easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

Last week, on a visit to Boston, I got to visit the Katherine Small Gallery in Somerville. It’s a gallery, because it does have exhibitions, but it’s most obviously a bookstore. An inviting, dangerous bookstore.

Michael Russem, the proprietor, greets each new arrival with the same welcoming line: “This shop deals only with graphic design and typography, so lower your expections!” If your tastes and interests are anything like mine, however, this introduction will only raise your expectations. And the shop exceeds them.

The shelves are full of books about typography, both current and rare. I was relieved to see that many of the most inviting were books that I already possessed; but not all. Naturally I ended up leaving with a bag full of books, which Michael bundled up in such a way that I managed to fit them into my carry-on bag for the flight home. (Such restraint I showed! As I told him, if I had wandered into a shop like this thirty years ago, I would have bought far more of the books – if I could have afforded them.) Then there was his own collection, which were not for sale but were displayed behind the desk and available to browse.

In a fit of perfect serendipity, I found that the current exhibit was on the book-jacket designs of Michael Harvey. I am a big fan of Michael’s distinctive lettering style (and of the man himself, now much missed), so this was a must-see for me. The germ of the exhibit was a small collection of mock-ups for covers and jackets, which were exhibited alongside the finished dust jackets. The glassed-in tops of two display cases were full of Michael Harvey designs, and flat-file drawers underneath them held many more.

I can certainly recommend a visit to Katherine Small Gallery if you’re in the Boston area. Michael Russem’s dry sense of humor is displayed in the folded map that he handed me: “A Complete Checklist & Map of Brick & Mortar Typography & Graphic Design Bookshops in & Around Boston.” Open it up and you find a lovely map of Boston, with exactly one shop: his.

[Top: Proprietor Michael Russem at the bookshelves behind the desk. Middle: a display case showing three sketches/mock-ups by Michael Harvey for a book jacket. Bottom: “A Complete Checklist & Map of Brick & Mortar Typography & Graphic Design Bookshops in & Around Boston.”]

Categorized as book design, books, culture, design, typography |

I’ve just finished reading Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life of Evan S. Connell, by Steve Paul (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2021). Connell is a peculiar writer, impossible to categorize; he’s been a favorite of mine since I first discovered his writing through North Point Press, my favorite American book publisher of the 1980s. He’s probably best known for his bestseller about Custer, Son of the Morning Star, which examines the Battle of the Little Big Horn from both sides, with its antecedents, its contexts, and its implications. He’s a master of finding the arresting detail, and his prose is wry and precise.

Mid-way through his career, Connell became closely involved with Berkeley-based North Point Press. “Everybody there is intelligent and courteous and they all seem to know what they’re doing – which is not at all true of some people I’ve met in the NY industry.” Jack Shoemaker, North Point’s editor in chief, encouraged Connell and continued to be his editor after North Point shut down and Shoemaker had to create a new publishing company (twice). Steve Paul devotes quite a few pages of the biography to North Point, giving me more background than I knew before now. He describes Shoemaker’s and publisher William Turnbull’s desire to make quality books, though he doesn’t mention David Bullen, North Point’s long-time book designer, who was responsible for how the books looked and felt. (Nor does he mention Jack Stauffacher, who was involved at the press’s inception and set some of the typographic standards that North Point became known for). What Bullen did at North Point was a strong influence on my own ideas about book design.

The other book that Evan S. Connell is best known for is his early novel, Mrs. Bridge, which is highly respected though I haven’t read it. His examination, in detail, of the empty life of an affluent Kansas City matron has simply never appealed to me; I’m much more fascinated by his delvings into history and art. Another of his books that I’ve failed to finish, despite being history-based, is Deus lo volt! (“God wills it!”), which is so effective at conveying the spirit and mindset of the Christians who launched the Crusades that I couldn’t go on; I couldn’t stand being inside their blinkered heads. Maybe one day I’ll come back to it.

