THE BOOK CLUB OF CALIFORNIA Quarterly NEWS-LETTER A TALE OF COLOPHONS ‘Iwo Important William Morris Exhibits On the Encouragement of Cataloging Gifts and Acquisitions Bookbinding Book Note Publication Notes Elected to Membership Volume Lv11, Number 2, Spring 1992 Published for its members by The Book Club of California 312 Sutter Street, Suite 510 San Francisco, California 94108-4320 Founded in 1912, The Book Club of California is a non-profit organization of book lovers and collectors who have a special interest in Pacific Coast history, literature, and fine printing. Its chief aims are to further the interests of book collectors and to promote an understanding and appreciation of fine books. The Club is limited to 1,000 members. When vacancies exist membership is open to all who are in sympathy with its aims and whose applications are approved by the Board of Directors. Regular membership involves no responsibilities beyond payment of the annual dues. Dues date from the month of the member’s election. Regular membership is $55; Sustaining $75; Patron $150. Members receive the Quarterly News-Letter and all parts of the current Keepsake series. They have the privilege, but not the obligation, of buying the Club publications, which are limited, as a rule, to one copy per member. OFFICERS & DIRECTORS Harry Goff, President Paul E. Birkel, Vice-President John Crichton, Secretary John W. Borden, Treasurer Oscar Lewis, Honorary Director Michelle Kallai, Executive Secretary James G. Nance, Membership Secretary Directors whose terms expire in 1992: Harlan Kessel JenniferS. Larson Karl Vollmayer Ann Whipple Harold A. Wollenberg Directors whose terms expire in 1993: John FE Class Jerry C.Cole John Crichton Alfred Newman Hugh Tolford Directors whose terms expire in 1994: Paul Birkel Ethel Crockett Harry Goff Joanne Sonnichsen David C. Weber COMMITTEE CHAIRS Finance: John W. Borden House: Ethel Crockett, Madeleine Rose Exhibits: Jack Maclean Library: Albert Sperisen Membership: John F. Class, Harold Wollenberg Personnel: Paul E. Birkel Planning: John W. Borden Publications: Gary Kurutz Public Programs: George K. Fox, Hugh Tolford Keepsakes 1991: William RP Wreden Keepsakes 1992: Joanne Sonnichsen Quarterly News-Letter Harlan Kessel, Editor-in-Chief John FEC lass Oscar Lewis Alfred Newman Michael Ryan Albert Sperisen Ann Whipple Members may purchase extra copies of Keepsakes or News-Letters, when available. Membership dues and contributions (including books and documents) are deductible in accordance with the Internal Revenue Code. Copyright 1992 by The Book Club of California, 312 Sutter Street, Suite 510, San Francisco, California 94108-4320. Hours: Monday 10-7, Tuesday through Friday 10-5. Telephone (415) 781-7532 or toll-free (800) 869-7656. Designed by Bruce N. Washbish and printed at the Anchor & Acorn Press, Petaluma. Letterpress cylinder presswork by James Wehlage and finished by BRM Bindery, Rohnert Park, California. Types used are Linotype and Monotype Janson. A Tale of Colophons BRUCE TAYLOR HAMILTON ‘THE OREGON HISTORICAL SOCIETY has been publishing since its founding in 1898, and since 1900 has issued (without interrup- tion—never missing a number) the Oregon Historical Quarterly. That journal is in its ninety-second year, with 364 issues pro- duced, a collective Oregon Country memory of over 41,000 pages. Over the years, the Society has produced occasional books, most actively in the mid-1950s, with the advent of the leadership of ‘Thomas Vaughan, a bookman with a background of New York editorial experience. Some of the first books produced under Vaughan’s leadership were printed by Lawton Kennedy. (They were laid out by Kennedy, who once told this author about his abhorrence of book designers: “Printers should do the layout and composition;’ he said to me, two months before I went off to my new job at the Oregon Historical Society to produce and “‘de- sign” books.) From the beginning of my tenure as the director of the publi- cation program at the Oregon Historical Society, and as the program has grown in size and reputation, it was insisted that each publication contain a colophon. There were four reasons for this. A colophon in a publication is in the tradition of fine printing, a tradition that was instilled in me by my work at the University of California’s Rare Book Room and through associations with fine printers of the San Francisco Bay Area. All of us at the OHS 31 a2 THE BOOK CLUB OF CALIFORNIA Press have made every effort to produce our books within that tradition while also working within the constraints of non-profit publishing. Colophons provide needed information for those who wish to know how we have put a book together—without intruding on those other readers who might not care or those who, quite by accident, stumble on the text printed on the last leaf of our books. We note typefaces (and who set them), paper (and the company from which we purchased it), printing information, and binding data. We also include, where relevant, names of illustrators, car- tographers, color separators—any persons or firms integral to our bookmaking work. The facts noted above lead to the third reason for the presence of a colophon. Years after a book is done, we can turn to that in- formation to help us remember how we put that particular volume together. This has often proved helpful in conjuring up a new book’s look and layout. There is a fourth, and more personal, reason for including a colophon. Colophons are this writer’s bailiwick, and at times they have been