THE BOOK CLUB OF CALIFORNIA Quarterly NEWS-LETTER VOLUME LXXXI- NUMBER 4-FALL 201 6 ^ Michael dawson: Collector Spotlight: Robert Bothamley Robert bring hurst: The California Greek Case kitty maryatt: A Bookmaker’s Analysis of La Prose du Transsiberien et de la Petite Jehanne de France randall tarpey-schwed: The Printer in the Fly Trap ^ ken karmiole: Note from the Development Committee ^ Brian villon: Remembrance of Richard Dillon steve fjelsted: Remembrance of Jane T. Apostol New Members the bookclub of California isacultural center, publisher, andlibrary dedicated to preserving and promoting the history of the book and the book arts, with a particular focus on California and the West. Membership in the Book Club of California is open to all. Annual renewals are due by Janu¬ ary i, but new memberships are accepted throughout the year. Membership dues are: Regular, $95; Sustaining, $150; Patron, $250; Sponsor, $500; Benefactor, $1,000, and Student, $25. All members receive the Quarterly News-Letter and, except Student members, the annual keepsake. Book Club of California members may pre-order forthcoming club publications at a 10 percent discount. Standing Order Members agree to purchase all Book Club of California publications and receive a 15 percent discount for doing so. All members may purchase extra copies of keepsakes orQN-Ls, when available. Club publications are made available for purchase by non-members only after pre-publication orders by members have been filled. The Book Club of California is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Portions of membership dues and all donations, whether monetary or in the form of books, are deductible in accordance with the Internal Revenue Code. The Book Club of California’s tax-exempt number is 42-2954746. For more information, please call: (415) 781-7532, or toll-free (800) 869-7656. Email: [email protected]. Website atwww.bccbooks.org. OFFICERS president: Randall Tarpey-Sch wed vice-president: JohnWindle secretary: Stephen Zovickian treasurer: Bruce Crawford DIRECTORS DIRECTORS WHOSE TERMS EXPIRE IN 2017 Mary Austin, Kenneth Karmiole, James Lee, Stephen Zovickian DIRECTORS WHOSE TERMS EXPIRE IN 2018 Janice Braun, Bruce Crawford, Paul Robertson, Randall Tarpey-Schwed,John Windle DIRECTORS WHOSE TERMS EXPIRE IN 2019 Marie Dem, Sharon Gee, Laurelle Swan, Kathleen Walkup STAFF interim executive director:AnneW.Smith membership services and office manager: Lesya Westerman programs, outreach & QN-L coordinator: Turi Hobart COMMITTEE CHAIRS development: Kenneth Karmiole executive: RandallTarpey-Schwed f i n a n c e : Brwce Crawford library: JohnWindle membership: JamesLee p ro g ra m s: Randall Tarpey-Schwed publications: JohnWindle QN-L editorial advisors: Carolee Campbell, Michael Carabetta, Peter Koch managing editor: TuriHobart Copyright 2016 by the Book Club of California, 312 Sutter St., Suite 500, San Francisco, California 94108-4320. This issue of the Quarterly News-Letter, designed and printed by Richard Seibert, is set in mvb Verdigris with Preissig for display. Cover illustration by Keith Cranmer. COLLECTOR SPOTLIGHT: Robert Bothamley Michael Dawson The exhibition Developing an Image: Photography, Books, and the National Park Service, from the Collection of Robert Bothamley will be on view at the I Book Club of California from August 8 to December 5,2016. HAVE KNOWN ROBERT BOTHAMLEY FOR ALMOST THIRTY years and during that time he has developed an important collec¬ tion of books and photographs. Like many of the true collectors I know, he is very modest when it comes to acknowledging the impressive scope of his acquisitions. The exhibition and forthcoming keepsake will bring a small portion of Bothamley’s collection and his deep knowledge of this subject to a wider audience, while also offering the opportunity to explore the history of the National Park Service through a selection of rare books and photographs. Robert and I met at a fortuitous moment. I began to work full time at Dawson’s Book Shop in Los Angeles in 1985, after spending a number of years in San Francisco working as a photographer and a member of the Eye Gallery art collective. My passion for photography and my family background in rare books helped me discover a small group of Southern California collectors interested in nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century photography, and together we enjoyed an exciting environment. At that time, new treasures were arriving at Dawson’s on a regular basis and collectively we explored the aesthetics and the history of these unknown rarities. In the 1980s few roadmaps existed to provide meaning and context for nineteenth-century photographs and photographically illustrated 99 THE BOOK CLUB OF CALIFORNIA books. Gary Kurutz’s seminal work, California Books Illustrated with Original Photographs, 1856-1890 published in