A PRESS HISTORY THAT LEAVES ALMOST EVERYTHING OUT
In 2002 I retired from carpentry & turned my attention to the writing & drawing that had accumulated into book ideas. In a discussion about the fact that I had no connection to the publishing world, a friend suggested I should just make my own books. This led me to a workshop at the SF Center for the Book taught by the brilliant Macy Chadwick, and it marked a dramatic shift in identity. I was hooked….on the feeling of making the text by hand & by the ways it resembled carpentry in the careful measuring and fitting….but without those screaming power tools and the showers of dust. I then volunteered to help the Santa Rosa poet/printer Don Emblen, and was boosted to another level of obsession by his example of literary depth expressed directly through the setting of type and making of books and broadsides. He started me in a true apprentice role of learning first how to distribute type from a book he had just completed; then on to typesetting and books on typography for homework. It was an odd experience to have someone who was 86 treat me like a promising young acolyte…when I was 61. I bought my first press in 2003, a Vandercook sp15, and made a shop space in my garage. Don gave me some cases of type that he knew I admired, and advice about where to get dies made, find old fonts, sources for paper, etc. …& I was off on my Rosinante.
Two people played important roles in my first period of printing. One was my friend Richard Burg, whose fascination with the letterpress world went back to the 1970s…I had seen his collection of press and type and he introduced me to the subculture where collectors & auctions were the ways to equip a shop. I greatly enjoyed going to old printer’s shops and seeing first-hand how they handled and explained the keys to the art. There was a warehouse at Hunter’s Point in SF run by Jim Heagy that had an enormous amount of type salvaged from old shops, and he was selling it by the pound. I was working my way down an aisle with type cabinets stacked on top of each other on both sides, when a young man struck up a conversation, and asked me where I lived. When I said Sebastopol, he said, “ do you know that one of the greatest printers in the country lives in your town? Pat Reagh?” I had not heard of him. “you need to meet Pat!” was the message I took away from that encounter, and duly introduced myself a few weeks later.
Pat immediately influenced my conception of being a printer, partly because of our similarities. For one, our lives had been shaped by making a living at trades that had archaic roots and many interesting subcultures. We also both had had the experience of selling our labor to companies and clients, and needing to serve our own spirit as well as that of Mammon. But the first couple of years of our friendship were marked by my reverence for his mastery of letterpress and typography. The more I learned the more I realized just how skillful Pat was. His mentoring was usually indirect: I’d bring a copy of a print & he’d notice something about inking…or I’d show him a proof of a weird old type I’d found and he’d say “looks like Abbott Old Style“…then go upstairs and find it in the Encyclopedia of Type. What? there’s an encyclopedia of type? Not just one? This kind of thing started me on a course of self-improvement; reading and acquiring all the books about type and printing I could find. Knowing someone who knows is a fine barrier against pretension or dilettantism. One more shared thing: when Pat is off the clock and working on something of his own devising, he is given to outrageous puns and wit. Seeing that side of his work opened things up for me. When I rented my first shop space, I spent the first two years trying out the idea of being a job printer, a tradesman. Business cards, chapbooks, broadsides, announcements…and it was good for me to try to meet the standards of ‘commerce’. But I’d spent 35 years working for others with little creative outlet and it struck me that I didn’t really need to reproduce that lifestyle. I wanted to play.
During the period when I had the shop in my garage, & after I had printed two books…I met others who were curious about my letterpress work, one of whom gave me a copy of Alastair Johnston’s book about the Zephyrus Image printing collective. He said my ‘Air Apparent’ reminded him of Michael Myers’ graphics and the kinds of things they printed. Reading the book I was amazed that I had never known them…having lived in SF during the time they were set up there and having an interest in radical writing all my life. It led me to make contact with the Teter family which still owned the property north of Healdsburg where Zephyrus Image had its last run, ending in 1982. I visited the site, and made an arrangement to rent it for a month in the winter to do some writing…in exchange for clearing the printshop of the accumulated twenty-five years of junk and rat poop. During that month I discovered in the loft a box with forty of Myers’ original linoleum block cuts, all in perfect condition. It had the effect of a treasure discovered after much digging. And led to a long engagement with the spirit of that press….thinking of their particular dedication to épater le bourgeois. They’d make posters on newsprint and staple them in town, or print bumperstickers that made fun of conservative politicians. All done with serious craftsmanship and Myers’ brilliant graphic art….but spurning the status of ‘Fine Printing’. I felt allegiance as a poet to the idea that one shouldn’t be printing books that your poet friends couldn’t afford. Five years later I had gotten permission to make proofs from Myers’ linocuts and gave an exhibition of his work at the Iota shop.
The next period of influences on what Iota Press would become began when I rented a public shop in June of 2009. A writer friend used the space for his classes, and I started offering letterpress workshops. The first wave of people who took those classes completely altered the trajectory for me. In a class on printing poetry, judi goldberg & Dixie Lewis, editors of a regional poetry magazine, both said they were determined to go further and could I see a way for that to happen? They became the core of a group that I hosted to learn more about printing– and to experiment with the fusion of image and word. I asked them to chip in to help with the rent, and we set up a schedule & some housekeeping rules. It became loosely known as the Iota Co-op…and grew to six, then eight, and at times twelve. I made clear to them that I was not anywhere near a master printer, & that I knew this because there was such a person and he lived just a mile down the road. That freed me to experiment alongside the others, since, for example… I didn’t know anything about ink or color-mixing. It led to some wonderful scenes, like the time judi wanted to do some kind of printing project that carried the feeling of the pilgrimage walk she & her husband had done that year in Spain. We ended up rolling ink on our shoe soles and walk-printing across a long piece of packing paper. That’s not described in trade manuals as far as I know. There followed many digressions and inventions, like printing on odd surfaces; making prints with the cleanup tools and brayers; cutting a stack of prints so they splayed out as one picture; printing on transparencies and layering them; creating kaleidoscopic overprinted octagons; trying to make notepads that behaved like Slinkies; composing directly from the case of type…and these are just things I was fooling with. Meanwhile the others in the Co-op were off on their own tangents, and we instigated and nurtured each other in this playground of book arts. It was just unmitigated fun. Eventually some levels of quality were reached: people with serious book art skills became involved & those of us who were new to it got more and more adept. We put on exhibitions, participated in festivals, and in perhaps the most validating step: were accepted as vendors at the wondrous CODEX exhibit in 2015…& 2017 & 2019.
Paralleling all this is the storyline that came up when I was working with Don Emblen: that I was very old to be an apprentice. It also surfaced comically with Pat Reagh after a few years when he was showing me some of the more arcane details of his Monotype casting machines. I was dazed with the complexity of it, and also aware that Pat had been talking about retiring in a year or two. I asked him what would happen to the operation? Had he thought about training someone? His answer was “how about you?” A few beats went by…..”Pat, I’m 70 years old!” …the point kept coming up: I had started on this craft too late. The clock would tick, wouldn’t it? As I write this now I’m 78, have announced my retirement from the nonprofit board, and have cut my hours in the shop in half. Once when I told an old friend that I regretted that I hadn’t apprenticed in printing instead of carpentry, he said, “but if you had become a printer long ago, by now you’d be burnt out by it.” Very true. It was what it was, a very good run with the wind at my back. Couldn’t have happened any other way. And thanks for all the type.