more than al isting of production factors. As the Press’s staff and output have grown, the colophon has been the one place where I am able to make a personal and direct mark on each book. There is always some point, near the end of production—when we have all the information about how the book was ‘‘made”— when a note appears on my desk, either from the Press’s superb designer, George Thomson Resch, or the masterful production manager, Susan Applegate, which says, “Colophon?” Most often the text of these brief essays is direct and to the point, with a short account of the history of the typeface (s) used. There are times in these essays, however, when typographic puns or a careful “remove” from an unfortunate typeface have emerged. In 1980 the Press issued Wheels of Fortune by Francis Seufert. This book about the salmon fishing and processing industries cen- QUARTERLY NEWS-LETTER 33 tered upon Mr. Seufert’s family canning business in The Dalles, Oregon. The book’s title derives from the numerous waterwheel- like fishing contraptions used along the Columbia River for years —until they were banned. In a publication about fish, we felt compelled to use, as the display face, a sans serif designed by Eric Gill. That fact was mentioned without allusion in the colophon. Those who get it, get it; those who do not, it matters not. In an effort (not unusual among publishers) to expand the Press’s list of titles, we have picked up a number of worthy out- of-print works from other publishers. Often we have been able to republish the book as originally designed, either by photo- mechanically reproducing the original pages, or by using the film flats, if they are fortunately available, for plate-making. The saving in production costs (with minimal added typesetting) is the economical trade-off for sticking with the typeface of the first edition. In two cases this has meant issuing works typeset in one of the more unfortunate—but exceedingly popular—typefaces available, Souvenir. In both these cases we felt required to note the type- face, but to assure those who respect our production levels that it was not our choosing. “Souvenir, a typeface common to many books issued over the past two decades, was used for both the text and display typography in the original edition,’ was a way used in the colophons to step around this issue. Several recent Press publications indicate the enthusiasm with which this writer approaches the task of producing a colophon that matches the volume for which it is written. (In the three ex- amples below, the references to the physical makeup of the book have been dropped.) Take, for example, a 1990 text placed at the back of the OHS Press revised edition of Ranald MacDonald: The Narrative of His Life, 1824-1894. This book tells the remarkable story of the man, born in the Oregon Country, the son of a Chinook Indian prin- cess and a Hudson’s Bay Company man, who later became the 34 THE BOOK CLUB OF CALIFORNIA first native speaker of English to teach that language in Japan. In 1848, MacDonald, with purpose and resolve, cast himself onto the Japanese shore from an American whaling ship, entering a Japan closed to foreigners. Little-known in the United States, MacDonald holds a continuing modest fame today in Japan. The books, photo-mechanically reproduced from two unbound origi- nals, proved to have a typeface we could not chase down: First published by the Eastern Washington State Historical Society in 1923 ina limited edition of one thousand num- bered copies, Ranald MacDonald’s Narrative has long been out of print. As time passed, and interest grew about Mac- Donald’s significance, it was evident that this book must be re-published. The Oregon Historical Society Press/North Pacific Studies Series 1990 photographic facsimile edition, with its added elements, is a tangible contribution to the growing scholarship on MacDonald and is another example of the Oregon Historical Society’s commitment to publish- ing works about the North Pacific region, and restoring to their proper place those persons who have had great influ- ence on our region and on the Pacific Rim. It is conjectured that the typeface used in the original edition was Metis Demi-Bold (not bastarda), a face that could have been popular with itinerant Linotype operators who may have plied their skills throughout the Inland Em- pire [eastern Washington] during the 1920s. However, all efforts by persons expert in the history of typography have been unable to confirm any of this. The typeface used for elements added to the 1990 edition (e.g., copyright page, the foreword, afterword, and colo- phon) is a photocomposition version of Plantin and “Old Style” or “Geralde” faces based indirectly on the genera- tion of typography used by Christophe Plantin. Plantin was a renowned sixteenth-century Antwerp printer/publisher (the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, Belgium, pre- serves his print shop as one of the finest “black art” exhibits QUARTERLY NEWS-LETTER 35 in the world). The first modern adaptation of this genera- tion of faces was designed for the Monotype Corporation by EH. Pierpont in 1913. It was chosen for this edition by the Oregon Historical Society Press’s book designer because of some similarities to the conjectural face outlined above. The Ranald MacDonald book was issued as the sixteenth vol- ume in an ongoing set of publications entitled the North Pacific Studies Series—studies about various countries involved in the exploration of the lands surrounding the North