you bring love into your work?" I am sure I would. In fact this case
in point was quoted recently on the wireless. If I remember rightly,
a speaker had referred with commiseration to the lot of the sewer-man
working underground among the rats in the muck and stench of drains.
He was called to task by a most insulted sewer-man, who explained that
his was a good job--as good as any other. All the artists and the
craftsmen who co-operate with me--the paper-makers, the cloth-makers,
the tanners, the brass-cutters, the illustrators, the compositors, the
pressmen, the binders--aye, and the authors too, who write and rewrite
their text until it seems to me just right for the Golden Cockerel--all
of them have their worries and their toil, but their work for me is
done with love.
This is a question you might ask yourselves: can a beautiful thing be
made cynically? The dice is loaded against the unwanted child of a
loveless marriage. You cannot divorce your work from your life. The two
are parts of a whole. My religion is that love should be the basis of
all one's living and all one's work. In so far as my books have been
successful as works of art, it is because they have been made with love.
Only with great self-restraint can I refrain from reading you again
that beautiful thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's First Epistle to the
Corinthians on Faith, Hope and Love--you remember "Love suffereth long
and is kind, love envieth not, love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed
up." Please read it now and then. It is so important.
Perhaps, when you heard my talk was to be called "Printing for Love,"
you thought, "Oh, he means printing without financial reward." Believe
me, love, too, hath its reward. Make what you have to make, and do what
you have to do, the way I advocate, and you will have your reward. You
must have _faith_ in this. We have got to fight our battles against
obstructions, but, if we fight well, and do what we are intended to do,
everything is made possible for us: the most miraculous things happen
in their due time.
At the Golden Cockerel I never choose a book because I think it a
good seller. Publishing friends are astonished when I admit that quite
recently I refused books offered to me by Evelyn Waugh--one of the best
selling novelists of today--and Sir Osbert Sitwell. Of course I do not
disapprove of the authors. I admire them greatly. But in each case the
manuscript submitted was not one I wanted for the Cockerel.
I choose those books which I believe are _right_ for this gay,
mirthful, versatile bird. At times he likes to play, at times to be
serious. He is interested in genuine old tales of adventure written
by explorers and missionaries, who may have travelled in birch-bark
canoes or quaint unwieldy ships. He is interested in old peoples and
their poetry. At present he is printing a translation of the epic of
Gilgamesh preserved on stone tablets. It is at least six thousand years
old and refers to a flood--like Noah's Flood--which was recent history
to people then. They were either more or less civilized then than we
are now, according to your view of what constitutes civilization. They
appear to have had more to eat than we have now; they spent more time
in making life beautiful, and in thoughtful enquiry into spiritual
things, such as survival after death. They had libraries of books,
not printed like Golden Cockerels, but inscribed on series of stone
tablets. There were several "copies" of the epic of Gilgamesh in the
library at Nineveh.
To return to the Golden Cockerel, he also loves the masterpieces of
English and French literature and classical literature. He is really
a very human bird, kind and sometimes very amorous, never spiteful,
never morbid, never cruel. I personally pretend to run this Press, but
you know this chimeric cockerel really rules the roost. When I and two
friends took over the Press in 1933, I had quite different ideas for it
from those I had accepted a few months later. This Cockerel had his own
personality and traditions. I have rather enjoyed following his gaudy
plumage along the aerial avenues in which he seems to want to fly.
This has not always been easy for me. From time to time I had partners
to help me. Their ideas and mine naturally did not always coincide.
They gave in to me so often that just occasionally I had, in common
charity, to print and publish some book favoured by one of them and
which I did not myself like. Usually on such occasions the finished
book was to me abortive--a baby cuckoo among my own fledglings. And
they usually did not sell well. Try as you may, you cannot do quite as
well for someone else's offspring.
It has always been of paramount importance that my books should sell.
As a husband and a father of three children, I have had to make the
Cockerel pay. Otherwise I should have had to work at something else.
