Impressive

 

 

             

 

 

 991

                                 .918

 

 

 

Two vaguely similar numbers—991 and .918—coalesced in my mind this week when we achieved an unprecedented head-start on preparing our annual Christmas greetings cards in what ought to be good time even for our increasingly sluggish postal service.  The date 991 is famous in my little sphere for a battle in which a brave band of English warriors met in a bloody fray with marauding Viking Marines.  This event is memorialized in an important Old English poem, “The Battle of Maldon.”  When making their heroic speeches, military heroes in Old English poems have a tendency to go through the drill of presenting arms.  Having no sabers to rattle they instead brandished spear and shield in menacing fashion as they uttered their alliterative threats, boasts, encouragements,  and philosophical observations.  A famous spear-shaking speech appears in the “Battle of Maldon”.  The spear-shaking orator is an old warrior named Byrhtwold.  Things are not going well for the home team, who experience serious attrition.   As his comrades fall all around him Byrhtwold delivers a memorable pep talk: “Our courage must be all the greater,” he declaims, “our hearts the keener, our spirits more intense, as our strength diminishes.”

 

            Well, I too am a geezer—so I translate eald geneat--and though I face no Vikings,  companions are falling all about me and I face my own personal version of Byrhtwold’s problem of diminishing strength.  My response involves neither  targe nor javelin.  I simply do about a quarter of what I used to do, and spend about three times as long on each task.  The tasks recently completed—setting the type for and then printing a very modest Christmas greetings card—took me pretty well two full days.  Tidying up will probably take another full day.  The paradox is that I am about two weeks ahead of my normal schedule.  When the “last minute” ceases to be a possibility, you tend to do it way before that.

 

            As to the fraction nine hundred and eighteen one thousandths (.918), it relates to my role as an amateur letterpress printer.  That is the height (in inches) of a piece of movable type.  You probably know that “letterpress” refers to the printing technique associated with the name of Johannes Gutenberg in the middle of the fifteenth century.  In letterpress, the raised faces of cast metal types precisely arranged and secured in a strong frame are first inked and then pressed against paper or some other suitable material by mechanical force, resulting in a printed sheet.  Printing was a huge American industry in the nineteenth century.  Every page of every book, every copy of a daily newspaper, was put together by the human hands of compositors (type-setters) working in large shops.  In addition there were thousands of “job printers” working from their own homes or small shops producing letterheads, commercial advertisements, business forms, calling cards, and so on.  The amounts of heavy metal type used in the industry were staggering.  The joke used to be that the only thing keeping Manhattan Island from blowing away in a storm was the weight of a thousand print shops.  There was constant innovation, as for example with stereotypes.  The fevered and protracted race to invent an efficient type-setting machine was won by the Mergenthaler Linotype, one of the most brilliant inventions in the history of printing, which was in significant use by about 1890.

 

            But though the equipment and procedures of letterpress printing were greatly improved over more than three centuries, its basic principle—a raised and inked type face pressing against paper--remained in operation well into the twentieth century.   Then the process called offset lithography challenged and largely replaced it.  Lithography (“stone writing”) exploits the fact that oil and water do not mix.  This allows a properly prepared text or design on a plane surface to be transferred or “offset” to a flat rubber blanket and thence to the desired printing surface.   The techniques of offset were especially effective for printing huge numbers of copies of magazines or other materials making lavish use of photographs and pictorial design.  The undisputed reign of offset lithography, however, was much shorter than that of letterpress.  As with so many other industrial processes, computer technology is revolutionizing practically all aspects of the printing industry.  In fifteen minutes you can compose on your MacBook to be printed on your wireless Brother a page as beautiful as one produced by Manutius Aldus in Venice in 1500.  Or almost as beautiful.   You will be hard pressed (so to speak) to find a stock of hand-laid rag paper, and you will never be able to feel the bite of the types as you run your fingertips (clean, please) very lightly over a few lines of the printed text.

 

            Letterpress “Print Shop” was still common as one of the vocational options in many high schools, including mine, in the early 1950s.  But by the 1960s and 70s, commercial letterpress was in rapid, near total collapse.  How I developed an interest in printing might be an engaging story, but it is for another essay.  Suffice it to say I got my first press as a birthday present from my wife about 1970.  It is a beautiful old Vandercook Proving Machine found in an intimidating printing junkyard in Camden.  The fouled makeready on its large, cylindrical drum was still in place, recording forever its last macabre act: NOVEMBER, MONTH OF THE HOLY SOULS.  ENROLL YOUR DECEASED NOW.  I used to go to weekend auctions in New York where they were selling tons of type at scrap metal prices and you could buy a Heidelberg press for two hundred dollars.  Of course you then had to move it.  Sometimes an entire shop would be sold for scrap.   Over a few years I put together a fine if eccentric letterpress shop for about a thousand dollars.  In one sale California job cases in bulk were a dime apiece.  Then Manhattan interior designers discovered their potential for the mural display of  tchotchkes.  Now a single type case may go for fifty dollars on Ebay.  Naturally I have spent a certain amount of time cursing myself for not snapping up this, that, or the other when I could have done.  Then, again, divorce is a high price to pay for a few hundredweight of Caslon.  There has been a renaissance in craft printing and with it a lightning transition from burdensome junk to expensive antique.