But I have read quite a few of Connell’s books, either bought new in North Point editions (which were sometimes reissues) or found and snapped up in used-book stores. Connell’s life is somewhat opaque; he was a private person, notably untalkative. Steve Paul is smart to call his biography a “writing life”; that was clearly the way Connell saw himself. Paul makes it clear, though, that Connell had connections to much livelier characters, especially when he was living in Sausalito and San Francisco. And Paul is good at weaving the strands of Connell’s life together, and at showing how the writing, the publishing, the extensive, usually solitary travel, and the thoughts he expressed were all woven of the same cloth. Or perhaps, given his fascination with pre-Columbian pottery, I should say that they were thrown from the same clay.

Categorized as book design, books, culture, letters, people, publishing, writing & editing |

Its origins are lost in the mists of time. Ron Drummond, the one-man publisher of Incunabula, reminds us that he first broached the subject to John Crowley thirty years ago: the subject being a special, celebratory edition of Crowley’s well-loved novel, Little, Big (1981). Incunabula had already published one book by John Crowley and two by Samuel R. Delany, of which I had designed two: Crowley’s Antiquities (1991) and Delany’s Atlantis: Three Tales (1995).

Incunabula, which Ron had named in a combination of respect and chutzpah, was a small press that published worthwhile literary works of science fiction and fantasy (or fantastika as critic John Clute calls it). “Incunabula,” which means “cradles” or “swaddling clothes” in Latin, is used to refer to European printed books published before the year 1501. By that time, sixty years after Gutenberg’s innovations, printing had exploded from a craft into an industry, and many of the standards of book design that we still follow were well established. In calling his new press Incunabula, Ron was drawing on a very long tradition.

I have no recollection of when it was that Ron first asked me about designing this more ambitious volume. I can find files related to the project dating back to 2003, and my earliest design file, LB design 1.indd, is dated May 9, 2005. I’ve been working on this book for at least seventeen years.

I have often referred to it as “Zeno’s book project,” for the way it seemed to keep approaching completion without ever quite arriving. I have also sometimes called it “the Oxford Lectern Little, Big,” in reference to Bruce Rogers’s monumental Oxford Lectern Bible. Our book, however, is not so monumental as to require a lectern.

The tale of how this book came to take its final form, with an intricate interweaving of original etchings and engravings by the artist Peter Milton, would take too long to tell. It has its painful interludes. Ron’s ambitions didn’t always correspond with his practical abilities, or with his never-robust health; this was a much bigger project than any he had undertaken before. But his vision was always clear: choosing and framing details from Peter Milton’s art that would create a conversation with the text of the novel.

Now, amazingly, Zeno’s arrow has hit its target. A couple of weeks ago, my advance copy of the trade edition arrived in my hands, a few days after Ron’s copy reached him. It’s an 800-page tome, 7½ x 10 inches, sewn in signatures, printed on luxurious Mohawk Superfine paper, rich with art, and all digitally typeset in Akira Kobayashi’s historically inspired typeface FF Clifford. I can say, having hefted the book and laid it in my lap and begun my own rereading of a favorite text, that it’s everything I had hoped for: comfortably readable pages, beautifully printed images, in a sturdy yet flexible binding. The printer, Brilliant Graphics in Exton, Pennsylvania, did a masterful job.

Fulfillment will be handled through Dallas-based literary publisher and distributor Deep Vellum. There are still copies of the trade edition available for purchase. The 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, which is now the 40th anniversary edition, is finally a reality.

Categorized as book design, books, culture, printing, publishing, typography, writing & editing |

I would like to direct your attention to a typographic element that is often ignored. Allow me to point out what makes it unique.

That element? The manicule. It’s also known as a fist, a hand, and by many other names, but it always takes the same basic form: a small image of a human hand, with the index finger pointing (usually to the right). Manicules date back to at least the Middle Ages, when it was quite common for readers to annotate their books, drawing a little hand in the margin to point out a particularly important or noteworthy passage. (“Manicule” comes from the Latin word for “little hand.”) Today they’re more likely to be part of a font, and to be used typographically, whether very large in a supermarket ad or at small size as an indicator of importance in a system of typographic hierarchy. They are often given a bright color to make them stand out. (Red is the traditional second color.)

