Safely in Tennessee. The internship starts tomorrow and I’m taking it easy until then. This holiday season has been a whirlwind of the fantastic and the terrible and I am hanging fiercely onto my health….

In the meantime, I started a little book while staying in Greensboro called IS, IS. It is constructed of map pages taken from the welcome center at the Virginia / North Carolina border, vellum and pine needles. Every cover features a different Polaroid photograph. The text is entirely hand lettered. I will only make as many copies as I receive orders for from between now and February 5th. Each copy includes a found lucky penny, so shipping time will depend on how quickly I am able to find lucky pennies.

$7 + $3 domestic shipping
Click below or Pay Pal $10 to rabbitlight at gmail dot com

Your order is deeply appreciated.

I have been doing a lot of writing this past month rather than reading anything about typography, or any actual printing. It’s going well, as well as it can for the winter time. I’ve been meeting a bit with Ed Skoog, who is a writer in residence at the Hugo House here in Seattle. Our meetings have been very encouraging and productive and I’m thankful for the time he’s put into helping me revise older stories.

It’s been difficult to update this journal because there’s nothing to report when I’m intensely writing. I just hole up in my basement apartment and get a little weird and beg my sister to buy me pizza when I’m out of food stamps. I’m working hard on a novella that’s excruciatingly difficult to write (though I should quit saying that, the more I say it’s difficult the more difficult I make it!) and a project that I don’t even want to mention for fear of spoiling but I will say that I’m VERY excited about it.

Printing has not been as prolific as I would have liked this year. Far from it. It’s been difficult to find a studio here in Seattle. Printing more and printing better are serious New Year’s resolutions and this Hatch internship is a good way to start things off. I don’t own a computer so I hope I’m clever enough to find a library or something to access the Internet with while in Tennessee and update this journal while I’m there.

I am not dragging any of my books or prints with me for my month and a half of vagabondage. A route that includes California, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and probably Georgia in six weeks demands light luggage. So if you’ve been wanting to buy anything from the site NOW is the time. I won’t be able to mail any orders placed after December 12th until early February!

I have a story in the new issue of Blackbird. It’s a fantastic issue all around and I’m excited to be a part of it. You should read the whole damn thing.

Paris was exhausting in its beauty. It took all of last week to settle my sleep back into a regular schedule. But here I am again, well rested, tragically unemployed and consequently with plenty of time on my hands to give a proper update.

While in Paris I intended to visit the Imprimerie Nationale and the Bibliothèque Forney. I couldn’t determine from the Internet whether or not the Impremerie was still in operation, or if it had perhaps been privatized and no longer open to the public. So I decided to forgo that trip, though in retrospect I wish I had at least ventured over that way.

The Bibliothèque Forney, however, was open. The institution houses the type drawings and library of the now defunct Deberny & Peignot foundry. A bit of background from The Elements of Typographic Style:

Joseph Gaspard Gillé the elder, one of Fournier’s apprentices, opened his own foundry in Paris in 1748[...] In 1827 the novelist Honoré de Balzac acquired the foundry as part of his intended writing, printing and publishing empire. The scheme failed at once, but the foundry was rescued by its manager and bought by Alexandre de Berny.

Gustave Peignot entered separately into the typefounding business in 1865. His own foundry entered its first creative phase under his son and grandson Georges and Charles Peignot, who issued historical revivals of the work of Jean Jannon and created a series of types based on the letterings of the eighteeth-century engraver Nicolas Cochin.

The De Berny & Peignot foundries merged in 1923. Under the guidance of Charles Peignot, the enlarged firm issued new designs by Adolphe Cassandre, Adrian Frutiger and others. When D&P ceased production in 1975, the type drawings and company library went to the Bibliothèque Forney, Paris, and most of the typographic material - including a set of original Baskerville matrices - to the Haas (now Fruttiger) Foundry, Münchenstein. Baskerville’s punches, also formerly help by D&P, are now at the University Library Cambridge.