 

            Hand-set letterpress printing is enormous fun, but quite hard work.  You need a strong back (lots of standing), excellent eyesight, and nimble fingers.  The requirements are vaguely similar to those for the Anglo-Saxon army, though the work itself is fortunately less dangerous.  Byrhtwold’s answer to the diminishing strength of his cohort was to fight more fiercely, but that worked only for a short while.  Mine is to moderate expectations, choose achievable projects, go slow, take a lot of time, talk to myself a lot, have a magnifying glass always close at hand, and make frequent recourse to large mugs of tea.

 

           

 

Printing with Joan Didion

The weather gods apparently subscribe to the Gregorian calendar.  Friday last was the first of December, and that night we got our first reasonably sharp chill of the year.  I had been raking leaves off and on in a desultory way for a better part of a month, but I would estimate that the trees had dropped only about half their load by Thursday, when the town’s huge leaf-vacuum trucks made what was threatened to be the last curbside collection of the year.  Since then there has been a continuous blizzard of light gold and pale red oak leaves carpeting the front lawn.  You would hardly know that I had already removed a small mountain of them.

But the turning of the calendar page and its concomitant change in the weather also inspired me to more satisfying exertions, ones that left me with something to show for my efforts.  For the first time in more years than I can remember I (1) constructed an Advent wreath before the arrival of the first —or for that matter second or third—Sunday of the season; and I (2) printed the Christmas cards.  This latter achievement I regard as particularly spectacular, although we still have the opportunity to face the full angst of crisis by procrastinating on their preparation for mailing.

Though my study is dominated by printing presses, type cabinets, a huge composing table, and a paper cutter, it is mainly an overstuffed library that looks like a set for “Hoarders”.  The initial and continuing problem was negotiating the clutter.  I hadn’t done much serious printing in a while, as perhaps the fact that I did regard this assignment as “serious printing” might suggest.  It involved quite a lot: the marital squabble about the right line etching and the search to locate it when decided upon, the composition of some ten point type despite octogenarian eyesight and fingers, the delicate alignment and make-ready for some eighty pound stock that had to go three times through the press, and the tedious imposition of an elegant return address on five hundred A-6 envelopes with tapered flaps.  But it is amazing how much one can achieve once one resigns oneself to abandoning all serious work, such as getting a book finished.

I love printing all alone in the early morning hours “while the city sleeps”—or at least that part of the city with whom I share my life.  The ample flourescent lighting of my library-pressroom is as bright as a noonday desert in the largely darkened house and in the greater darkness beyond the windows.  There is a gentle but business-like hum to the variable speed motor, and the well-oiled clickity-clack of the Chandler and Price, punctuated decisively by the dull percussion of platen and type form at the moment of impact.  It’s not exactly rocket science, but it still requires attention and dexterity, even a little skill, to achieve a good product.

In recent years I have liked to have a video playing on my computer while I’m printing.  I alternate ten or fifteen minute segments between the old technology and the new.  The episodes of viewing offer refreshment from the more demanding episodes of printing.  For the printing of this year’s card I had settled upon a Netflix documentary about the life of Joan Didion—“The Center Will Not Hold”.  This occurred by pure chance, but there is something appropriate about the linkage of printing and authorship.  I am hardly alone in admiring the quality of Didion’s prose or the remarkable sensibility that it expresses.  She is, after all, one of the most celebrated of living writers.  But content is also a draw.  We are roughly of an age—she’s a year and a bit older than I—and I myself was fascinated by many of the cultural events of the Sixties and Seventies about which she has famously written.  Yet what struck me most forcibly in this video was determined I suppose by the eccentric circumstances under which I was viewing it.  It’s quite recent, having come out only this year.  Many of its scenes show the author in the last year or two.  She has aged dramatically.  In fact I would describe her as a frail old lady.  Her speech is utterly lucid, crisp, nuanced—finely pointed like her prose.  But she has a disconcerting mannerism of moving both her arms—especially the right one--in front of her while she talks.  It is hard to tell whether this is a neurological tic or a lifetime habit grown pronounced in old age.  I could see no obvious correspondence between this brachial motion and the content of what she was saying.  But it was strikingly similar to another pattern with which I am quite familiar: the arm motion required when operating a clam-shell press.  One must concentrate intently on feeding the press with the right hand while constantly ready to disengage the clutch lever with the left.  Failure to do so by half a second can result in a real mess.  What is called for is less a cooperation between the upper limbs than a competition between them, or better yet a feigned indifference between them.  Jesus had something else in mind when he said “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing”, but he might have been describing Didion talking or Fleming printing.