Manicules can take the style of the font they’re in, just like ampersands or currency symbols. And now, the Dutch/Finnish type studio Underware, whose typefaces range from one of my favorite book faces, Dolly, to the truly bonkers stencil typeface Plakato, has issued a small booklet they call a “Manicule specimen,” demonstrating their versatility at imagining new forms of manicules for every occasion.

This little limited-edition book has a short text running through it, changing typeface twice per page, facing enlarged manicules in the same typeface, two per page. It’s a tour-de-force in its own highly specific way. And it serves to remind us that we have manicules at our fingertips, in many digital fonts, and that sometimes it’s appropriate to use them.

[Image: page spread from Underware’s Manicule specimen.]

[Originally published on February 8, 2022, in PPN Post and Updates, the newsletter of the Publishing Professionals Network.]

Categorized as books, culture, fonts, type history, typography |

I’ve just had a chance to peek behind the curtain at the Letterform Archive, to see its new digs in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. The move to larger quarters began before the pandemic, but everything moves slowly when you’re in quasi lockdown. The new Archive has much more space than the old location, including a spacious, well-lit double room that will become both a classroom and a reading room, with a folding dividing wall that is actually soundproof and that doubles as a whiteboard.

The first post-Covid exhibition opens in early November, a celebration of the centennial of the Bauhaus. Archive founder Rob Saunders showed us a sample copy of the elaborate catalog of the exhibition, which shows off the strengths of the Archive’s publishing program with its finely controlled stochastic printing, where you can peer closely at tiny reproductions of full two-page spreads and even read the text.

We looked at early printing examples such as Claude Garamond’s first Greek type (16th century) and the first type specimen known to be published by a woman printer (18th century). We also perused issues of the San Francisco Oracle from the late 1960s and an alternative newspaper from Ottawa, Octopus. On the back page of one issue of Octopus was a surprisingly professional-looking ad for “3 Days of Peace & Music” at Woodstock.

The Archive plans to begin regular tours in January (pandemic permitting).

[Originally published on November 1, 2021, in PPN Post and Updates, the newsletter of the Publishing Professionals Network.]

Categorized as culture, education, printing, typography |

In October I joined Chuck Byrne to give a two-part talk about the life and work of Jack W. Stauffacher for the Society of Printers in Boston. No doubt in a normal time we would have traveled to Boston to address the members in person, but because of the pandemic the event was entirely virtual. This has its disadvantages (my connection was evidently a bit wonky, sometimes making my audio slur for a moment, though I had no way of knowing this until I listened to the recording later), but it has advantages as well: a much larger potential audience, one that was geographically dispersed although constrained by time zone. And of course the talk was recorded, so you can watch it now, well after the fact.

My part focused on Jack’s life, using the biographical essay I had written for Only on Saturday, the upcoming book from the Letterform Archive about Jack’s abstract wood-type prints. I was reading my text, rather than speaking extemporaneously, which seemed appropriate, since the book hadn’t yet been published. For the talk, I put together a selection of images that I hoped would give a visual counterpoint to the narration. Researching Jack Stauffacher’s life was a fascinating project, and finding a way to organize its many aspects and facets was a creative project of its own. But it was all in the service of telling people about Jack.

Chuck is the moving force behind the book, and in his part of the presentation he went through the book, page spread by page spread, explaining why they had chosen particular images and how they had put them together into a remarkable, highly visual volume. The design of the book is Chuck’s; he was quite sure that Jack’s approach to the design would have been different, but they were long-time friends and no doubt would have enjoyed mutually criticizing each other’s choices. It’s a beautifully designed book.

Categorized as book design, books, culture, events, people, publishing, typography, writing & editing |

I have continued my memoir of falling into phototypesetting and working in a small print shop in Seattle in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Franklin Press moved from Capitol Hill to Pioneer Square within a month of my starting there. Being in the heart of the city, and in the heart of Seattle’s pre-grunge alternative culture, I felt intimately connected with the life of the city. And I was learning a craft I had never suspected that I would take up.

