The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

The Cary Collection is one of America’s premier libraries on graphic communication, its history and practices. Located in Rochester on the campus of the Rochester Institute of Technology, the original collection of 2,300 volumes was assembled by New York City businessman Melbert B. Cary, Jr. during the 1920s and 1930s. Cary was director of the Continental Type Founders Association (a type-importing agency), a former president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), and proprietor of the private Press of the Woolly Whale. His professional and personal interests in printing led him to collect printer's manuals and type specimens, as well as great books on the printer's art. In 1969 his collection, together with funds to support its use and growth, was presented to RIT.  Today the library houses some 40,000 volumes and a growing number of manuscript and correspondence collections. While its original strengths continue to be an important focus, other aspects of graphic arts history have also been developed. For example, the Cary is committed to building comprehensive primary and secondary resources on the development of the alphabet and writing systems, early book formats and manuscripts, calligraphy, the development of typefaces and their manufacturing technologies, the history and practice of papermaking, typography and book design, printing and illustration processes, bookbinding, posters, and artists’ books. Though many of the volumes in the library are rare, the Cary has maintained, from the beginning, a policy of liberal access for students , especially those enrolled in the RIT’s College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, and interested literary tourists. The Cary Collection also manages some 36 Graphic Design archives documenting the work of important 20th-century Modernist graphic designers, and has been aggressively acquiring examples of avant-garde book typography. This great library is a must visit destination for all those who love books and the processes involved in making them.

Last summer I met with Stan Bevington in Toronto to talk about the history of the Coach House Press and some of the more collectible books that it has published over the years. In this, Part ll of our conversation, we discuss, among many other things, the influence of the Stinehour Press; the adoption, adaptation, and in some cases invention of new printing; photographic and computer technologies, and the book designs of Glenn Goluska and Gordon Robertson.

It didn't win any prizes; no awards; didn't make many, if any, long or short lists; but David Gilmour's The Perfect Order of Things is a great novel. The best I read last year. In fact, I think it's one of the best Canadian novels ever written. Deceptively easy to read, the book's 300-odd pages are not only crowded with elegantly crafted sentences, they collectively capture and convey levels of insight and depths of experience one typically finds only in great Russian novels. Perfect Order leaves you invigorated; filled with admiration for the life fully lived. It makes you want to get out there and show the world who's boss. David Gilmour was in Ottawa recently to attend the Ottawa International Writers Festival.

From March 23 to April 30, 2006 the Canadian Centre for Architecture hosted an exhibition entitled 125 Kilos of Books. I took in the show and interviewed Serge Belet, Head of Exhibitions at the CCA, about it. From the notes:  "Celebrating the designation of Montreal as UNESCO World Book Capital City for 2005-2006, the exhibition presents a selection of printed architectural works dating from the 15th century to the present from the CCA’s collection in order to provoke thought about what seems, at first sight, the most banal fact of any book: its size. A book’s dimensions are only partly determined by the technology of its production or the physical comfort of its readers. Size is routinely used by authors and their publishers to indicate value, to justify price, and to control how and by whom their work is read – whether casually or ceremonially, individually or in groups, by the rich few or the many poor... Architecture in print has a long tradition of the big book. As in other disciplines such as human anatomy, this tradition developed because scale added clarity to the illustrations in a treatise, and kept better faith with the original drawings... By contrast, the builder’s manual is traditionally small enough to fit the literal and metaphorical pocket of its intended audience...  The books presented in the exhibition encompass an impressive range of scale and size, from the smallest, A brief discourse concerning the three chief principles of magnificent building: solidity, convenience, and ornament by Sir Balthazar Gerbier D’ouvilly (London, 1662), measuring 14.2 cm x 9.5 cm x 0.8 cm, to Sulpiz Boissere’s Histoire et description de la cathdrale de Cologne (Stuttgart, 1823), a hefty tome more than a metre in height and weighing 21 kilos! All works have been selected from the CCA collection, which comprises nearly 200,000 volumes, by the exhibition’s curator Gerald Beasley, Director of the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, and until 2004, Associate Chief Curator and Head Librarian at the CCA. 

I met with Phil Hall, whose latest collection of poems, Killdeer, has just won the Canadian Governor General's Literary Award for English Poetry. It's a sensitive, engaging, revealing work that incorporates narrative essay, life philosophy and literary criticism into its stanzas. In sharp contrast to  the arrogant, impenetrable and solipsistic, Hall's poetry is humbly presented, accessible, beautiful, pastoral, reflective and at times profound. Listen here as we talk about brown speckled eggs and fiddle tunes, imbalance and literary prize juries, lying, distraction, pain, what's important, plus theatre and spectacle,  truth and doubt.