Obviously you cannot make a large income from the sale of, say, half
a dozen books a year in small limited editions. But the Cockerel
has never let me down and always made it possible for me to keep on
with this work. The late St. John Hornby, who used to publish those
monumental Ashendene Press books at prices in the neighbourhood of
100 gns. has said that, taken all over, he would just approximately
cover his costs. No profit! He was in a financial position to ignore
costs and the necessity to make his books pay. In theory that is
good. In practice I think it is wholesome that the products of your
labour should be commercially right. The absolute necessity for you
to sell what you produce makes you take notice of the reactions of
your patrons, keeps you from being too personal, too idiosyncratic,
too precious, shall I say too amateurish? Here I am on difficult
ground. It depends what you mean by amateurish. I think of myself as
a professional, but, to the trade publishers (who would not dream of
rejecting a manuscript from Evelyn Waugh), I, and others like me, are
looked on as amateurs, because we do what we like.
This type of amateur, who does what he likes, scientifically, is,
I believe, very important. Into this category would fall research
students, and poets, and scholars, and inventors, and all sorts
of people. Has a scientific study ever been made of the amateur
throughout the ages and his influence on our life? If not, _there_ is
a noble thesis for a research student, and he could make of it a most
interesting and I think saleable book. Perhaps _one of you_ will do it!
Now you may be thinking, "here's this chap and they tell me he has a
certain reputation as a printer. We get him down here to talk to us
about printing, and off he goes gassing about love, and Noah's flood,
and how to make money without trying to."
Please forgive me! You see I started as a printer and taught myself
how to dress a book according to my tastes. Then I became a publisher.
Let us make no mistake: the important thing is the literary content of
the book. How it is dressed is only of secondary importance. It _can_
be dressed any old how. Obviously it is better when it is suitably
dressed. But the dress, that is, the printing and binding, must not
be accorded _too_ great importance--it must not _vaunt_ itself. If
you ask a book-seller who has built up a circle of people who collect
"cockerels" _why_ they like cockerels, he will answer "because they
are _cockerels_." By this he does not, I hope, mean "because they wear
cockerel dress"--or, shall I say, "plumage"?--but rather that they are,
in their literary content, in their dress, and in their illustration,
examples of the cockerel idea of what a book should be.
Of course it is no good the author thinking he has done everything--it
is the composite whole which is so engaging. I have known some
illustrators who think the author doesn't count. And authors tend
to think the artist a hack who should do what he is told. Both
may think that my own small contribution, as the architect of the
whole structure, is unimportant. Quite the greatest joy for me in
publishing is being in constant delightful intercourse with these
beautiful authors and artists. Beautiful is the right word. I don't
mean physically, of course, but in their natures. Compare them if
you like, to the most sensitive instruments designed by man and you
behold these God-made beings a hundred-fold more sensitive. Go to the
races and delight in the controlled nervousness and the pent-up fire
of enthusiasm in those beautiful thoroughbred horses, and yet these
dreamers of dreams, these passionate romancers, these scholars, in
all the controlled exuberance of their knowledge and their zeal for
research, these drawers of pictures, who "see the light that never was
on sea or land": the horses are as nothing beside them!
Now, who are these authors and scholars and artists? Well, some are, of
course, professionals, in the sense that they live by their art, and
others, a lot of them, are civil servants, or architects, or even prime
ministers, who make their art a hobby. But can we end there? Is not
every roadman tidying his road, every thatcher on the roof, or every
good accountant neatly writing his accounts, and every worker planting
his allotment of a summer's evening, an artist to a greater or less
degree? He seems to me, watching him, to be working for love. And so
with those of us who make seemly books.
Normally you have the publisher who chooses what books he will
publish, and contracts with the author to produce and sell his work
in book form. You have also the paper-maker, the ink-maker, the
type-founder, the maker of printing machinery and plant. You have
the printer, with his compositors who prepare the type for press,
his proof-readers, his pressmen who print the corrected type on the
paper, and his warehousemen, who deal out the paper, and pack the
printed sheets. You have the binders and manufacturers of material
and machinery used in binding. Normally a host of people have taken
their part, however small, in processes which go to the making of the
finished book.