Categorized as culture, people, type history, writing & editing |

When Tree Swenson asked me to create a new visual identity for the Academy of American Poets, the brief included creating a new logo. Tree was then Executive Director of the Academy, which was (and is) based in New York City but represents poets and poetry from all over the country. Other parts of the visual identity included the annual report, the website, and promotional material and program books for the Academy’s annual fundraising event in New York, which featured, each year, several very prominent people from the literary and entertainment worlds.

In the logo, Tree told me, the emphasis should be on “Poets”: that was the word she wanted people to remember, not “Academy.” So from the first I thought it should be a two-element logo, with “Academy of American” essentially modifying “Poets.”

As you can imagine, I played with all sorts of typefaces and all sorts of arrangements. At first I aimed for something symmetrical, preferably square or circular, because that’s the least troublesome shape for a logo that has to be used in a wide variety of circumstances. But then I began breaking the boundaries.

By turning the word “Poets” into the central element, spelled out in all-caps in Matthew Carter’s elegant, sparkling typeface Big Caslon, and placing it within a classical-looking rectangle, I gave the logo a solid, clearly recognizable mark. But what about the rest of the name?

For that, I tried something entirely different, though also in an elegant and somewhat old-fashioned tradition. I set the words “Academy of American” in Zapfino, Hermann Zapf’s swooping calligraphic typeface, a dramatic contrast to the solidity of the Big Caslon caps. And I let the calligraphic strokes overlap the main element.

In fact, I tried out a large number of different placements of the Zapfino words, and what this process made me realize was that there was no one solution; in fact, there should not be a single solution. Instead, it became a modular logo that could change again and again in various uses.

Zapfino has an enormous number of swashes and alternate forms of letters, notably for both the lowercase f and the uppercase ‘A’. This meant that varying the logo wasn’t just a matter of moving around a calligraphic element, but of choosing a different arrangement of strokes for each instance.

The version we used most often had restrained A’s but an exuberant f in “of,” which swoops down into the word “POETS” and up outside the top of the box, plus somewhat restrained swashes on the d and y of “Academy.” Other versions substituted a swash version for the first A, breaking the box on the left as well as at the top.

In some instances, we did away with the box altogether. The membership cards boxed “POETS” but left “Academy of American” outside the box, floating above it, with swashes penetrating the space of the box and a swash on the final n flying out to the right. For the mailing label, where a horizontal approach was called for, both elements were in the same line, rather than stacked; though they still had a little overlap.

Then there was the website logo: poets.org. In ads in the New York Times and elsewhere, promoting National Poetry Month, we used a “poets.org” logo done in the style of the Academy logo: POETS in Big Caslon, and the “.org” in Zapfino, in a second color, with the tail of the g dramatically sweeping under the word “POETS.” (This proved to be a difficult design for use on the website itself. In the end the website design was done separately.)

On the cover of the annual report, the logo’s elements were rearranged along with the other typographic elements, including an enlarged ornament from the Zapfino font (which changed from year to year; the first one was the tip of a calligrapher’s pen). I would use Zapfino ornaments as occasional accents on later pages.

One other situation called out for a special treatment: when the logo would be displayed on the front of the lectern during the annual fundraising events at Lincoln Center. I tried out the slightly bold “Forte” weight of Zapfino, but decided that it wasn’t necessary. Instead, it was a simple stack of four words, in Zapfino and Big Caslon, on a black background, enclosed in a single-line box that some of the (relatively short) swashes burst through. It was meant to be readable at a distance in a large, dimly lit auditorium, yet still to be recognizably the logo of the Academy of American Poets.

This identity, with its ever-changing logo, was used for three years, until changes at the Academy brought on, as they often do, a change in its visual direction. The Academy’s current visual identity is very attractive and effective, though it is entirely different in style and feel.

