#centaur type

It’s Fine Press Friday!

Gypsy is a collection of several poems by James Baldwin (1924-1987), published by sculptor and printmaker Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press in Searsmont, Maine in 1989. The book contains a portrait of Baldwin etched by Baskin (1922-2000), printed on blue paper from the original copperplate. This copy is also signed by Baskin. The type is Centaur, cast by Harold Berliner's Typefoundry. The red pomegranate is one of the Gehenna Press's printer’s marks. Though Gehenna often worked collaboratively with poets, this collection was published two years after Baldwin’s death in 1987.

Speaking with The Black Scholar in 1973, Baldwin traced a mid-century shift in black culture in America, as part of the generation born in an urban, northern environment after the Great Migration: “It had become clear,” he explained, “that one could no longer live by the so-called standards of white civilization.” His writing embodies an intense, and honest excavation of history and its implications on the personal, the psychological, the emotional, the spiritual. “History is a very strange crucible and I don’t pretend to understand it; but I do understand at least in my own mind that you are lucky if you are forced to understand your own history.”

To grapple with reality and history through art: Baldwin here speaks to Baskin’s own artistic motivation. A vocal critic of “the irrational and accidental,” Leonard Baskin saw these approaches as the “denial of history.” Sidney Kaplan (1913-1980), an editor at Gehenna, scholar of African American history, and activist, explored Baskin’s portraits of artists:

“The true issue of mastery—the bold and conscious exploration of the past as a past of total reality, the discriminating and weighing of its necessities, the courage and intelligence to use the past without being used or used up by it, the endless desire to know man again and again in all his avatars of flesh and art…all this is what has led Baskin to look hard and long at the deathless faces of those who, for him, have been masters of man’s changing image.”

See other posts highlighting Leonard Baskin.

Check out our Black History Month posts.

--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

Typography Tuesday

Born in 1923, and after a career as a textbook publisher and graphic designer, Chicago-based printer Muriel Underwood came late to book making and letterpress printing in 1990. In 1995, she printed this little book, A Little Bit About Punctuation and Other Funny Marks, in Chicago under her Miscellaneous Graphics imprint in a limited edition of 90 copies signed by the printer.

She began research on punctuation in 1979 at the Newberry Library and continued intermittently there and in Special Collections at the Chicago Public Library, now the Harold Washington Library. Printing for this book began in the Type Shop of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which she had attended after her discharge from the Marines in 1946, and finished in a friend's basement, using a Chandler & Price treadle press at each place. The typeface is 10 pt. Centaur with illustrations in "large metal type adn cuts made from art from numerous sources."

Our copy is a donation from the estate of our late friend, printer and collector Dennis Bayuzick.

Now this is a joyful printer!!

View other books from the collection of Dennis Bayuzick.

It's Fine Press Friday!

Veteran letterpress printer and fine press publisher Richard Bigus founded Labyrinth Editions in 1977 in Torrance, California. He learned his craft under the tutelage of noted California poet and printer William Everson and printer and educator Jack Stauffacher at Cowell College, University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1980, Bigus designed, printed, and bound this exquisite edition of Everson's anthology of pacifist poetry, Eastward the Armies, in an edition of 250 copies illustrated with linocuts by California artist Tom Killion, another student of Jack Stauffacher, and signed by the poet and artist.

Bigus handset the type in 18-pt. Centaur, with Arrighi italics and Castellar initials and titling. Other text was set in 12-pt. Centaur and Arrighi italics. The illustrations are printed directly from Killion's linoleum blocks. The book is quarter-bound with leather-thong side stitch in linen and decorative paper marbled by Bigus over boards. Of the 250 copies, ours is one of 50 printed on handmade Japanese Hosho Professional and Suzuki papers. Our copy is another donation from the estate of our late friend, art professor, painter, collector, letterpress printer, and book artist Dennis Bayuzick.

View other posts on books by Richard Bigus.

View other posts on books illustrated by Tom Killion.

View other posts on works by William Everson.

View other books from the collection of Dennis Bayuzick.

It’s Fine Press Friday!

Noted San Francisco artist, teacher, and children’s book designer Joyce Lancaster Wilson wrote and illustrated The Ark of Noah with color linocuts “for my nursery school children who listened intently to this old tale every stormy day, and for those who will discover it in the future.” It was printed in 1975 by her internationally-known printer/book-designer husband Adrian Wilson at his The Press in Tuscany Alley in San Francisco using Centaur type on Simpson Lee Recycled Text paper and handbound in an edition of 300 copies signed by the author/illustrator.

Joyce Lancaster and Adrian Wilson met as conscientious objectors during WWII. They founded the Interplayers theater group in San Francisco which they ran for 20 years. Hand printing material for the theater company led to the founding of The Press in Tuscany Alley in 1960 which continued production until Adrian Wilson’s death in 1988. Besides her children’s books and her work with her husband, Joyce Lancaster Wilson was also head of San Francisco’s Laurel Hill Nursery School for 20 years. She died in 1996.

Our copy of The Ark of Noah is yet another donation from our friend Jerry Buff.

View other posts on works by The Press in Tuscan Alley.

It’s Fine Press Friday! 

Novelle Cinque: Tales from the Veneto, translated and edited from the original Italian by George H. Bumgardner, is illustrated with four watercolor facsimiles from the 16th century manuscript and constitutes a major part of the “Refugio de miseri” (the refuge from misery), containing five short stories that detail the misery surrounding young lovers in Venice. Our edition was translated into English for the first time from the manuscript residing in Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and was designed by Martino Mardersteig, who also oversaw the letterpress printing in the Stamperia Valdonega in Verona, Italy. Mardersteig was notably connected to the Officina Bodoni, a private press in Verona specializing in hand press to create beautiful and incredibly high quality books, through his father Giovanni Mardersteig. The elder Giovanni designed the Dante, Griffo, and Zeno typefaces based on the popular Old Humanist types of European printing in the early 20th century. This edition was printed in Centaur typeface designed by Bruce Rogers, another Old-style typeface similar to typefaces designed by Mardersteig. It was printed on Pescia paper made specifically for this edition by Cartiere Magnani and bound by Legatoria Recalcati in Milan. There were 1950 copies published by Imprint Society Publishing in Barre, Massachusetts in 1974.