Book Design

I should be finishing up my first dissertation but I keep reading and this continually opens up new angles. Over the past few days I have been following up a few ideas about the significance of fully-integrated book design in Jones' poem The Anathemata. Part of my argument is that the physical book of The Anathemata becomes a sign in itself, an object which the reader uses to perform an 'anamnesis' , like the transubstantiation of the Eucharist. It suddenly occurred to me that treating the book as a utile sign in itself has its roots in a far deeper history. Gill and Jones were involved with the private printing presses of Hilary Pepler and Robert Gibbings; The St. Dominic's press at Ditchling and The Golden Cockerel Press. Anyway this has led me down the criss-crossing history paths of further research. This further 'research' mostly involves requesting the most beautiful books from the stacks and absorbing every minute detail of its design. I have been reading about the history of these two presses, feeling the quality of its paper choices beneath my fingertips, seeing carefully selected typefaces which have been handset, and perhaps best of all admiring the specially commissioned wood cuts and engravings which revived a dying art.

Eric Gill, Four Gospels

There are two masterworks I have been studying. The first is Eric Gill's Four Gospels for the Golden Cockerel Press. Gibbings gave Gill the typeface as a framework and the engravings grew from this. As I looked through the pages I could sense the perfected unity which this process of working had produced. The letters are interwoven with the designs, so that story and illustration are an integrated and fluent whole.

I am very tempted to take this page and head my dissertation with it, at the moment I have a simple quotation 'In the beginning was the Word [...] The Word made flesh.' but perhaps this invokes so much more?

It is clear from these pages and excerpts the extent to which Gill was experimenting with typography, layout and the relationship between visual and linguistic arrangements of meaning. This is one of the side effects of my dissertation, that suddenly I have this overwhelming appreciation for typography. Typography which once seemed the most incidental of things has become this vessel of resonant meaning.

I read somewhere that copies of Gill's The Four Gospels now sell for around £5000. This moment in the University Library, touching vellum and hand-pressed paper, is the closest I will ever get to such essential perfection!

For David Jones' masterwork of Book Design I looked to the Chester Play of the Deluge which he produced woodcuts for in 1927 for the Golden Cockerel Press. The collaboration with Robert Gibbings on this project enabled him to take more of an interest in layout and to produce woodblocks of an even greater complexity. The engravings are dark, compact knots of energy. They capture the chaos and power of the biblical story of Noah. My attention was directed towards The Deluge mostly because of a scholar called Thomas Dilworth who writes that Jones's Anathemata takes its spatial structure from an artistic development that Jones made in these same woodcuts.

The Deluge, David Jones

Building the Ark, Jones

After the Deluge, Jones

While I agree with Dilworth's description of the spatial structuring in these woodcuts, the point I want to make about David Jones' and his involvement with book design is something very different. But I'm not going to give anything away in that regard...

This remains as a glimpse in to my afternoon of discovery, I hope you have a feel for something significant and exciting in this.

Deanne Cheuk

I know that I am getting older because this strange dizzying thing keeps happening to me whereby old, forgotten, buried memories assault me unexpectedly. Last week I was taking a long walk home down the Madingley Road when a cloud of crows danced across the sky and all of a sudden I remembered this image. There was a pink sky, the dark silhouette of trees, crows flying by and a woman kissing a man. It was an image I had used in my school art project, I had painted water colour studies of it, I loved it so much I used it to head a short story I wrote as well. I couldn't remember the name of the artist, but some vague details about mushrooms and books and google searches allowed me to find her; Deanne Cheuk.

I have used images in this post which I remember. These graphic starry pseudo-water colours are all from her Mushroom Girls Virus Book 'A guide to the identification and study of our commoner fungi with special emphasis on the edible varieties'. With an embroidered cover and the notice that the book instantly sold out on the website, I coveted it for a long time. Cheuk is an art director, illustrator and artist living in New York. She publishes her own Zine 'Neomu' and has graphically illustrated a number of advertising campaign.

Her website organised by 'print', 'pattern', 'type', 'illustration', 'collage', and 'art' testifies to her skill and diversity as a graphic artist. I can only suggest that you take a virtual tour of Cheuk's body of work, because it all speaks of her far better than I can. For a long time I dreamt of being an illustrator and looking back at Cheuk I suspect she may have been at the root of my desire.

