A Nearly Perfect Book
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Many poems enact wild rides of uniqueness. The approach runs con- the imagination, but John Ashbery’s A Nearly trary to mainstream trends in today’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mir- literary marketplace, and, like the ror,” which announced a new kind Ashbery poem, it rests on the value of of craft in 1974, is also vivid in con- precision: the physicality of the book creteness and its emphasis on form. Perfect Book as an object and the startling original- Referencing a Mannerist painting ity of the craftsman’s eye. “There’s a by Parmigianino, Ashbery carefully kind of human rhythm to this,” Hoy- elaborates size, angle, light, tex- em explains. “That’s what fine print- ture, and time (a “peculiar slant / Of The poetry critic, ing is—it’s about being perfect.” memory”) to tease out his poem’s in- In pursuit of that perfection, he tellectual shape—an approach that the publisher, and chose not to make “Self-Portrait in a draws particular attention to the Convex Mirror” a traditional book at piece’s own materiality. For a pub- all. Instead, he imagined the printed lisher of sensitivity, the work raises a the art of bookmaking pages as a physical object shaped by particular question: how to publish the poem’s imagery and cultural ver- a poem that brings the physicality of 1in a digital era nacular. The pages of the volume Self- seeing, reading, and writing so dis- Portrait in a Convex Mirror were not tinctly to the fore? trimmed to their dimensions, but That was one challenge that An- by nathan heller handmade as round sheets. Hoyem drew Hoyem, one of the leading printed the lines of the poem like letterpress printers in the country, faced 29 years ago when he spokes, radiating outward from the center of the page, with gen- undertook a new edition of the poem. Hoyem runs Arion Press, a erous space between. He stacked the round pages in a custom- fine-edition publisher in San Francisco. Some of the books it has made, film-reel-like canister for each copy, in lieu of binding, and, produced are set by hand, and all are printed in small editions on each canister’s exterior, fitted a convex mirror in which the whose volumes sell for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Fol- viewer would see him- or herself. (“I see in this only the chaos / lowing tradition, Hoyem either melts down the type or returns Of your round mirror which organizes everything.”) He commis- it to its cases after the run is complete, preserving the volumes’ sioned eight artists, including Jim Dine and Willem de Kooning, 34 September - October 2013 Portrait by Stu Rosner Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Porter University Professor Helen to respond to the Parmigianino painting, and inter- Vendler in Hough- They’ve done a good deal. In the years since the “Self- polated these new works among the wheels of text. ton Library with a Portrait” edition appeared, in 1984, Vendler has become Ashbery [’49, Litt.D. ’01] contributed a recording he’d copy of the Arion Arion Press’s most prolific contributor, and the two Press edition of made of the poem, and Hoyem included the LP, with John Ashbery’s have together produced 11 volumes, accompanied by the Parmigianino on its cover. All that remained was a “Self-Portrait in original work from artists such as Jasper Johns, Richard critical introduction. For that, he sought the counsel of a Convex Mirror,” Diebenkorn, and Sol LeWitt. Most recently, they col- his wife, Diana Ketcham, a former academic and a critic and publisher laborated on Stone from Delphi, a collection of classical- Andrew Hoyem at who is the press’s senior editor. Arion’s San Fran- themed poems by Seamus Heaney. Vendler helped select Ketcham proposed Helen Vendler—at that point a cisco quarters and introduce the poems, with an eye to their histori- New Yorker contributor and a relatively new face on the cal overtones; her introduction explains how “Heaney’s Harvard faculty. (She is now Porter University Professor.) The lyric poems drawing on the classics address motifs significant to proposal, Hoyem and Ketcham recall, struck them as a long shot, his own sensibility, ethics, and linguistic hunger, [and reclaim], but one worth trying. (“Early on, I had some advice from a much for modern ears, works inaccessible in their original language to older man,” Hoyem explains. “He told me, ‘Go to the top—ask.’ ”) the common reader.” The book is bound with a goatskin spine To his surprise, Vendler agreed. She wrote an introduction, which and printed on mold-made paper from Germany, with 16 water- Hoyem printed as “liner notes” to Ashbery’s LP. “What drew Ash- color illustrations of Greek and Roman statues by the American bery to this painting was its combination of extreme beauty and painter Wendy Artin, done exactly at scale and reprinted on a self-conscious expressive distortion,” Vendler explained in her es- high-grade Epson digital inkjet printer—a technology that Hoy- say. “A convex or concave mirror distorts what it represents; the em, a master of the old ways, not a vassal to them, calls “one of the principle can be taken to extremes (as with mirrors in a funhouse) major innovations in the history of printing.” There are only 300 or it can be used to convey the distancing effect of aesthetic self- copies on the market, and they are costly: $1,200 each. representation.” She quoted aptly from Wallace Stevens, Gerard Arion Press is now the only full-service letterpress left in the Manley Hopkins, and George Herbert. Hoyem and Ketcham loved United States. Although facets of traditional bookmaking lin- the essay. Vendler was much taken with the printed result, too. ger—some letterpress printing here, some hand-binding there— “I didn’t know, when I was asked to do it, that I would be given no other workshop houses the complete process, from the casting a copy—that stunned me,” she explained recently. “This gorgeous of type to the trimming of covers. In 2000, Hoyem and Ketcham object! So, from then on, I was willing to do anything that seemed launched a nonprofit, the Grabhorn Institute (named for two ear- within my powers with Andrew.” lier San Francisco printers), to oversee these efforts and help pre- Portrait of Andrew Hoyem and photographs taken at Arion Press by ToniBird Photography Harvard Magazine 35 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 serve the press’s repository of knowledge and machinery. Today, Today, Arion Press is housed in a spacious building on the edge its facility doubles as the country’s largest museum of working of San Francisco’s Presidio, a lush decommissioned military base letterpress equipment. of nearly three square miles cradled by the Richmond district and The case for preserving such technologies and methods seems Pacific Heights and swooping down toward the lower harbors of counterintuitive at first, especially in ecosystems as invested in the Golden Gate. Down a long hallway on the entry level, display the next new thing as twenty-first-century San Francisco and cases feature selected volumes, some of which grew from Hoyem’s Cambridge—two of the most digitally oriented communities in longstanding relationship with Vendler. Stone from Delphi is their the nation. Contemporary publishing favors open access; recent second book of Heaney’s poetry; in 2003, Vendler helped Hoyem advances in the technology of reading offer many text formats, assemble Squarings, a sequence of 48 Heaney poems, originally not the perfection of a single one. Data suggest that Americans from his collection Seeing Things. Sol LeWitt, the chosen illustrator, read more now than ever before, but how they read is increasingly answered with 48 drawings of his own—each six inches square unmoored from paper’s physical aspect. and based on a varying grid on which LeWitt produced “scrib- And yet the book persists, with something of a second wind. bles” (his word). The effect on the page is one of dazzling optical- Today, Arion Press leads a growing group of small Bay Area–based ity: forms that are at once rigorously geometric and diaphanously publishers placing a fresh emphasis on physical type and centu- undefined. In her introduction, Vendler explores the poems as ries-long tradition, revivifying the old arts at the heart of screen- evidence of a similar dance between the speaker’s ordering intel- age creativity. Users of the iPhone might forget that Apple’s early ligence and the free play of his imagination. “Imagined grids and rise in design-based computing drew from the traditions of ty- lines,” she explains, “are the latitude and longitude lines by which pography, but the press has not: it is among the leading custodi- mentality orders the world.” ans of that craft and one of the few remaining producers of cast Occasionally, Hoyem has found himself so strongly drawn to an type. (Arion’s in-house foundry, M & H Type, ships hundreds of existing work of art as the complement for poetry that commis- fonts of lead type every year.) Though reading habits are chang- sioning new work is unnecessary. That was the case when he un- ing, the values sought on a page—beauty, clarity, ease—are more dertook to publish T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, in 2007, again with a crucial than ever, and, in this context, Arion Press’s old mastery is Vendler introduction. He could imagine no more fitting work than as much a blueprint for the future as a preservation effort for the R.B.