The staff was extraordinarily helpful with my requests and gracious toward my non existent French (a special thanks here is due to Typfoundry for keeping an archive of important typographic resources. That entry insured that my spelling of all the important names was correct, which is absolutely essential when you have to communicate though written slips of paper! Do check out the journal, it is a fascinating delight.). While I was examining some specimens, one of the librarians who had been helping me excitedly rushed into the reading room and told me that a member of the Peignot family was at the library to deposit some additional documents for the collection and wanted to know if I should like to meet him. I of course said yes. This man turned out to be Monsieur Jean-Luc Froissart, grandson to Georges Peignot and nephew to Charles Peignot, an absolutely charming gentleman and fantastic story teller.

Monsieur Froissart sat with me for over an hour and regaled me with stories and gossip about the family, giving a delightfully human sheen to the material in front of me. He scowled when he spoke of the grandmother who had insisted on the foundry only designing inline type (an edict which did not prevail), beamed when talking about Georges Peignot, and sighed at his personal perceived incompetence of Charles. Monsieur Froissart had written a book about his family and a copy was in the library. We looked at the plates together. My favorite was a photograph of Charles, boldly bare chested and in sharp profile, taken by Man Ray. “Naked,” the librarian chuckled.

The serendipity was incredible and perhaps the crowning element of my trip. I had to sign many documents stating that I would not publicize any photographs I took of the collection, so I can’t share any of my beautiful pictures. However, Monsieur Froissart is not part of the collection, and so I leave you with this portrait.

Monsieur Jean-Luc Froissart

Well speak of the Devil! I’ve been accepted to Hatch Show Print’s winter internship program. I’ll be in Nashville for the month of January, working in the shop. Thrilled!

I am headed to Paris today, loosely in conjunction with Human Parts of Me Want to Eat the Flowers off of Trees being a part of the Colette show. This journal will be on holiday until I return on November 2nd.

Lastly, Jessica Hallock sweetly interviewed me about Human Parts of Me. Transcript below.

Jessica Hallock: Meat comes up frequently in Human Parts of Me…. What significance does the eating or handling of meat have for you, & also what significance the fine line between living vessel & lifeless carcass?

Jessalyn Wakefield: I grew up eating wild game. My family, at times, also raised and slaughtered our own animals. We lived out in the middle of nowhere, the dogs were always bringing home dead and rotting things. So carcasses were fairly omnipresent in my childhood. Even so, there was always reverence and fascination with a slaughter, or with my father bringing home something from hunting, or even the dogs dragging half rotted deer down the road that just never left me and hasn’t left me to this day. The significance is, I suppose, in the fascination and reverence that I experience at the sight of something dead. I cannot wrap my mind around lifelessness. And that by eating meat you take another body and make it part of your own. That eating meat, muscle tissue, specifically feeds your own muscles. That’s an incredibly powerful act to me. Flesh of my flesh.

That fine line between living vessel and lifeless carcass exists for me as Mystery.

JH: Early in the dialogue between the Angel & the Woman in The Waters of Jordan there are motions of voicelessness, of an inability to give voice - characters cutting off, falling silent, long spaces between phrases - that seem remniscient of Beckett, whereas in the stories this voicelessness is expressed more in obscenities, a failure to attend to dialogue, discontinuity in speech, etc. - do you feel this disconnect, or gap, between the voiced & the intended in your own life?

JW: It’s less voiced and the intended, that is, the internal and the external, and more about the internal voice and the internal comprehension of that voice. I feel a constant inability for my self to communicate with its Self. I experience a huge disconnect in understanding what I am thinking and feeling and experiencing, being able to name what is going on internally. I often have inappropriate emotional reactions to situations, or don’t understand why I have the reactions that I do, or don’t know what I am feeling or thinking about a situation at all. My interaction with the external is fairly naive and surface most of the time.

JH: Are the nausea & disgust (or self-loathing) encountered in your stories emblematic of a response to the absurdity of existence, or more a result of a distance from that existence? Or something else entirely?

JW: I think the disgust and the nausea go back to the previous question, having to do with the frustration and perplexity I experience at the closed off nature of my internal life. Experiencing strong reactions and being unable to deal with them because I cannot name them, experiencing a void when I know I should be experiencing a reaction. Etc. It all builds into a sickness, you know?