From Bundren to Bodoni and Back

The French revolutionaries found it easier to overthrow the political arrangements of the Old Regime than to transform by legislative decree the old rhythms of life. From time immemorial they had been linked to the liturgical cycle of Christian experience. To change that would require a new calendar. They made one, and it had the virtues one would expect from a document composed by a committee of the Enlightened: logic, tidiness, coherence. The orderly decade trounced the mystical heptad. There would be twelve months of awesome regularity, each with three weeks of ten days each. The committee chucked out the old names of the months—admittedly a rather incoherent hodge-podge—and replaced them with a rational system of dull meterological and agricultural stereotypes. So you got Winey Month, then Foggy, Frosty, Snowy, Rainy, Windy, etc. As the earth’s revolutions around the sun did not perfectly coincide with the mathematics of the revolutionaries, there were five days left over for secular festivities of an uplifting and politically correct sort. Today would I think be Septidi, the 17 Germinal (Seedy) of the year CCXVIII. Except that fortunately Napoleon made a deal with the Pope about the year XII; and they decided to return to the Christian calendar, which had the advantage of relating not merely to the seasons of the year but to the seasons of human life, and to spiritual and mythic as well as meteorological and agrarian experience.

Last week, Holy Week, for those who enter it imaginatively a kind of calendrical roller-coaster, culminating this year in one of the most beautiful Easter Sundays in my memory, has put me to thinking about times and seasons and cycles. So has another circumstance, which will eventually become the subject of this blog. That might be defined as the special contours of love among family members. To be a little more specific, the subject will be our parental joy at the approaching marriage of our younger son Luke and his wonderful fiancée Melanie.

Luke and Melanie

Half a dozen extraordinary books read in my teen years were enough to encourage me to contemplate a life devoted to the study of literature. Among the American writers I knew, I thought Faulkner was the greatest. He was then still alive, still writing, still living just across the river from my own state.

His first book to hook me was As I Lay Dying. I didn’t exactly understand it. I felt better much later, after years of professordom, when I came to realize that nobody else exactly understands it either. But I knew it was great. As I Lay Dying is about a seriously Faulknerian outfit called the Bundrens. The Bundren who lies dying is Addie, the mother. Insofar as there is a plot, it is the story of her death and the grotesque and heroic effort of her children to cart her body by wagon to a town named Jefferson for burial. The oldest child, a man named Cash, is an expert carpenter. The reader hears him before meeting him. The first sound recorded on the first page is the rasp of sawing, then the “Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. of the adze.” Cash is constructing a coffin for his dying mother, as she listens from her sickbed.

There are times, perhaps, when true depth of love can be best expressed through the medium of careful craftsmanship. Cash Bundren had a Good Friday task. Thank God there are also Easter ones. For Luke and Melanie had asked me to print their wedding invitations—a task I completed yesterday.

As they lay drying...

I have been an amateur letterpress printer for forty years, though precious little has come off the presses recently. Luke and I have had a few joint printing projects in our time, but I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to find the most important printing I had ever done for him. It took a fair amount of rummaging around in half-forgotten files of child-memorabilia. One advantage of such rummaging, perhaps the only advantage, is that one uncovers stuff one didn’t know existed. In this instance, I uncovered quite a cache of Luke’s artwork. He was, and is, a talented artist, as is obvious in this miraculously preserved piece from his affreuse period. The exact date is uncertain, but most art historians place it in the second term of the Reagan presidency.

C.L.O. Fleming (1979- ) untitled Mother's Day Card--affreuse period

At last I did find what I was looking for—to wit, the announcement I had printed in 1979, to share our parental joy with friends and relations throughout the world. Joan and I wanted to name him Christopher—hence the technicality of the birth certificate and the iconography of the birth announcement—but we had already been told in no uncertain terms by his sister that she had no intention of honoring any “sissy” names like Christopher. (You know, as in Columbus, Marlowe, and other sissies of that ilk.)

Does he look like a "sissy" to you?...

I had set the birth announcement in the beautiful, large, fresh fourteen-point Bodoni I had acquired for the printing of the Latin texts in Two Poems Attributed to Joachim of Fiore. I clearly remember the look and feel of the pristine types in their cases. I can also remember, though barely, that thirty years ago I could without difficulty or magnifying glass set the six-point type of the psalm text! That old Bodoni type, considerably reduced by service in several book runs, and even at the cost of tolerating a dinged letter or two, I simply had to use for the wedding invitations!

There are a few passages in the Bible that might be called “Bible Passages for People Who Haven't Actually Read the Bible.” Perhaps the most famous of these is the third chapter of Ecclesiastes: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted…a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance…a time to love…” Well, this is indeed the time for love. I love you. That's why I gave you this.

I placed the finished text of the invitation cards out on the dining table to dry for a few moments—it doesn’t take long—and returned to the press to work on the much easier task of the envelopes. With each revolution the old Chandler and Price makes a distinctive, rhythmic sound. I would be hard pressed to give it graphic representation—but “Chuck…chuck…chuck” is at least in the ballpark. So as the sheets lay drying, I thought of As I Lay Dying, and of times and seasons and cycles, and of the great wonder and mystery of it all.