In a "private press" a very great deal of the work is concentrated in
the hands of its owner. In certain cases the owner himself has set
the type and printed it on a hand-press. His output has thus been
severely limited to the productivity of one single pair of hands.
This is not practical politics today--one's turnover is too small to
cover overheads. An alternative is to employ skilled help with the
type-setting and presswork. This was the method employed by the Golden
Cockerel up to 1933. For reasons I need not go into, this method does
not now pay.
The survival of the Golden Cockerel, since I and my friends took it
over in the midst of the great depression, has been due in large
measure to the method of production which we adopted. By working in
with the Chiswick Press, a famous old firm of trade printers, we
arranged that the Cockerel should have the use of their plant and
their skilled labour precisely as and when we wanted it, without
the necessity for capital expenditure on plant or of providing the
wages of skilled craftsmen, week in week out, whether or not fully
employed. Those were terrible times, and our solution was the only
one practicable. It was a great experiment, but it worked. Of all the
important private presses in this country, the Cockerel alone has
carried on--and right through the war. In the books of the Golden
Cockerel a great tradition survives.
But the survival of the Golden Cockerel, and of the tradition which
it holds dear, is not achieved solely by its method of production. On
the contrary, there are other prime factors. I have said that in my
view the literary content of the book is more important than its dress.
We must not print for the sake of printing. Firstly then I only print
what I greatly desire to publish--something that is really good. I
think I have been successful in finding a lot of new literary material
which a sophisticated section of the community does enjoy to read.
Of course some of my book-seller friends often beg me to print the
old favourites, for which there is such a great demand. Occasionally
I oblige. I have a Gray's _Elegy_ at the binders now and a Keats'
_Endymion_ in the press. But generally the Cockerel prefers to be more
enterprising. Look at all the literature we unearthed and published
on the subject of the Mutiny on the Bounty--book after book. And then
those volumes of Shelley's letters to Hogg. We found and published the
journal kept by the Pilgrim Fathers when they went to America. Then
there were the four previously unpublished books by that legendary
character, Lawrence of Arabia, and so on. These are typical of the sort
of thing we've found and published for the first time. Not the old
favorites, but, because they add to literature and knowledge, so well
worth making known.
The second important feature of Cockerels is their illustration with
engravings. More than any other process, engraving harmonizes with
type. Engraved wood-blocks and copper-plates are very difficult to
print as they should be printed, especially on a durable rag-paper.
They are therefore little used in these days of mass-production. In
the hands of the team of artists who work for the Golden Cockerel,
engraving as an artistic medium is flowering as never before. By the
enthusiasm and _love_ which these artists bring to their work, they
advance their techniques year by year, always improving on their own
previous best, or the previous best of their competitors, till there
sometimes seems to be no limit to the new effects they will obtain
in their illustrations. It is an undying satisfaction to the Golden
Cockerel to be able to encourage and advise talented engravers, and,
by displaying their work to the best advantage, to build up for them
the reputations they deserve. In the twenties it was Eric Gill, Robert
Gibbings, Eric Ravilious, David Jones, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Agnes
Miller-Parker and John Nash. In the thirties, and more recently,
other engravers like Clifford Webb, John Buckland-Wright, Reynolds
Stone, Gwenda Morgan, Peter Barker-Mill, and John O'Connor have come
to the fore. You have seen a few examples of my own wife's work
among the books I have brought along. And now we have others too,
of an astonishing brilliance, like Dorothea Braby, coming on. It is
impossible for me to be sufficiently grateful for the privilege of
being able in my small way to nurture this flowering and progressive
art.
After their literary content and their illustration, the third feature
of Cockerels which has sustained the Press, when other presses have
fallen out, is my policy of co-operating with the buying public--of
producing books which they can afford to buy. Obviously the very rich
men who can pay 100 gns. for a book are now very few and far between.