JH: What is the significance of the animals in the scene?

JW: Need. Submission and humiliation because of need.

Last night I was talking to Rich and he said “That was a nice post you made about Hatch, but I don’t know what you mean, fifteenth century French Renaissance types. Gutenberg didn’t build his press until 1439.”

And I was like “Whatever Rich, I know what I’m talking about, let me pull out A Short History of the Printed Word and prove you wrong.”

And he said “No! No! I don’t want to go there with you!”

Which was just as well, because by that point I had already flipped through the book I realized that the type I was talking about was from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and most of it falls in the Baroque period.

Rich, you are a sharp young man.

I don’t even remember how I first heard about Hatch Show Print. Hatch is such a significant part of American letterpress that it kind of seeps into your consciousness via osmosis if you hang around a studio long enough. As I use letterpress primarily for book making, Hatch is a vibrant reminder of the possibilities of color and space and graphics. And as I am magnetically drawn to French Renaissance typography and fonts, I tend to become mired in a heavy golden dream of the 15th century, to which Hatch also serves as an inspiring wake up call, boldly announcing the goddamn modern *A*M*E*R*I*C*A*N*E*S*S* of printing in these United States.

An exhibit of Hatch Show Print posters just opened here in Seattle at the Experience Music Project - Science Fiction Museum Hall of Fame and I am THRILLED (both to see the exhibit and to actually go inside the EMP - SFM, the name of which always makes me ask Seriously what does that mean???). It’s long running, till July, so you have some time to make a West Coast pilgrimage if you need to. Or if you’re local, you have time to go twice. Or three times. Or four.

(PS Dear Bauhaus, please do not ever, ever, ever again play the instrumental version of the soundtrack to CATS that’s playing right now. Please.)

The small shopkeeper, for instance, is still with us, and though the time has almost come wherein he will have no apparent place, nevertheless his survival is permanent; for nothing can stop small boys from selling one another marbles, and it is that personal dealing which is the root of all trading.

-An Essay on Typography, Eric Gill

There are, then, two world & these twain can never be one flesh. They are not complementary to one another; they are, in the liveliest sense of the words, mortal enemies. On the one hand is the world of mechanised industry claiming to be able to give happiness to men and all the delights of human life- provided we are content to have them in our spare time and do not demand such things in the work by which we earn our livings; a world regulated by the factory whistle and the mechanical time-keeper; a world wherein no man makes the whole of anything, wherein the product is standardised and the man simply a tool, a tooth on a wheel. On the other is the languishing by indestructible world of the small shopkeeper, the small workshop, the studio and the consulting room- a world in which the notion of spare time hardly exists, for the thing is hardly known and very little desired; a world wherein the work is the life & love accompanies it.

-Ibid.

I picked up a copy of An Essay on Typography while at The Strand this summer. I got perhaps a third of the way through it and then misplaced it during the move. Over the past few days of unpacking it surfaced again and I have been alternating it with Sanctuary on my bus ride.

Of Eric Gill’s most well known fonts, Gill Sans is not a font I’ve ever been particularly fond of (a personal prejudiced against san serifs, though I’ve been trying to come around and appreciate them) and I haven’t spent enough time with Perpetua to have an opinion. An Essay on Typography is set in Joanna, a font I had never encountered before. I’ve become quite enamored with Joanna and with her companion italic especially. Gill chose to set the text ragged right rather than justified as a protest against ‘the tyrannical insistence upon equal lengths of lines.’ Not to be colloquial, but the ragged right setting has kind of blown my mind.  As a final endearing typographic touch, he uses the pilcrow to mark his paragraphs rather than line breaks or indentation (and he includes a liberal sprinkling of ampersands).

Gill is continually brilliant and amusing throughout the book, if meandering. It’s less An Essay on Typography and more An Essay on Whatever Eric Gill Should Like to Talk About, and Mostly He Should Like to Talk About Typography. I don’t mind one bit. It’s interesting reading whatever way you cut it. Throughout the book there persists a theme of “two worlds,” that of mechanized industry and that of the humanist craft. Gill’s treatment of this subject sings to me. I’ve marked the pages up with dark underlining and exclamatory stamps of “YES!” Reading this book has, surprisingly, given me a grounded hope in the persistence of the humanness of our existence.

