed.
“Where does the tradition come from?” I ask, expecting another Gutenberg story. Hugh has so many of them. Sometimes he says he feels he is the reincarnation of the man who made today possible.
“Well. You need to know,” Hugh begins, “you need to know that this tradition started a couple of weeks ago when I got out of bed and put my shirt on backwards. I thought, We should do this when we put the press to bed. And somehow I got all of you to do it!”
We feel a little foolish with our buttons rubbing against our bellies, our ruffles tickling our chests. We laugh.
“A thousand years from now,” says Mico, “people will wear their shirts backwards when they put a press to bed, and they’ll wonder how that tradition got started.”
What an optimist, I think. Then again, fireworks and gunpowder were invented a thousand years ago, and they are still around. The fishing reel and stirrups were invented a millennium and a half ago, and they are still around. Maybe the hand-operated press will still be printing pages in the year 3000, too, 1,600 years after its invention.
In The Social Life of Ink, Ted Bishop travels the world looking at, making, and marvelling over every kind of ink imaginable, inclu
ding printer’s ink. He is making ink in Utah with a printing master and notices students wearing what look like folded paper baskets on their heads. His guru explains that the students each make a fresh hat every morning by folding one of the new sheets that has just come off the press. They’re like hair nets in a chef’s kitchen, he says. Printers have to keep their hair out of the press: a single strand on the type can ruin a page. After today I plan to tell Hugh. The lucky souls who work together on his next project will be wearing their shirts inside out and paper baskets on their heads.
Finally, it is my turn at the flywheel. I place the folded sheet of Salad paper upside down on the tympan as Hugh instructs. There is a small, pencilled number in one corner. 287. “Put the number on the left, at the top,” Hugh says. “Centre the page between these two lines.” He points to the pencil marks on the Mylar that by now are scarcely visible. I do my best to centre the page, then give the flywheel a whirl. I feel like a contestant on Wheel of Fortune.
287. 288. 289. 290.
I print my four pages. Hugh pulls the big lever on the side of the press. The Chandler & Price grinds to a halt.
The Paradise Project is printed. We’re done.
I crack open the bottle of single malt scotch, although it is not yet noon. Hugh christens all his projects this way. When we are each holding a snifter or tumbler, we raise our glasses, and Wayne recites a poem he’s written for the occasion:
It started with stories like plump morning glories
that sprouted from Merilyn’s head
Not enough pages
And too many haitches
Now we’re putting the press to bed.
He goes on, verse and after, finally coming to the end.
The Paradise Project is printed at last
Gutenberg's Fingerprint Page 19