the Summer/Fall 1974 issue of Biblio-Cal Noteswas a small but valuable resource. In 1996, Bothamley and Kurutz collaborated on an expanded version of this publication, which was designed and printed by Patrick Reagh. In the late 1970s noted antiquarian book dealer Charles Wood began to issue beautifully designed and printed catalogues on photographically illustrated books that themselves are now prized collector’s items. David Margolis’ 1994 publication. To Delight the Eye: Original Photographic Book Illustrations of the American West, was a seminal work, heralding the vast array of material held by special collections libraries around the country. In this instance, Margolis focused on the collections of the Degolyer Library at Southern Methodist University. By the mid-1990s, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographic book was attracting a growing number of collectors. Publications such as The Book of101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of theTwentieth Century (2001) and the three-volume series The Photohook: A History(2004,2006, and 2014 respectively, by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger) exponen¬ tially expanded the scholarship and interest relative to nineteenth- and twentieth-century photography books. verso 4 a magazine for the Book as a Work of Art November 2016 In this issue - Carolee Campbell writing on Alan Loney - Alan Loney writing on Carolee Campbell - Marian Crawford on the Gefn Press in London - Gregory O’Brien on the Bill Manhire & Ralph Hotere collaboration in ±eir book PINE - and much more - Subscribe - versomagazine.com.au Email - 26verso26(a)gmail.com 100 QUARTERLY NEWS-LETTER With the exhibition Developing an Image: Photography, Books, and the National Park Service, Bothamley traces the origins of the National Park Service back to the late 1860s, when the initial movement began to preserve Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove. His thesis is grounded in the concept of competing impulses of westward expansion at play in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. One impulse was expressed in a desire to preserve wilderness lands like Yosemite, and the other was to exploit these resources for financial gain. Bothamley notes that: Responsibility for managing public lands logically falls to the govern¬ ment, which should be an impartial arbiter in the matter. The government, however, is not insensitive to the pressures of special interest groups and, if both sides are not positioned to exert similar levels of pressure, management of the lands will tilt to one side or the other, towards con¬ servation or development. The books and photographs in the exhibition are presented as guides to the history of preservation and development in Yosemite. In some cases the narrative presented is primarily textual but most often it is a combination of text and image. This combination proved to be extremely popular from the 1860s forward, when original photographs were mounted in books or disseminated as stereographs and cabinet cards. The photographs provided a likeness of a landscape, which by reason of distance and difficulty of travel, the viewer did not have the opportunity to experience directly. Displaying an array of rare books, photographs, and ephemera, Bothamley traces the history of Yosemite and the development of the National Park Service, including Lafayette Bunnell’s 1851 description of travel in Yosemite, the Big Tree exhibitions of the mid-i850s, the photography of Weed, Muybridge, and Watkins, the arrival of James Mason Hutchings and rise of tourism, the writings of John Muir and the founding of the Sierra Club, and the relationship of Stephen Mather and Horace Albright relative to the establishment of the National Park Service. The exhibition concludes with the early work of Ansel Adams that presages his rise as one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. These are only a few highlights of an exhibition rich in nuance and detail. 101 THE BOOK CLUB OF CALIFORNIA Several of the objects in the exhibition merit further description if for no other reason than they are my personal favorites. Published in 1868, Yosemite: Its Wonders and its Beauties by John S. Hittell is a small, unassuming volume recognized as the first guidebook to Yosemite and an important project in the history of California photography. The book contains twenty tipped-in photographs by Edweard Muybridge, credited under the pseudonym Helios, reduced to a 6.5 x 8.8 centimeter dimension by rephotographing the original full-plate images. While the photographs are diminished in scope and grandeur, it is interesting to reflect on the first public reception of work now considered to be some of the finest landscape photography of the nineteenth century. One of the rarest items in the exhibit is an album of Muybridge full-plate