I have resisted the temptation to compete with the 100 gn. books--the
"museum pieces." I have resisted the temptation to spend so much on the
production of my books that they are inaccessible. With the levelling
of incomes there is now a considerable public, which, if it appreciates
them, can buy Cockerels at the 2 guineas or 4 guineas which their
production necessitates.
Those, then are the particular features of Cockerels which [Illustration]
have maintained the Press through difficult years. That they
are works of art--the conceptions of a book-architect--would not have
sufficed, but, since they are expressions of the art of the book, let
us consider them architecturally for a few minutes. The subject is
vast: I must try to epitomise it....
COCKEREL DEVICES BY MARK SEVERIN
ARTHUR W. RUSHMORE
_THE FUN AND FURY OF A PRIVATE PRESS. Some Voyages of The Golden Hind_
From _Bookmaking and Kindred Amenities_ edited by Earl Schenck
Miers and Richard Ellis. Copyright 1942 by Rutgers University Press.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
[Illustration] "It's fun, isn't it?" said my wife. "I've gotten so
that I can recall whole sonnets just by reading these first lines." We
were sitting in a patch of warm September sunshine under the walnut,
trimmed high like a giant umbrella, over the terrace back of the press.
Proof and copy of the long Contents of Edna Millay's new volume of
collected sonnets lay on the table between us as we idled, savoring
the first signs of Fall in the yellow leaves that the breeze scattered
about the gray flagstones. The air was spicy and the ageratum and
marigolds in the border matched the autumn colors of the goldenrod and
wild asters by the roadside. "I love gardening, too," she said loyally.
"I must pot those double begonias before the frost gets them." I lit my
pipe again and we went on with the proofs. One hundred ninety-two pages
set in Bruce Rogers' beautiful Centaur, corrected, tied and wrapped,
lay in neat piles waiting to be taken to Camden for printing. We had
worked at it off and on all summer--painstaking work, but as rewarding,
in our eyes at least, as any labor we could think of--interesting
copy, lots of problems to argue over, the excitement of watching the
author's mind at work as proofs came back with alterations, changes
that in some miraculous way always added clarity or cadence to the
lines; reading and re-reading proof until the sonnets became part of
us. Now it was finished, and we had added one more book to the world's
store and to our little shelf of Golden Hind Press imprints. This book
will be published by Harper & Brothers in an edition which would take
us the rest of our lives to print by hand. The design, the whole format
and all the composition is ours. The printing and binding will be done
elsewhere. Thousands of people will share our pleasure (or brand us
failures). We feel that books of this type offer golden opportunities
for the private press. We are not selling them, we are making them our
way for someone else to sell. However, most of our books are printed on
an old hand press, and given to our friends. So far we still have our
friends.
As a hobby, a private press may be as extravagant, or as inexpensive,
as one chooses to make it. It's fun and hard work and a challenge to
all the intelligence one possesses.
We started our press in 1927, named it The Golden Hind after Drake's
flagship that went on adventures no more hazardous than ours. Elmer
Adler called it "A Busman's Holiday" for a publisher's production
man. Perhaps he was right. At that time we knew little about the
problems--about as much as parents do about the first baby. We don't
know much yet, but we've had a swell time and through it have made a
jolly lot of friends which in itself is reward enough.
We started with an ancient hand press of unknown vintage that had been
in use in the cut-room at the old Harper plant in Pearl Street since
before the knowledge of any man now living. I've an idea that it may
have come from England when Harpers started in 1817. Until the 1830's
all their books were printed on hand presses--so close are we to the
beginnings of the art of printing.
Later, in Philadelphia, we found a big Washington hand press in perfect
condition that was going out as old metal. The bed was smooth though
the edges showed the nicks of hard wear from the endless up-ending of
the forms of some country newspaper. With decent treatment it will be
just as good a hundred years from now.