Joseph Malaby Dent (30 August 1849 – 9 May 1926) was the British book publisher who gave the world the Everyman's Library series. After a short, unsuccessful career as an apprentice printer he took up bookbinding, and shortly thereafter founded J. M. Dent and Company, in 1888, publishing the works of Lamb, Goldsmith, Austen, Chaucer, and Tennyson among others. Printed in short runs on handmade paper, these books enjoyed some success, but it wasn't until the Temple Shakespeare series, launched in 1894, that Dent hit the big time. Ten years later he began planning what became known as the Everyman's Library, a canon of one thousand classics, attractively, but practically, produced pocket-sized books sold for a shilling each. To meet demand, Dent built the Temple Press.  Publication of the series began in 1906; 152 titles were issued in the first year. They were hugely popular. 'Small, lame, tight-fisted, and apt to weep under pressure,'  Dent's ungovernable passion was, says critic Hugh Kenner,  for bringing books to the people. He remembered when he'd longed to buy books he couldn't afford. Yes, you could make the world better. He even thought cheap books might prevent wars." I met with renowned book historian Professor Johathan Rose to discuss J.M.Dent, and to find out why the Everyman's Library series was so successful.

Glenn Gould was a world renowned classical pianist and an 'eccentric genius'— a 'solitary, headstrong, hypochondriac virtuoso.'  Abandoning stage performances in 1964, he concentrated instead on mastering recordings, radio, television, and print. His sudden death at age fifty stunned the world, but his music and legacy continues. Philosopher/critic Mark Kingwell sees Gould as a philosopher of music whose contradictory, mischievous, and deliberately provocative ideas ruled his life. Instead of a single narrative in his Extraordinary Canadians biography of Gould, Kingwell adopts a 'kaleidoscopic' approach.  It took Gould twenty-one "takes" to record the opening aria in the famed 1955 Goldberg Variations, Kingwell does the same with Gould's life. Each take offers a slightly different, sensitive interpretation of this complex man, each plays with the notes, harmonies and dissonances that characterized his time on earth. I met with Kingwell to talk about Gould, chutney, the problem of the biographical line, perfectionism, architectural beauty, tempo, pregnancy, absence becoming presence, recording and communications technology, and wonder. 

Douglas Gibson was, for more than 40 years, a noted Canadian editor and publisher whose skills both as writer and salesman put him at the pinnacle of his profession. Douglas Gibson Books, the first editorial imprint of its kind in Canada, has over the years  published much of the best writing that has ever come out of this country. Stories About Storytellers is Gibson's memoir. In a series of short profiles, he tells us tales about some of the authors he has worked with during an illustrious career.  He himself is an impressive story teller. The book takes us on a coast to coast tour, through the lives and writings of, among others, Jack Hodgins, Harold Horwood, Alice Munro, James Houston, Mavis Gallant, Alistair McLeod, Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney. Gibson's journey through Canadian political and publishing history,   eloquently documents the story of Canada. We met in Ottawa. Please listen as we talk, among other things, about his careers and roles as editor and publisher, about the best Canadian fiction, luck and a system that encourages Canadian writing, Olympic gold, the difficulty of literary prizes, subjective judgement, and the most important paragraph in Canadian writing. 

Lester "Mike" Pearson was an extraordinary politician. He was also an extraordinary athlete, diplomat, leader, teacher, writer and student. And yet, despite all of this, and, the fact that during his lifetime he was the world's best known Canadian, many are today unaware of the important role he played in creating modern Canada with its enviable social programs and economic safeguards. Andrew Cohen's biography of Pearson, part of Penguin's Extraordinary Canadians series, sets out to rectify this as it explores the various, successful lives this man led, and the contributions he made both to the building of Canada and world peace. 

A complicated, fascinating, largely unknown man who did a great deal for American literary publishing, Mitchell Kennerley was born in 1878 in Burslem, England. He arrived in the United States in 1896 to help set up publisher John Lane's U.S. offices. After an unhappy parting, Kennerley set off to publish various small literary magazines, and in 1906 launched his own imprint under which he published literary criticism, modern drama, fiction, and poetry, including Modern Love, first book off the press. He produced elegant books in small print runs and launched the careers of many important young authors of poetry particularly. American Bookman said  that his imprint was "in itself guarantee of a book's worth.” Christopher Morley called Kennerley “unquestionably the first Modern publisher in this country.” Kennerley's publishing career wound down during the First World War, and he subsequently took over operation of the Anderson Galleries where he orchestrated some of the 20th century's most amazing rare book auctions. The Huntington and Folger Libraries were largely built on these sales. He opened the Lexington Avenue Book Shop in 1940 and operated it until his suicide in 1950. Women, an inability to focus, a failure to pay his bills and desire for a lifestyle beyond his means, have all be pointed to as explanation for his sad ending. I met with Dan Boice, author of the 1996 bibliography of the Kennerley imprint, in Iowa to talk about Kennerley and the books he produced.