Pacific basin. The twelfth volume in the popular series is the Press’s edition of the long-out-of-print wonder of North Pacific scholarship and and book design, Frederic W. Howay’s Voyages of the Columbia. ‘This edition has a more pleasing typographic association, and the colophon speaks directly to that fact: The original 1941 edition of Voyages of the Columbia was printed for the Massachusetts Historical Society by the Merrymount Press, one of a handful of American commer- cial printers noted for producing books equal in quality to any issued by limited-edition fine printers. Founded by Daniel Berkeley Updike in 1893, Merrymount produced books of excellence until Updike’s death in 1941, the year Voyages was first published. ‘The Oregon Historical Society Press is honored to have this extended association with a man characterized by printing historian Warren Chappell as “one of America’s most distinguished and able printers,” who operated “his press... with impeccable standards.’ This Oregon Historical Society Press edition was photo- graphically reproduced from a carefully unbound copy of the 1941 original set in Caslon text and Janson titling. The required additional material written for this edition was typeset in photocomposition versions of Janson and Caslon, which by design vary from the hot-type letterpress faces used by Updike. 36 THE BOOK CLUB OF CALIFORNIA Finally, in late 1991, we issued The Shogun’s Reluctant Am- bassadors: Japanese Sea Drifters in the North Pacific, written by Katherine Plummer. It is a study of numerous unfortunate sailors and fishermen whose fates were determined by the strong winds and currents of the North Pacific after they were cast adrift: When producing a book, the normal course of events can be as routine as a safe sea passage. This does not preclude the fact that each book and each voyage have explicit and unique occurrences and memories. In a book that details the often harrowing experiences of Japanese sailors cast adrift by cruel accident, we are reminded that the publishing journey could be such an experience. Without the aid of the vast background of book-making and type-design tradi- tion (as sailors were trained in the lore and practice of their traditions) and by a number of professionals (our experi- enced shipmates), this journey would be just that much more perilous. These printing traditions and persons help bring the precious cargo—the author’s work—to you, the reader. Over the years, the colophon at our press has grown from a strictly utilitarian feature found in each book to something that reflects the nature of the content of each publication and our special association with that particular project. QUARTERLY NEWS-LETTER 37 LTwo Important William Morris Exhibits ADELA SPINDLER ROATCAP MATERIALS FROM MEMBERS Helen and Sanford Berger’s Wil- liam Morris collection made up two exhibitions celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of the Kelmscott Press. From No- vember 1, 1991, through January 5, 1992, the Department of Special Collections, Cecil H. Green Library of Stanford Univer- sity, mounted an exhibition, /m Self-Respect and Decent Com- fort, featuring books and manuscripts relating to the Kelmscott Press’s first book: The Story of the Glittering Plain. From No- vember 25, 1991, to January 6, 1992, at [he Book Club, a second exhibition, William Morris: The Unpublished Works, document- ed the fact that Morris had been in the process of developing a radically different typographic design program at the time of his death—October 3, 1896. Five unfinished projects made up The Book Club’s exhibit: Froissart, Sigurd the Volsung, Macbeth, Cupid and Psyche, and St. Jerome’s Vitas Patrum. The Froissart was to be a double-column folio of similar pro- portions to Morris’s Chaucer: “...no book that I could do would give me half the pleasure I am getting from the Froissart, Morris said in 1895. “J am simply revelling in it... printing it in my Chaucer type?’ The borders on the one extant double-spread, printed on luminous vellum, incorporate coats of arms, vigorous and spiky in appearance, and an initial letter connected to one of the borders. The initials for Sigurd the Volsung, like those of the Froissart, have tails which extend down into the margins. Sigurd was to be a folio adorned by about twenty-five plates by Edward 38 THE BOOK CLUB OF CALIFORNIA Morris making a wood block for The Earthly Paradise. Sketched by E. Burne-Jones Froma copy inthe British Museum Manuscript Collection. Burne-Jones. It was finally published in 1898 but in a smaller format—Burne-Jones’s last work for the Kelmscott Press. His sketchbook, a true art treasure, was open to an illustration for Morris’s Cupid and Psyche, later published by ‘The Rampant Lion Press. An ethereal silver-point by Burne-Jones demonstrat- ed the delicacy of touch of this Pre-Raphaelite master. A rare trial page for Macbeth—two columns of Morris’s Golden type in black ink and six line-ornament initials, stage directions and speaker’s name in red ink—is all that remains of Morris’s erand plan to publish the plays of William Shakespeare. St. Jerome’s Vitas Patrum, whose English translation was finished by William Caxton on the day of his death, was repre- sented by a rare mounted leaf and folded prospectus. ‘A book has a tendency to be a beautiful thing,’ said William Morris. A collection can also be a beautiful thing—not just an assemblage of elements but a veritable work of art. Exhibit chair- man Jack Maclean, as well as this writer, were treated to an