albu¬ men photographs (measuring approximately 15x20 centimeters) from the collection of Theodore Hittell, brother of John Hittell. This album contains a scarce format of Muybridge photographs from which the reduction prints were made for the 1868 publication. TheTosemiteBook (also published in 1868) is an interesting counterpoint to the unassuming presentation of Hittell’s publication. It features text by Josiah Dwight Whitney and twenty-eight full-plate photographs by Carleton Watkins. Whitney was aware of the impact that Watkins’ mam¬ moth plate photographs had on politicians in Washington D.C. when a group of Californians included a set ofWatkins’ photographs ofYosemite, taken in 1861, with a petition to create the Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees Grant. Given the impact of those images, Whitney decided to produce two reports for the Yosemite survey: a sumptuous volume illustrated with photographs for key government officials and influential citizens, and a simpler guidebook, smaller in size and without the photographs, for use by tourists and the general public. Due to the cost and effort required to produce the necessary photographic prints, the illustrated book was limited to two hundred and fifty copies. Ansel Adams’ 1938 publication, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail follows in the tradition of The Tosemite Book, attempting to utilize the power of photography to influence wilderness preservation. The project began at the behest of Walter Starr who wanted to produce a memorial volume for his son, Walter Starr Jr., killed in 1933 while solo climbing 102 QUARTERLY NEWS-LETTER in the High Sierra. Adams envisioned a publication with almost no text featuring one image per page tipped on to a larger sheet of paper. Adams was instrumental in establishing a modernist vision for the design of photographic books, demanding primacy and respect for the image such that the image was not subservient to a textual narrative. The fifty photographs reproduced in this volume feature some of his most famous and recognized photographs of the High Sierra but also many images that are quiet, lyrical, and highly abstract. Many admirers of Adams’ work consider his photographs of the late 1930s to be the most advanced images of his entire career. The book was a tremendous success and received numerous accolades from many reviewers, includ¬ ing Alfred Stieglitz. A copy of the book was sent to the Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, who was so impressed that he lent his copy to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The book had such a positive impact on the President that he decided to keep it, much to the disappointment of Ickes. Shortly thereafter, the President signed legislation that created Kings Canyon National Park. These are but a few of the treasures found in Bothamley’s masterful exhibition. It is not possible, in this brief essay, to explore all of the themes articulated by the rare and exceptional material on display, but I hope you will have the opportunity to view the exhibition in person at the Book Club of California’s gallery space. Michael dawson is a private dealer and appraiser specializing in rare books and fine art photography, including historical photographs of California and the Southwest. Michael has written widely on photography and has owned and operated his own gallery as well as the celebrated Dawson’s Book Shop in Los Angeles — a business established by his grandfather in 1905. He is a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (A BAA), the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (I LAB), and the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (A IP A D). Michael is known as an expert in the history of Southern California photography. His writing on the subject is included in LA’s Early Modems: Art/Architecture/Photography (Balcony Press, 2003) and Land of Sun¬ shine: An Environmental History of Los Angeles (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). Michael contributed an essay for the Book Club of California’s William Reagh.ALong Walk Downtown: Photographs of Los Angeles & Southern California, 1936-1991 (2012). 