We made up in enthusiasm what we lacked in knowledge. It's not always
wise to know too much--it's a great damper on ambition. Shortly after
we started, a chance came to do a proposed definitive edition of
a well-known poet's works. It was to be in seven folio volumes on
handmade paper and no effort was to be spared to make it right. Six
hundred pounds of 18 point Lutetia and weight fonts of the smaller
sizes were ordered cast at the Enschedé Foundry in Haarlem, Holland,
for the job. The type duly came, pages were set, and sample forms
printed and bound--and then the project was withdrawn! In the light of
accumulated experience I still break out in a cold sweat at the thought
of our colossal nerve to have taken on such a task. Anyhow we had the
type, and have used it many times. With it we have set the limited
editions of each new book of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poems as they
have come along, since 1928.
The status of a private press is difficult to define. As far as we are
concerned it is to make as well as we can only those books that we want
to do and to turn down all else; to have no "help," no payroll, keep
no books; to care not a hoot about a balance sheet which has no column
for satisfaction; and to take all the time we want to do the job the
way we want it. From the standpoint of factory speed we are nothing
to write home about--but we are not a factory and have no ambitions
in that direction. Ours is a private press and we work as we please:
that is where the fun comes in. We can work hard if need arises; then
hours have no meaning, and we work till we get exhausted, fed up, and
solemnly vow that we'll never do another book. But we have been at it
nearly fifteen years and we still think, even though composition is
exacting work, that such congenial labor is the best fun in the world.
Sometimes we have furious arguments over punctuation, as though life
depended on it. It is surprising how much warmth can be generated over
the position of a comma. When we set _Shakespeare's Sonnets_ we had
at least six different sources to work from, including a facsimile of
the first edition. A single punctuation mark will completely change
the meaning of a sonnet, so condensed is the wording to fit the mould.
No two sources agreed throughout--who were we to put in Shakespeare's
points for him--so the smoke got pretty thick sometimes, and the result
was still another reading of the sonnets embodying those details we
preferred from each: that's the fury of it.
The dream of every private press is to own its own private face. We
had our chance but didn't know what to use for money so we let it go.
One of the best presses in the United States now owns that type--alas!
We have many, too many, faces and borders and florets collected from
Europe when the world was sane, yet every new volume seems to need
something we do not have. Fred Goudy cast for us at his shop at
Marlboro two sizes of Mediaeval. We did Mrs. Browning's _Sonnets from
the Portuguese_ in it. That type is precious now since the matrices
were lost in the fire that destroyed all his equipment at Deepdene.
Long before the Monotype cut the Deepdene face, Fred cast it for us.
We used it for Dr. North's _Hymns_. Then along came a book my wife
wanted to do. Two hundred and eighty-eight pages of 14 pt. A.T.F.
Garamond all standing in galleys made a lot of type for us to store.
We used it again for Frederic Prokosch's _The Assassins_ and later for
_The Carnival_. Gradually the metal has crept into the house until
scarcely a room is spared. We sleep with 60 cases of type in stands on
our sleeping porch. We should be safe in a tornado--we have plenty of
ballast.
A couple of years ago we did a group of Edmund Spenser's _Amoretti_ for
Christmas. The lines breathe the spirit of another day and we wanted
to preserve, if we could, the romantic atmosphere. I remembered that
for the titles of the poems in _The Queen's Garland_, printed for R.
H. Russell in 1898, D. B. Updike had used an odd Italic which he told
me was Original Old Style cast by the old Farmer foundry in 1854. Some
one had had fun with the 18 point size--it had a swell set of oversized
vowels and all the long ſſ ligatures. The resulting effect looked much
like very early printing. The mats were in the possession of the A.T.F.
though they seemed never to have heard of them and were a bit annoyed
by my insisting on seeing their file copy of the Farmer type book.
There it was, and eventually they dug them out and cast them for us.
We printed the book on our old Hoe hand press on Arak Ash white paper.
For a frontispiece we used Virtue's beautiful engraving of Spenser. It
was bound in tan boards with dusty rose cloth spine and a bright yellow
label. In many ways it is our favorite book.