#deepdene type

[uwmspeccoll]

Fine Press Friday

This 1944 edition of the biblical Song of Songs, with illustrations and border designs by American illustrator, designer, and wood worker Aldren Watson (1917-2013), was printed for the Peter Pauper Press in Frederic Goudy's Deepdene italic types on Archer paper by the Walpole Printing Office in Mount Vernon, New York.

Both the Peter Pauper Press and the Walpole Printing Office were founded by Peter Beilenson (1905-1962), and later joined by his wife Edna Beilenson (1909–1981), in 1928 and 1929, respectively. They are known for using fine-press principles and practice to produce well-designed, but very affordable publications. Peter Pauper Press is still a family operation, but today it mainly produces commercial novelty, miniature, and children's books.

Art was also a family affair for Aldren Watson. His mother was the American artist Eva Auld Watson and his daughter Wendy Watson is a children's book author and illustrator. Our copy of this book is another gift from our friend Jerry Buff.

View our other posts on books by the Peter Pauper Press.

View other Fine Press Friday posts.

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

Richard J. Hoffman (1912-1989) was a long-standing letterpress printer and collector of type in the Los Angeles area from 1925 until his death in 1989. One of his final projects was this publication, When a Printer Plays, printed in 1987 at his shop in Van Nuys, California in an edition of 200 copies. The book is an historical presentation of fleurons and printers' ornaments with over 200 designs of his own invention made from individual pieces of foundry and monotype units that he collected over more than 50 years. California rare book dealer John Howell called When a Printer Plays Hoffman's magnum opus, noting that "Hoffman lavished the utmost care upon every detail of typesetting, arrangement, margins, proportions, multi-colored patterns, and illustrations."

Hoffman begins with Garamond and Granjon ornaments first designed in the 16th century and moves toward more contemporary ornaments by designers such as Bruce Rogers, Will Bradley, Thomas Maitland Cleland, David Bethel (Glint Ornaments), and Rudolph Ruzicka (Fairfield Ornaments). All the letterpress printers we know delight in creating borders and designs from typographic ornaments, and Hoffman quotes Bruce Rogers:

When my own time comes to be marooned on a desert island . . . instead of taking along the favorite volumes that most amateur castaways vote for, I think I shall arrange to be shipwrecked in company with a Monotype caster and a select assortment of ornamental matrices. The fascination and amusement . . . that can be got out of the almost numberless combinations of a few simple units would enable me to cast away for an indefinite period with great contentment.

Linotype Electra was used for the text in this book, with Deepdene for display. Our copy of When a Printer Plays is yet another donation from the estate of Dennis Bayuzick.

View more posts of type ornaments.

View other books from the collection of Dennis Bayuzick.

View more Typography Tuesday posts.

[uwmspeccoll]

It’s Fine Press Friday!

This week we present a 1929 edition of Alexander Pushkin’s satirical and even blasphemous poem on the Lukan Annunciation story, Gabriel: A Poem in One Song, translated by Max Eastman, illustrated with original wood engravings by Rockwell Kent, and published in New York by Covici-Friede in a limited edition of 750 copies. The publication was handset by J. S. Jacobs and printed under his supervision at the Stratford Press in Frederic Goudy‘s newly designed Deepdene type on Arnold unbleached cream wove paper, and bound in limp vellum with a gold-stamped illustration by Kent at the American Book Bindery in New York.

Here’s Wikipedia’s synopsis of the blasphemous narrative:

God chooses [Mary] to be the mother of Jesus and sends Archangel Gabriel to announce the good news. Satan learns about God's plan and arrives first in the form of a snake to seduce and deflower Mary. Gabriel arrives too late to save her from Satan but manages to drive him off with an illegal punch to testicles. Then he quickly has his way with Mary, who had already seen him in a vision and was impatiently waiting for him. The next morning, God in the form of a dove flies into Mary's bedroom and has intercourse with her, thus thinking He has conceived Jesus.

Oh, my! Pushkin wrote the poem in 1821 while he was a student. It only circulated in manuscript and because of its impiety, it was never published in Pushkin’s lifetime. Still, enough had read it in manuscript to get the author in a lot of hot water, and it would have been off to Siberia for him if he had not appealed directly to the Tsar with the deepest contrition.  

