¶ BEYOND the COLOPHON the Elements of Robert Bringhurst Style

¶ BEYOND THE COLOPHON The Elements of Robert Bringhurst Style PAM WELLS MMXVII | WELLSWORLD BOOKS Beyond the Colophon: The Elements of Robert Bringhurst Style © 2017 Pam Wells All rights reserved. ¶ INTRODUCTION Twenty-fve years ago, Robert Bringhurst wrote a book which soon became a standard reference in its feld—a feld for which he had no formal training. Today, The Elements of Typographic Style is in its fourth edition, boasting a cover blurb from type designer Hermann Zapf who dubbed it the Typographers’ Bible.1 Crispin Elsted, Bringhurst’s colleague at the University of British Columbia, voices the typographer’s cry: “Consult Bringhurst!”2 I want to know how. How did he do it? What elements in Robert Bringhurst’s life infuenced his ability to write such a book? In this essay I’ll explore what inspired him to embrace typography while making his way as a poet, linguist, translator, author, editor, teacher, and philosopher. 3 4 ¶ A HOUSE WITHOUT BOOKS Robert Bringhurst’s mother left Idaho when she was sixteen and found work as a typist in Los Angeles. The year was 1933. There she met George Bringhurst, an inventor who could turn any machine into another. He could not, however, support a family in Los Angeles. After Robert was born in October of 1946, they moved to Salt Lake City where he had hired on as a junior salesman with Lennox Industries. The next several years brought one move after another throughout Montana and then to Calgary, Alberta. The frequent moves meant books did not travel with them. Mark Dickinson, co-editor of Listening for the Heartbeat of Being: The Arts of Robert Bringhurst, describes Bringhurst’s introduction to the written language: In a house without books he learned to write before he could read, learning individual letters of the alphabet and then writing pages and pages of them, his mother circling the words that formed accidentally in the stream of letters.2 He went to a number of schools in Calgary and learned French, Dickinson says, “from a one-armed Irish teacher who had an imaginary dog named Hypothesis.”3 The family eventually moved back to a neighborhood of Salt Lake City in the shadow of the Wasatch Range. Bringhurst was a freshman in high school. He was different than other kids—taller, ruddier, and formal in his demeanor. He had no interest in ‘60s music so he taught himself to play classical guitar. Academics bored him to the point of neglect. Strong but not athletically talented, he didn’t enjoy the usual team sports. Instead, he climbed mountains. 5 At sixteen, Bringhurst often took to the road in his Triumph TR3 to explore the red rock canyons of southern Utah in search of Indian pictographs. He carried a book everywhere he went—a hardcover copy of Cantos by Ezra Pound.4 After graduation, he spent the summer in Wyoming, climbing the Tetons before going off to college. He had been taking philosophy courses at the University of Utah during his senior year at Olympus High School but had won a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the fall he went to Cambridge and began studies in architecture and physics. He also took a course in Milton, “a decision that did not go over well at home,” Dickinson says. “By his second semester, Bringhurst was already gravitating away from his chosen felds, flling his schedule with almost nothing but humanities courses.”5 He studied literature from the perspective of linguistics. He had the opportunity to engage in dialogue with MIT Professor Noam Chomsky, whose advice deepened Bringhurst’s focus on language: To know anything at all about language, Chomsky told him, Bringhurst would have to go beyond Indo-European languages. Bringhurst fnished the year at MIT and began an intensive Arabic course in Utah. Arabic was hard, Bringhurst has said—the frst thing he’d done that was hard.6 He continued studying Arabic and philosophy at Utah, then boarded a freighter to Casablanca. It was 1965. Bringhurst’s travels over the next few months took him throughout the Mediterranean. He lived in Beirut through the summer and then headed to the small village of Bcharré in the mountains where he immersed himself in the language and culture. He wrote letters, he received letters. One was from the draft board. Bringhurst looked at his options. Living abroad, he could move to France or Canada to avoid the draft; he could declare himself a stateless person; or he could go 6 back to MIT. A fourth option was to enlist. Enlistment meant he would have some say in his future and avoid pounding the ground in the jungle. He joined up as an army linguist. “Bringhurst did not enter the army reluctantly, but enthusiastically,” Dickinson says. “He saw it as another domain of experience he