http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i31/31a01401.htm
From the issue dated April 8, 2005
Pressing Matters
Richard-Gabriel Rummonds once made fine books. Today he studies the secrets of their makers.
By PETER MONAGHAN
Seattle
Richard-Gabriel Rummonds has always maintained – "partly in jest and partly to shock," as he once wrote – "that for me, printing was an erotic experience; however, I could just as easily have said that it was a religious one."
Not for him, he says, the clacking and whirring of the modern press or the chuffing and clunking of early mechanical presses. Yes, that technology of printing quickly came to dominate after its introduction, in 1814, when a steam-powered cylinder press invented by Friedrich Gottlob Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer was used to print The Times of London.
But, asks Mr. Rummonds, so what? And so what, if by midcentury, an American manufacturer, R. Hoe & Company, had built a newspaper press that weighed 62,000 pounds and could print 20,000 sheets per hour?
Such events may mark the mainstream of the history of printing since the early 19th century, he allows. But they cannot move Mr. Rummonds to exclamations about the eroticism of the art.
"In Italy," he says of such technological innovations, "they say, 'Non che la mano' – 'The hand isn't there.'"
Actually, that is what Italian hand-press printers have long said of German hand-press printing, too, as Mr. Rummonds knows. Indeed, he seems to know just about everything there is to know about the craft of hand-press printing, which, although it was long ago trounced by mechanization in the world of commercial printing, remains the standard for small runs and fine bookmaking. Hand presses remained the workhorses of many small-town newspapers until well into the 20th century, he adds, because little ever went wrong with them.
Mr. Rummonds's two-volume work Nineteenth-Century Printing Practices and the Iron Handpress (Oak Knoll Press) has recently appeared in bookstores. As the product of over a decade of painstaking research, it has been much awaited by a small and passionate guild of hand-press aficionados to whom Mr. Rummonds serves as a paragon and an inspiration – even now, 16 years after he gave up printing in favor of research.
He was, by common agreement among hand-press experts, one of the world's one or two leading exponents of the old craft. "What he produced," says David Pankow, curator of the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at Rochester Institute of Technology, a leading library on the history of printing, "is generally regarded as some of the great achievements in 20th-century private-press printing."
Mr. Rummonds gained his renown among collectors of exquisite, limited-edition hand-press books, as well as among historians of publishing, through his exacting, stately, and elegant employment of typefaces, formats, and papers, and his use of impressive calligraphy on title pages – all stamped with the distinctive touch of la mano.
His new history, which runs to 1,051 pages, represents a personal quest to understand "the hand" in fine printing, the independent scholar says here in his office. He wished to explore the origins of the printing practices that he, as a hand-press printer of fine limited editions, used or adapted or, "out of necessity, ignored."
The two volumes provide a rich description of a crucial turn in the history of publishing, when the wooden hand press, which had been used since the first Western printing of the 1450s, gave way to the iron version. And they are as handsomely printed as their subject deserves: Oak Knoll, a publisher of fine books about books, printed them on acid-free archival stock, with reproductions of hundreds of historic illustrations.
"Gabriel's book is not just about printing technology and type founding," says John Randle, editor of Matrix, a British annual about the printing arts. "It's also about economics, sociology, human relations, and everything else you can imagine. It's a phenomenal work."
Fixing a Felon
Printing by iron hand press – and all printing, in fact – has often been "a delicate balance between aesthetics and productivity, art and industry, craft and expediency," as Mr. Rummonds puts it. He hopes that his research will permit the few remaining printers who are inclined to follow "correct historical practices" to do so while "creating works of lasting beauty."
In his history Mr. Rummonds surveys all stages of the printing process, from composition to presswork, including such arts as "imposition," "locking the form in the bed," and "making register." He explains those both in his own words and through hundreds of readings culled from printer's manuals. The first of those, in any language, was Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, of 1683, which, along with many, often highly derivative successors, recorded details that generally were passed on orally to apprentices who entered the trade as young as 6.
In books like John Smith's The Printer's Grammar (1755) and Cornelius S. Van Winkle's The Printer's Guide (1836), Mr. Rummonds found a remarkable body of technical literature. He has compiled an exhaustive annotated bibliography of such manuals, to serve as a standard reference for college librarians and instructors of the history of books and printing.