103 THE BOOK CLUB OF CALIFORNIA THE CALIFORNIA GREEK CASE Robert Bringhurst is supposed to Almost everyone knows that foundry type live in an upper case and a lower case. Not so many seem to know that this convention may not have arisen until the mid sixteenth century and was largely abandoned in the nineteenth. The earliest European printers, so far as we can tell, arranged their basic majuscules, minuscules, and figures all in single cases — though some of them would have needed as many as three additional cases to hold the profusion of ligatures and variants found in some sixteenth-century fonts. This is especially true for Greek fonts. One of the reasons things changed in the sixteenth century is that roman fonts were more and more often supplied with their own small caps. For these fonts, paired cases were a great convenience and in time became the European norm. Caps, small caps, and figures were laid in the upper case; minuscule letters and standard ligatures stayed in the lower case. Non-standard ligatures, accented sorts, and analphabetics (parentheses, asterisks, daggers, pilcrows, fleurons, and so on) were put wherever room could be found. By the early nineteenth century, most compositors were spending more time setting newspapers than books, and the type they set for newspapers consisted increasingly of ads. More and more typefaces were therefore designed for this kind of work: job work rather than bookwork, as compositors like to say. Jobbing faces very rarely included small caps. If they were laid in double cases, half the upper case was wasted. So for many compositors, there was a good and practical reason to return to single cases. The most successful of the new single-case designs came to be called the California Job Case. It may have been invented in London or Ed¬ inburgh, but its success was connected, in some people’s minds, to the California Gold Rush, and San Francisco in the 1870s is where it took off. Most letterpress typographers and printers in North America, and many in Europe as well, are using California Job Cases to this day—and are using them even to hold their finest book types, small caps and all. 104 QUARTERLY NEWS-LETTER figure i: Typical lay for a California Job Case. There are many variations on this arrange¬ ment, but in general the variations are confined to the top left and top right rows, the left edge, and the bottom right corner. The core of the case - the lay of the basic letters and figures - is rarely altered. Paired cases are usually built with a lot of bilateral symmetry. The most common arrangement has forty-nine squarish boxes — a seven by seven grid—in each half of the upper case. Caps and figures are generally placed in one half, small caps and accented sorts in the other. The lower case normally has larger and fewer boxes: typically twenty-four in the left half, twenty-nine or thirty in the right half, and the sorts distributed in a scheme that is just as peculiar, and just as resistant to change, as a typewriter keyboard. (The usual lay in the core of the lower case puts jbcdke/zlmnh/xqvut in the left half, isfg/oypw/ar in the right half.) The California Job Case is divided into three main sections, not two. The left two thirds closely resemble a standard lower case. The rightmost third consists of thirty-five compartments holding caps, a few ligatures, and other odds and ends. Printers may speak of “the lay of the case” as if it were the ten com¬ mandments, but there are many local variations. Further permutations, often introduced for specific fonts or projects, are also a natural feature of pressroom life, but fundamentally new lays are very rare. Nevertheless, in the spring of 2016, a new lay of the case was created in Berkeley by Richard Seibert, and christened the California Greek Case. I was working at that time on a book called Palatino: The Natural History 105 THE BOOK CLUB OF CALIFORNIA A B r A E Z H CrL C\L c/Vl CeL C5L CeLr CeLl CVL C5L1 CL C'sC’ CLj col cy © I K A M N £t £\ Zl £< £5 £rf e£l £5/ 5£1 Zi Ur u\ zv V5/ J O n p 2 T T O yrj y\] y.1 yej y5j ye]/ yejl y5)/ y5i1 yj % yyj yy] yy,1 t \ tv e 5 e/ el 5/ 51 f 7 •A •1. X n cl CO l l t t / l / l l 1 / i / 1 V 4 t \ A/ e 5 e/ el 5/ 51 t & ? r F c4 l V CO 0 0 7TV 0 0 0 0 0 0 y> TO TO TO 4 r 1 /V r \ e-j r \ c 5 er el V 51 'z' v X v tv T6 T8 TV /A or t\ TCV 7TV V V V V V V V V V V u V V V t \ ~ e 5 e/ el 5/ 51 7* ? w - / \ c 5 e/ el 5/ 51 CO CO 00 CO CO CO CO CO 0) 00 CO TOO TOO TOO 5 CL u thins hairs cr S <P <P fe f5 ad X r e <? y £ 1 K & X K A V 0 7T TTT f p ms ems >• • ? V 7 r thicks a, CO 4 • > figure 2: Typical lay for an early 19th-century pair of Greek cases. In addition to the basic Greek alphabet, there is room here for 42 ligatures and eight alternate forms. Many Greek fonts still in use in the 19th century had a lot more ligatures than that and would have needed one or two additional cases to contain them. Sorts in the six tinted compartments are cast on short-faced bodies so that short-faced diacritics can be set on top of them: two pieces of type stacked in the space that would normally be occupied by one. The eight pairs of alternate letters, all in the lower case, are: a/g {sigma) and <p/<p (phi) in the first row; /&/£ (beta), [/y {gamma), and 5/6 {theta) in the second row; tt/tx {pi) 7 and f/f> {rho) in the third row; /r {tau) in the bottom row. Only the first pair is required by the rules of Greek orthography; the other alternates, like the ligatures, are used at the compositor’s discretion to achieve better spacing and liven up the page. 106