I look at these images and I can smell my sketchbook and the materials in the art room at school. I can remember the dreaming feeling of drawing my own goddesses in ink and painting astrological backgrounds for them. Anyway, it is nice to have recovered memories and interests.

Virago Green Spines

The Cambridge University Library are offering a £500 prize for a collection of books put together by a student. With £500 as temptation and motivation I thought I might have a try. As the collection will not be judged on size or monetary value perhaps I have a fair chance. Many years ago I joined a website called ReaditSwapit, and one of the books which came rushing through my letterbox on a whim was Elizabeth Taylor's Angel. The book fascinated me; the feel of its binding in my hand, it's green spine, the silhouette of an apple at its top and then the Portrait of Madame Lacroix by Giovanni Boldini which acted as its cover illustration. A little research only increased my fascination. What I had stumbled upon was a feminist printing press established in 1973 by Carmen Callil to publish the work of forgotten or overlooked women writers from the literary canon and to promote the writings of new and emerging women. Virago has been an obsession ever since.

Part of my fairly modest collection.

I felt sure I was the first to have made this discovery and began a treasure hunt in local charity shops, second hand bookshops in Cornwall and London and internet swapping communities. I was under the impression that they were difficult to find (they were in Harlow!) and that I must be the only woman on earth who actually wanted them. Since moving to Cambridge I have found that I can no longer buy eeach one that I find as the Virago press was genuinely prolific, (Heffers even reprints the originals to add to its stock). I have to be a little more selective in my search now that I am a student.

A picture of a larger and more impressive collection, stolen from Fleur Fisher

For the University Library prize my collection requires a coherence and an intellectual strain of thought to support it. My collection is of the early originals, published in the 80's with portraits of women for their covers. My interest is both literary and artistic; the cover paints a portrait of the central character just as the books themselves are studies of the female voice which leads them, these novels are word- portraits.

Cover: 'The Bather' Kees van Dongen

'I wanted to live at the centre of a focus of pleasantness, and harmony, and things coming right. And instead I was tossing about in a whirlpool of useless passion and frenzy.' The Thinking Reed

Cover: 'Portrait of Ira P' Tamara de Lempicka

' "Hardly anyone is dancing," said Charlotte to the unknown man beside her, "yet whenever I put out my hand, I touch someone," But the stranger seemed not to have heard her.' Strangers

Tamara de Lempicka was an amazing painter during the 20's and 30's who had her own distinctive and feminine approach to Cubism. Working in Paris she was associated with Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Andre Gide. The portrait used for the cover of Strangers is a powerful portrait in red and white, between innocence and passion.

Cover: 'Catherine Carrington' Carrington

'I am forward-looking girl and don't stay where I am, "Left right, Be bright," as I said in my poem. That's on days when I am one big bounce, and have to go careful then not to be a nuisance. But later I get back to my own philosophical outlook that keeps us all kissable.' Novel on Yellow Paper

I just finished reading Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper for my London dissertation and I love her loose writing style. It is like a 'stream of consciousness' but with an innocence and enthusiasm to it that is completely independent of the fluidity of writers such as Virginia Woolf.

I won't pin all my hopes on that book collecting prize, but I think I have a story and a chance, so wish me luck.

Jean Rhys at her melancholy best

I might suggest that these beautiful covers may lure you in to a false sense of literary security, but if you fail to miss the dark heavy eyes of these cover women then you are naive enough that no luring is needed. The beginning of reading for my second dissertation has been a melancholy, if beautiful, affair. These women face us alone on these covers, but not because they are independent. But because men have destroyed them and the only consolation left is solitude.

After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is introduced by an illustration by Faith Jaques, who was most famously an illustrator of picture books. Here her pen and ink portrait captures Julia's abject nature, her sense of shame and despair as life has beaten her down. Quartet is presented by a photograph by Sue Wilks. Marya stares at us coldly from the bleak desolation of the French sea. She asks us how things have ended this way? But she is completely distanced from us, beyond our care or hope. If I had judged the books by their covers I would have been unsurprised by the torpid misery of the narratives of these women. Unfortunately the excitement of finding Jean Rhys in the Amnesty bookshop made me careless and uncritical.