Additionally, I had no idea that Eric Gill had such a dark personal life, but every time I’ve mentioned that I’m reading the book, someone will say something like “Eric Gill! He was a nudist!” or “Eric Gill! He molested his children!” or “Eric Gill! He fucked his dog!” There’s apparently a biography by Fiona MacCarthy that rakes up all his dirt that I’d dearly love to read. Who knew typography could be so perverse?

Human Parts of Me Want to Eat the Flowers off of Trees will be for sale at Colette in Paris in conjunction with the Off Off Bowery exhibit, which opens today and runs until November 1st.

Howard Junker, editor of ZYZZYVA, generously agreed to a brief interview about his letterpress history. 

Jessalyn Wakefield : Describe your experience with letterpress printing and hand composition of type. 

Howard Junker : I think I had a beginner’s printing press when I was about eight. The type was rubber. It took forever to make a word, so I didn’t get very far.

When I was ten, my Cub Scout den visited the NY Journal-American. We saw typesetting by Linotype and were given a few sample letters.

When I was 19, my family moved a half block from the Morgan Library so I began to look at illuminated manuscripts and the great printed texts in that collection.

Jump to 1981, when Ben Sonnenberg started a literary magazine called Grand Street, ostensibly to dissipate his inheritance-he was ashamed of the way his father made his fortune (public relations). Ben had it hand set. It was very beautiful and because he paid writers well and had good taste, it was a pleasure to read.

When I started ZYZZYVA in 1985, the first president of the board was a book collector and for the first couple years he did little profiles of fine printers: Harold Berliner, Robin Heyeck, Ward Ritchie, and Leigh McLellan. Tim Appelo wrote about the Sea Pen Press. Steve Corey, curator of special collections at the at USF, profiled Poltroon Press and Wesley B. Tanner. Eloise Klein Healy wrote on Susan King. Peter Koch wrote about himself.

The Bay Area has always been rich in letterpress, and I’ve visited the presses of Jack Stauffacher et al. And stop by the SF Center for the Book whenever I have a chance.

JW : Did you have an instructor or mentor who guided your typographic education?

HJ : I learned a lot from Sandy Kirschenbaum who was publishing FINE PRINT in town. And from Andrew Hoyem, who, when I had just started ZYZZYVA, had begun raising the bar for letterpress with the $1,000 edition of Moby-Dick.

JW : Do you feel that your experiences with older methods of printing have impacted the way ZYZZYVA is approached (or has been approached in the past), as compared with younger literary magazines? 

HJ : Sure. I care about the texture of type. I have it in mind as an ideal.

I love the way letterpress bites into the page. I wish our offset words didn’t sit on the surface as they do.

I love the way letterpress books are usually so lavishly empty, with such care taken in every dimension of the layout.

I try, rather clumsily, to be inspired by them.

I instructed our original designer, Tom Ingalls, to give us a classic look: no postmodern pull quotes, no text submerged in color, no huge illustrations illustrating nothing.

Generous margins. Footers. A customized Bembo. Bios as a postscript at the end of each text, not segregated in the back of the book as Contributors’ Notes. Lots of ads (all in the front of the book, right after the table of contents), as many as we can sell-and the last page devoted to a list of our advertisers: “ZYZZYVA is backed by:”

At first, we used just a few pages of art, originally in b&w (so the loss in translation to our b&w page would be minimized). The art is not illustration, but has been gathered from galleries, mostly, independently and stands on its own. (Of course, when a story describes a horse and we have an image of a horse….)

Now we have at least one page of art before and after every text. This has become a litmag standard. We include 20 or so artists per issue, about a third of whom do not have gallery representation.

JW : How was the first issue of ZYZZYVA printed in 1985? How is it printed today?

HJ : Unfortunately, we’ve always been offset. But in the early days we did a few letterpress blow-ins by Eric Johnson, Susan King, Gerald Lange & Robin Price, and Emily McVarish.