wanted to plumb.”7 He worked at several bases and went rock climbing on the weekends. When the Six Day War broke out in the summer 1967, he was sent to National Security Agency headquarters in Maryland to do “elint” work—electronic intelligence— intercepting, decrypting, and translating radio traffc. After a short assignment in Israel, he was sent to Panama where he stayed until his discharge in October, 1969. The next months brought more changes but more focus to Bringhurst’s emerging life as a writer and translator. He used the G.I. Bill to take more linguistics courses at MIT. Then he and his girlfriend, Miki Sheffeld, moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where he worked at a local news- paper as an arts critic. He published translations of French and Arabic poetry and wrote journal articles explaining his approach to the work of translation. ¶ MISSING THE MOUNTAINS Bringhurst and Sheffeld started Kanchenjunga Press (named after third highest peak in the Himalayas) in order to publish his poetry. But he was restless to resume his studies. They went to Canada so he could pursue an MFA in writing at the University of British Columbia. Enrolled in poetry, translation, screenwriting, he “kept a low profle,” Dickinson says, and rarely attended class, preferring to drop off his assignments every week. His profle and attendance rose in 1975, however, when he was asked to 7 teach a poetry course after the instructor was murdered. Three-plus years later, in 1979, he left teaching to take a job with a Vancouver typesetting frm, Douglas & McIntyre, and closed down his own press. Crispin Elsted taught at UBC at the same time Bringhurst was there. He traces Bringhurst’s interest in typography to “a self-imposed crash course” while designing his frst books of poetry, The Shipwright’s Log (1972) and Cadastre (1973). Since he had studied a bit of architecture, he said, it was decided by the group involved that he must know something about putting lines and letters on pieces of paper, so he became the designer by default. He . laid hands on Daniel Berkeley Updike’s Printing Types: Their History, Form, and Use (1922; 1937). Reading that considerable text . many times over to the point where he had ‘almost memorized it,’ he came to feel that ‘typography put the broken pieces of [his] world together.8 Elsted saw Bringhurst’s style developing with the production of a new book of poems in 1975 entitled Bergschrund: The margins are generous, the type for the frst time is worthy of its text, and the book is sewn in gatherings, not “perfect bound”—that vile misnomer and oxymoron denoting a stack of separate pieces of paper glued on the spine side with fexible paste and slapped into a cover. It is a real book, with real type, on real paper which, although unidentifed, is a decent wove sheet which has not discoloured in the nearly forty years I have owned it.9 8 Elsted describes the look and feel of Bergschrund— which means, in German, a deep crevasse at the upper end of a glacier: There is nothing about the typography or the arrangements on the page, the page formats, the titling, or the facility with which the book lays open, to separate the reader from the text. Bringhurst has said that good typography should have ‘a statuesque transparency’; like the best flm music, it must be noticeable only when it is absent.10 At Douglas and McIntyre, Scott McIntyre frst collaborated with Bringhurst in 1979 to design and publish Looking at Indian Art of the Northwest Coast by Hilary Stewart. Of the book, McIntyre says, I like to imagine this was one of Bringhurst’s early encounters with the power of Northwest Coast mythology . absorbing the truth of the highly stylized forms with the sensibility of a poet and typographer rather than that of an anthropologist or art historian.11 Bringhurst was working as freelance typographer and editor, but he was anxious to write full time. He and Sheffeld had married and by 1980 had an infant daughter. He began to split his time between Vancouver and Garibaldi, sixty miles north, where he occupied an abandoned mountain cabin. He hiked the Coastal Mountains and became obsessed with the native culture of the Haida, a tribe whose ancestral home is a group of coastal islands off the coast of British Columbia.12 Bringhurst became a Canadian citizen in 1982. 9 ¶ MYTH IN TRANSLATION Eighty years earlier, John Swanton, an American ethno- grapher, had spent a year creating a written record of Haida literature. Bringhurst was both fascinated and baffed by these stories, according to Dickinson. Characters would appear and disappear illogically . in and out of different levels of reality, some- times occupying more than one at the same time.

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