Categorized as culture, design, typography |

This is the text of the talk I gave yesterday at ATypI 2019 in Tokyo, about the project I’ve been working on for the past year: a history of ATypI. A draft of the first part of the history is now available on Medium.

*

I’ve given this talk the title “In Search of ATypI” because it really did require a search, to uncover the Association’s early history.

The Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) was founded in 1957. The driving force behind the creation of ATypI was Charles Peignot, managing director of Deberny et Peignot, one of the most important French type foundries. (This, incidentally, is the reason why the Association’s name is in French.) The first official general meeting of ATypI took place in Lausanne, Switzerland, during an exhibition called “Graphic 57.” The list of people involved in that first meeting is a virtual Who’s Who of the type world of the 1950s.

Over the 62 years of ATypI’s existence, we haven’t always been very good at keeping records and preserving the association’s institutional memory. Most of the records we have are now kept at the University of Reading, but those records don’t go back past the 1970s and a little bit of the 1960s. And only some parts of them have been organized and catalogued.

When the Board of Directors commissioned me last year to write a history of ATypI, I had to see if I could find some documentation for those early years, and try to talk to the relatively few people left whose memory goes back that far.

My own involvement with ATypI began in 1990, when I attended Type90 in Oxford, my first type conference. So I have several decades of first-hand knowledge; but when ATypI was born I was barely seven years old. On the other hand, in subsequent years I served on the Board of Directors for fourteen years and as President for six, I have written quite a lot about typographic history, and I’m willing to talk to pretty much anyone while I’m doing research. So it may be that I was the right person to ask to write this history.

I only wish we had begun this project ten years ago. But I suppose everyone writing a history of a contemporary organization has a similar regret.

*

There are many boxes and file cabinets of ATypI records at the University of Reading, and right after the 2018 conference in Antwerp, I spent several days in Reading digging into those boxes. Some of them were well organized; some were not. My work was made easier because Ferdinand Ulrich had done some organizing and cataloging of the materials as part of his postgraduate research at Reading, so I had Ferdinand’s very useful outline of what kinds of materials we had and where they were in the archive.

And by following up on a couple of serendipitous leads, I discovered earlier collections of papers from both Charles Peignot and John Dreyfus, co-founders of ATypI and the association’s first and second presidents, respectively. These were not in Reading.

*

The Peignot lead came from Jean François Porchez, who was ATypI president from 2004 to 2007, and who organized the 1998 ATypI conference in Lyon. I stopped over in Paris for a couple of days on my way from Antwerp to Reading, and over dinner, Jean François told me that he thought that Peignot had given his papers to the Librairie Paul Jammes, a highly respected rare-book dealer. This antiquarian bookshop is located in a very old building in the heart of Paris, in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter of the 6th Arrondissement. The very next day, I visited the bookshop and met the director, Isabelle Jammes, the granddaugher of the founder. She was very helpful, but she told me that the Peignot archives had been donated many years ago to the Bibliothèque Forney, the city of Paris’s specialist library for, among other things, the graphic arts.

I had no time during my brief stopover to visit the Bibliothèque Forney myself, but luckily one of my American friends who lives in Paris is an art historian and editor, and she is also a member of the Forney. She was quite familiar with the library, she speaks French, and she was willing to go to the library and dig into the Peignot archive.

So I got permission from the Board to commission her to do exactly that.

It turned out that the Peignot archive, or “le fonds Peignot” in French, had an unusual condition attached to it: only items that had already been published could be photographed or scanned; original documents could not, although they could be quoted. This meant that Allison had to copy out by hand any information that seemed relevant.

Not all of the Peignot archive was concerned with ATypI, but among the papers were many records of early meetings when the Association was first being planned and when it first got going – the institutional memory that was missing from the archives in Reading. There wasn’t much personal correspondence, unfortunately.

*

But here is where the other unexpected lead comes in. One of the long-time ATypI members that I got in touch with was the Swiss book designer and publisher Erich Alb. Erich told me that John Dreyfus, the second president of ATypI, had donated four boxes of ATypI-related papers to the St Bride Printing Library in London many years ago, and recommended that I go find them.