The antique terminology found in the manuals – "galleys," "bodkins," "quoins," "chases" – remained in vogue even after the major technological advances in 19th-century printing, because iron hand presses enjoyed only a brief reign in commercial printing.
The machines revolutionized printing when they began to appear in 1803 – but only 11 years later, mechanical presses emerged with their vastly greater speed and capacity. By 1816 one machine, the perfecting cylinder press, could print 900 two-sided sheets per hour.
Still, for devotees of la mano, only hand presses continued to count, and they continued to develop a distinctive culture of their own, minutely detailed in Mr. Rummonds's volumes. Need to fix your "felon" – a painful infection at the end of a finger from the wear and tear of setting countless pieces of type? Plunge it into water hot enough that, as G. Krumbholz said in The Country Printer (1893), "you'll withdraw it quickly enough without direction." Continue the procedure, he advised, until the finger "presents the appearance of being parboiled," and then wrap it.
Mr. Rummonds describes, or includes excerpts that describe, the duties and best practices of every kind of printing employee, from the master printer and overseer through the various ranks of journeymen: compositor, corrector (or proofreader), pressman, machine man, roller boy (the inker of type), printer's devil (errand boy), flyboy (remover of the printed sheets), warehouseman. Then on to the journeymen's apprentices.
He finds amazing the work rates expected of printers: up to 166 pages an hour. "On my hand press," he says, "we were able to average only about 20 impressions an hour."
Not only was the pace of work torrid, but regulations and draconian fines ruled the work, as Caleb Stower specified in his 1808 The Printer's Grammar: "A compositor mixing any two separate fonts, without an express order from the overseer, [is] to be fined one shilling" – as much as he would earn for setting 2,000 pieces of type. Anyone who failed to settle fines by noon Monday was docked sixpence more.
Such discipline reflected publishing's dicey finances: Imperfect books had to be discounted, and that erased profit margins.
Art and Life
The publishing life of that era was not all dourness and drudgery. In Britain and the United States, when an apprentice came of age, colleagues beat drums and dosed the young man with beer.
But by no means were labor rights encouraged. Pay was scant, raises rare. All workers labored monotonously on strictly prescribed duties. Work weeks in the 1830s were 64 hours (an improvement over the 72 hours of the 18th century). And printing-technology advances, notes Mr. Rummonds, advanced a hallowed concept of the Industrial Revolution: more machines, fewer workers.
In his own practice, Mr. Rummonds indulged in none of that. Working in Verona, Italy, he primarily combined two great traditions of hand-press printing – the Italian and the English. In the latter, printers, including Baskerville and Ashendene, were particularly interested in what the text had to say.
The earliest printers in the West (long after the Chinese and Korean inventors) were commercial tradesmen who rarely produced deluxe editions; handwritten manuscripts served that purpose. But by the late 19th century, the artist and political theorist William Morris and others had begun to print with great care, as part of an arts-and-crafts revival.
Mr. Rummonds followed Morris, paying attention to the text. He also added illustrations, in collaboration with artists he admired. He never printed Shakespeare, Chaucer, the Bible, or other standards of the fine-book trade; instead he printed such texts as Italo Calvino's Prima che tu dica, 'Pronto', with four woodcuts by Antonio Frasconi, and Journeys in Sunlight, by Dana Gioia (now chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts), with four etchings by Fulvio Testa.
Mr. Rummonds's Plain Wrapper Press and Ex Ophidia Press became leading lights in the world of the literary fine press – which, he says, "makes the books much more interesting, because people actually read them."
The influence of his work on hand printers is undisputed. "His hand was involved with every letter on the page," says Mr. Pankow, of the Cary collection. "He took a 19th-century invention and figured out how to extract every ounce of beauty from it." Mr. Rummonds did not produce a great number of books, the curator says, but "no private-press printer who is really dedicated to the task does."
Mr. Rummonds, who was trained as an industrial designer, wanted to learn printing so he could print his own poems and stories – which, he admits, were not very good. He operated his first press in Quito, Ecuador, in 1965, while working for the U.S. government on a development project to help indigenous people make products they could sell to sustain their communities.
Then, in Buenos Aires, while he briefly attended a Paulist seminary, a bibliophile introduced him to "incredibly beautiful books," which "revealed to me a subliminal glimpse of a centuries-old technology that I would fervently embrace."
So he recalled in "Confessions of a Lapsed Handpress Printer," an autobiographical essay he published in The Book Club of California Quarterly News-Letter in 1997.