Covici-Friede was founded in 1928 by publisher Pascal Covini and Boni & Liveright vice president Donald Friede. It had considerable literary success in its short run, and Rockwell Kent corresponded with the firm from its founding to the time it folded in 1938. Gabriel was the first publication Kent illustrated for Covici-Friede and he would illustrate only one other title for them, a 2-volume Canterbury Tales published in 1930. We hold a 1934 second Covici-Friede edition of that title printed with Kent’s original plates from the 1930 edition. Our copies of Gabriel and The Canterbury Tales are both gifts from our friend Jerry Buff,

View more posts with illustrations by Rockwell Kent

View more Fine Press Friday posts..

[uwmspeccoll]

It’s Fine Press Friday!

Before Squarings became the beautifully illustrated collection of poetry we hold at Special Collections Library, it was first published 1991 as Seeing Things (which we also hold) by celebrated Irish poet Seamus Heaney four years prior to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. Our 2003 edition of Squarings was printed by Andrew Hoyem in San Francisco at his Arion Press in Deepdene type designed by Frederic Goudy, alongside 48 drawings by the American conceptual artist Sol Lewitt reproduced in photopolymer plates and printed letterpress on a Miller cylinder press on Pescia, a mould-made paper from the Magnani mill in Italy. There are 400 numbered copies for sale and 26 lettered copies for complimentary distribution, each signed by the poet and artist (our copy is signed, it’s just hard to see here).

Squarings can be tied to Heaney’s changing viewpoint of the material world in the wake of losing both of his parents between 1984 and 1986, described by literary critic Helen Vendler in Squarings introduction as “Life is; Death is.” Many of the poems recall long-forgotten childhood perspectives as the then 45-year-old poet grieves and struggles with reconciling a new beginning with immense loss. With each of the poems composed as four equal tercets, Heaney imbued a level of meaning usually associated with much longer works. Lewitt’s drawings speak to the layers of humanity contained within the poems and appear as large scribbled square images throughout the collection accompanied by a caption that details the constraints of creating the image. The images become increasingly complex as Heaney wades deeper into his grief.

-- Emily Birz, Special Collections Writing Intern

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

Fred Goudy’s Kaatskill

The great American type designer and printer Frederic W. Goudy designed over 100 typefaces in his long career, including Copperplate Gothic, Goudy Old Style, Deepdene, Kennerley, and a number of noted proprietary faces, such as University of California Old Style. Goudy designed his Kaatskill typeface in 1929 specifically for an edition of Rip Van Winkle. As designer, typographer, and printer Dwight Agner tells the story:

According to Charles Pont, Goudy invited George Macy of the Limited Editions Club [LEC] to see a new type design he was working on and discuss an idea for its use. The book Goudy had in mind was Rip Van Winkle, and he wanted it to be set by his wife Bertha . . . and printed by the recently established Walpole Printing Office of Peter Beilenson and Ned Thompson. . . . When the the book was published, Goudy made much of the fact that the typeface was produced in the area where the story took place. Macy noted that since Kaatskill “owes nothing in its design to any existing face, the type is therefore as truly an American type as anything as hide-bound by tradition as type can be.”

Goudy never designed an accompanying italic, but recommended instead that his Deepdene Italic be used with Kaatskill. Once the LEC volume was done, he offered various sizes of Kaatskill for sale, but got few takers, except for the Walpole Printing Office. The Goudys did use Kaatskill again in 1930 for a small book for the Carteret Book Club, Jemima Condict, Her Book!, which was printed by Fred and Bertha Goudy at their Village Press, combining Kaatskill with Deepdene. The book was selected for the AIGA Fifty Books of the Year exhibit, but that still didn’t seem to popularize Kaatskill for wider use. Dwight Agner writes again:

After being ignored for half a century and unavailable for most of that time, Kaatskill has been given a new lease on life. . . . In the late 1980s Lanston Type Company Ltd, of Vancouver, British Columbia, issued a series of digital versions . . . . Jim Rimmer redrew the Kaatskill, reproducing the roman very faithfully and adding an italic. . . . It is to be hoped that such access to Kaatskill and other Goudy fonts will spur a rebirth of interest in the work of the dean of American type designers.

Click on the images for details.

View our other posts relating to Fred Goudy.

View our other Typography Tuesday posts.