When I got to Reading, I told Gerry Leonidas about this. I didn’t have time to go to St Bride’s myself, but Gerry of course is very familiar with the library and said he would visit it and see what he could find. A few weeks later, when he had a chance to do that, he discovered that the Dreyfus papers were indeed there, but that nobody had been aware of it. Apparently the four boxes had somehow been put into storage with their labels to the wall, so that they appeared to be just four more unidentified boxes in an already over-stuffed library.

What Gerry found in those boxes was exactly what we had been looking for: not just official documents but correspondence between John Dreyfus and other founding members of ATypI, including of course his friend Charles Peignot. There are missing pieces and blank holes in the historical record, but between the Dreyfus papers at St Bride and the Peignot papers at the Forney, we now have a fair amount of documentation describing how ATypI got started.

*

The impetus behind the creation of ATypI was the advent of phototypesetting, which Charles Peignot supported but which he thought would make it much easier for competitors to copy each other’s type designs. Of course, copying of designs goes back as far as the early 16th century, when the printers in Venice accused the printers in Lyon of copying their type designs. But it was a major feature of the type business in the first half of the 20th century, with each major foundry or type-machine manufacturer rushing out new type designs that would echo the latest popular designs of their competitors.

In those days, type was either set by hand or cast on a mechanical typesetting system. Those systems were not mutually compatible; each manufacturer made its own type that worked only on its own typesetting machines. Even if a foundry licensed one of its designs to a manufacturing company like Linotype or Monotype, the design would have to be redrawn and engineered to work on their system. (This was also true of the new phototypesetting machines.)

Peignot’s goal was to have type design included in the system of international standards that was governed by the Hague Agreement of 1925 on industrial designs. A large part of ATypI’s early effort was devoted to achieving this goal, including participating in endless international standards meetings and trying to establish ATypI as an expert voice on matters of type and typography.

As it turned out, all these efforts were for nought. The quest for international protection of type designs was a quixotic effort that, over the course of more than 60 years, has never fully achieved its goal. But that’s a story for a later part of the ATypI history project.

What ATypI did achieve, through the efforts of Charles Peignot, John Dreyfus, Jan van Krimpen, G.W. Ovink, and many others, was to bring the leading figures of the typographic community together, creating an international forum for discussion of type design and typography. When they started, they were thinking in terms of a “European Typographic Union,” which quickly expanded to become an “International Typographic Association,” including the United States and Canada. I wonder what the founders would have made of ATypI today, with our focus on education rather than industrial protection, and our expanded reach around the world. I like to think that they would approve.

*

So far, my research has been mostly about the earliest years of ATypI’s history, since those are the least known. But here are a few highlights from later years.

The 1967 ATypI Congress at UNESCO in Paris was the first to be a real conference, not just a series of business meetings. As Matthew Carter recalls: “Over time, people realized that this single question, the protection of typefaces, was not really going to be enough of a reason for ATypI to exist. So these annual conferences got more and more important in the life of ATypI. They became more social and less industry-oriented. That was a novel idea at the time, to have a program of talks and so on. As far as I remember, all of them since then have had a program, some degree of talks.”

In 1973, the early efforts at type-design protection culminated at the Vienna Congress, which was a general effort at revising international standards for the protection of industrial designs. A special agreement about type design was reached, and hopes were high; when John Dreyfus concluded his term as President later that year, he did so with a feeling of “mission accomplished.” But that turned out to be premature. The agreement required at least five countries to ratify it. In the end, only two countries did.

In addition to its conferences, ATypI sponsored a series of “working seminars” between 1974 and 1992, each one focusing on a particular aspect of type or typography. (As you know, a new series of Working Seminars has just been launched, beginning with the one in Colombo, Sri Lanka, earlier this year.) The 1983 Working Seminar at Stanford University, “The Computer and the Hand in Type Design,” turned out to be a seminal event, focusing attention on the new possibilities of digital typography. It was organized by Chuck Bigelow, who at the time was an Associate Professor of Typography at Stanford, and featured, among others, Hermann Zapf, John Dreyfus, Donald Knuth, and Jack Stauffacher.