In 1968, while a senior book designer at Alfred A. Knopf, the New York publishing house, he pored over fine English, German, and American books at the New York Public Library. Then he moved to Verona, the hub of modern hand-press printing, and sought out printers who were open to sharing their art. "There should be no secrets about how to print," he says.
He set up shop in a former Renaissance palace, within yards of the cathedral, and subsisted largely on pasta and olives. His first press was an 1844 R. Hoe Washington hand press that he had shipped from West Virginia, where it had been used to print a weekly newspaper. In 1974 he completed his masterpiece, an edition of 120 copies of Siete Poemas Sajones (Seven Saxon Poems), by Jorge Luis Borges, with embellishments by Arnaldo Pomodoro that included three gold-plated bronze reliefs on the cover. Mr. Rummonds had met Borges in Buenos Aires: "He loved my little book of my own short stories, but he said, 'It's a shame that you go to this much effort for such a minor literary effort.'"
Nonetheless, Borges, himself a bibliophile, agreed that Mr. Rummonds should publish Seven Saxon Poems. What with false starts and other interruptions, the book was seven years in the making. But once completed, it won the prestigious Premio Internazionale Diano Marina, a design prize, in 1976. Copies, which are hard to come by, now sell for upwards of $12,000.
From Shop to Study
In 1981 two major retrospectives of Mr. Rummonds's work were held, at the New York Public Library and at the University of San Francisco. But he closed his shop in 1982, facing the reality that, despite his renown, he had worked long and hard for little or no profit – even though his press was 80 percent subscribed (a third by Italians, a third by Americans). "I had charisma for printing," he says. "Everybody wanted me to talk and wanted my books. I never understood why."
He had been visiting the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa as a guest lecturer, and in 1982 he accepted a position as director of its Institute of the Book Arts. The institute created the first master-of-fine-arts program in bookmaking in the country, and probably in the world. In nearby Cottondale, Ala., he started Ex Ophidia ["from the serpent"] Press.
He ran the Alabama program for six years, met opposition, suffered back problems that required surgery, and took early retirement in 1988. "I had a wonderful place in Alabama, on two acres on a lake," he recalls. "My studio had an 18-foot ceiling and 20 feet of windows facing a lake. It was the ideal place for a studio, and a wonderful place to print books, but I didn't have any joy in them any more."
The costs of printing aside, he says, "Where are the collectors today?" University libraries rarely purchase fine-press books now, he notes.
That he is a perfectionist is clear: "Of the 42 items that I printed between 1965 and 1988, I must admit that there is not a single one that wholly pleases me." Still, the market for his books is strong. Several of his Borges copies found their way into the collections of heads of state. His collection of Plain Wrapper and Ex Ophidia Press books is now held by the University of Oregon.
After moving briefly to Los Angeles to pursue another of his passions, screenwriting, he settled here in Seattle in 1996. He had already begun his next book-related career, as a historian of printing. While leading workshops in 1991 and 1992 at the Rochester Institute of Technology, he began preparing an instructional book that ballooned into his 470-page Printing on the Iron Handpress: A Contemporary Approach with Selected Readings on Historical Practices (Oak Knoll, 1998). Originally he planned his new work, long before it ballooned to 1,051 pages, as an appendix to that book.
Now, at the age of 74, he is completing his memoir, "Fantasies and Hard Knocks: My Life as a Printer," which should appear next year. Among reminiscences of printing, he also promises 53 Italian recipes, for peasant dishes tasty, nourishing, and cheap enough to afford while working in Italy.
And amid a few tales about religion (that brief stint with the Paulists), "lots of sex."
It is not clear whether that is his way of referring to the eroticism of hand-press printing. The art, he has written, is "a sensuous, tactile experience like no other." The "flow of steps" – floating the dampened paper to the tympan, letting the heavy ink roller "ever so lightly distribute a thin film of ink on the type" – is a "balletlike" repetition of sequences that is, he professes, "intoxicating, exhilarating."
And for the reader, "the hand responds to the tactility of the paper, the barely visible bite of the type in the paper; the eye is drawn to the richness of the ink impressed into the paper, the beauty of the illustrations; the nose picks up the smell of the size in the paper and the myriad scents of the binding materials. ... And last, but by no means to be overlooked, the pleasure of reading the text in such a special format."
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