Type90, the 1990 conference in Oxford, England, was ATypI’s first event to be open to the wider community of visual design. It was organized by Roger Black, and it was a typographic extravaganza, presenting both the traditions of type and the effects of new digital technology. Sometimes it turned into a clash of cultures: I remember the shock with which some people reacted to Zuzana Licko’s all-digital presentation with its rock-music soundtrack, in one of the hallowed halls of Oxford. From that date on, ATypI was more outwardly focused than it had been in its earlier days.

In 2009, ATypI held its first conference in Latin America, in Mexico City. In 2015, the first ATypI conference in South America was held in São Paulo. The first ATypI conference in Asia was held in Hong Kong in 2012, and now here we are in Tokyo for our second Asian conference.

*

We have just published a draft of the first part of my history of ATypI on the ATypI website, so you can go there and read it now. It’s just a draft; it will be part of the first book in the ATypI history series, which will be published in time for next year’s conference in Paris. I welcome comments and any new information from anyone who was involved in ATypI’s early years. I would be especially happy to hear from anyone who has usable images from those early years; what we have is pretty sparse.

Thank you for your attention. I hope this short talk has given you a bit of historical context for the ongoing project that is ATypI.

Categorized as culture, events, people, type designers, typography, writing & editing |

The wonderful poet W.S. Merwin died two weeks ago. I had the pleasure of meeting him once and being in his presence twice, and I had the honor of designing one of his books (Flower & Hand: poems 1977–1983, a reissue of his early work by Copper Canyon Press) and designing the cover of one more (East Window: the Asian poems, also for Copper Canyon). I came to his poems from designing the first of these books, but his work has become a touchstone for me and an example of what poetry can be.

The time I got meet him was when he was in Seattle for a reading at the Seattle Asian Art Museum (in fact, it might have been so long ago that it was still the Seattle Art Museum, before SAM opened a new site downtown and the Art Deco building in Volunteer Park became the Asian). After the reading proper, Merwin was ready sign books – but the art museum was strict about its closing time, so we ended up on the loading dock at the north end of the building, in chilly weather, with Merwin gamely signing books for everyone who had bought one and wanted a signature. I’m sure he later remembered that somewhat trying moment.

He came back to Seattle for a later reading, at the Seattle Public Library’s main branch downtown, and afterward there was a party at the tippy-top of Smith Tower. It was hosted by a patron who was living in the almost-secret apartment at the top of Seattle’s oldest skyscraper (for a brief time, around the turn of the last century, the Smith Tower was the tallest building west of the Mississippi), tucked into the top, above the level formerly known as the Chinese Room (now an observatory and bar) that everybody thinks of as the highest part of the tower. The family that lived there was well-off, obviously, or they wouldn’t have been there; and they welcomed a bunch of artsy types into their home to celebrate the work and the presence of W.S. Merwin. Details I remember: the Dale Chihuly glass-sculpture chandelier (bottom left) hanging down from the pointed top; the mezzanine/balcony level running around the interior of the pyramidal space; lots of very fine food and wine catered on tables on the main floor; and the ladder to the actual tip of the tower, where you could crawl out into the night air and view the lights of downtown Seattle (I decided that I was probably not svelte enough to make this ascent, and declined). I never did actually talk with Merwin at that event, but I think he had sufficient attention from the other admirers present.

Merwin’s elegiac poems from his later years speak volumes to me, and fit my own autumnal sensibility as my friends and I age and as the world seems (sometimes) to be descending into darkness. But then, the world always seems to be doing that, at least when you yourself have gotten old. I take Merwin’s late-in-life poems as a guide and a voice in the mist; and I appreciate all of his words, recent and old, as an expression of what it means to be human. Thank you, Bill Merwin.

Categorized as book design, books, culture, people |