Nothing like the right kind of friends and beautiful surroundings to foster creativity.

Book Artist Claire Van Vliet‘s cat….and their view:

Poet Galway Kinnell‘s dog…

and their surroundings

Nighhawk

Which one do you like the best? (I’m kind of partial to d)

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d):

Claire Van Vliet is the owner of the Janus Press founded in 1955 located, since 1966, in Newark, Vermont. Janus Press has to date produced approximately 100 publications — books, pamphlets, and broadsides- , many of them designed, illustrated, type-set, printed (sometimes on paper made by the artist), and bound by Van Vliet herself  in a well-equipped studio, printshop, bindery of her own design.

Born in Ottawa, Canada, she has lived in the United States since 1947. After graduating with an MFA degree from Claremont Graduate School (1954), Van Vliet traveled in Europe, apprenticing herself for a time as a hand typesetter. During these travels she taught herself etching while working as a craft instructor at the United States European Headquarters in Germany.  For the remainder of the ’50s and early 1960s she taught printmaking, typography and drawing at the Philadelphia Museum School (now The University of the Arts) and worked as a type compositor for John Anderson, first at The Lanston Monotype Company in Philadelphia, and then at his own Pickering Press in New Jersey. In 1965 to ’66 she was hired by the Art Department of the University of Wisconsin, Madison as a Visiting Lecturer in Printmaking.

Primarily a publisher of first edition poetry (including the work of Seamus Heaney), Van Vliet pioneered the use of colored paper pulps for book illustration, and more recently has developed a variety of distinctive non-adhesive book structures. Museums that collect Van Vliet’s  work include The National Gallery in Washington, DC; the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institute. In addition to her many honors, in 1993 the University of the Arts in Philadelphia named Van Vliet an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts. We met in her studio recently to talk about artist books and a long, outstanding career. Please listen here:

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Incoming search terms:

• Claire Van Vliet

Jack McClelland’s ‘coat of many colours.’

About an hour ago the McMaster University Library launched a new website called " Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing"(hpcanpub.mcmaster.ca/). The library is home to the papers of well-known publishers such as McClelland & Stewart, Macmillan Canada, Clarke Irwin, Copp Clark, and Key Porter Books, plus lesser known educational, avant-guard, and fine press publishers, including Garamond Press, Weed/Flower Press, the Book Society of Canada and Locks’ Press.

Publishers’ archives contain valuable primary research materials such as editorial files, exchanges with authors, catalogues, correspondence among publishers and with government agencies, manuscripts, production cards, marketing and publicity plans for books, inventory books, financial ledgers of many kinds, salemen’s record books, designs, mock-ups of books, illustrations, copyright registrations, readers’ reports, contracts, reviews of books, royalty reports, and photographs. These documents contain the stories of people in publishing, authorship, design, and marketing.

The website operates in partnership with the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at University of Toronto (archives of Coach House Press, Barbarian Press, and Richard Outram of the Gauntlet Press) and Queen’s University Archives (home of the archives of the legendary editor Lorne Pierce).

Featuring digital images, sound, and video the site contains 90 case studies written by scholars from across Canada. Studies have been written on Farley Mowat, Pierre Berton, L.M. Montgomery, Alice Munro, and Al Purdy, among many others. The ‘hardscrabble’ business of Canadian publishing is discussed in relation to fiction, poetry, children’s literature, academic publications, and the periodical press, from the 1800s to the present day.

Looking forward to rummaging around the site…especially interested in getting info on scarcity and the size of various print runs…

And what is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered.
      - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The summer’s flow’r is to the summer sweet,
  Though to itself it only live and die’
    But if that flow’r with base infection meet,
      The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
        For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
          Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
      - William Shakespeare, Sonnet XCIV

To win the secret of a weed’s plain heart.
      - James Russell Lowell, Sonnet XXV

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the headbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O Let them be left, wildness and wet:
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
-  Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889, Inversnaid

Incoming search terms:

• The secret of weeds
• what is weeds used for in poems

In addition to the thrill

of meeting old book loving friends, jawing with bookselling legends

and looking at some spectacular

volumes: these observations from last weekend’s Ottawa Antiquarian Bookfair:

Unlike gas stations, where all typically snap into sync the moment one bumps or lowers prices, at bookfairs you can often find the same book selling at one table for as little as one tenth of what it’s going for at another. For example a friend picked up a 2nd impression Seven Pillars of Wisdom for $35. Three stalls down a 6th impression equivalent was selling for $350. That’s why it pays to get a good look at every booth before putting money on the table.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s fourth novel The Unconsoled has received considerable approbation from the learned class…and the rest of us…it’s universally acclaimed as a great novel. It came in tied for third in The Observer’s best novel of the past 25 years poll. Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club has also been acclaimed, and made into a movie staring Brad Pitt. The two sat close to eachother on the vendor’s table. Both signed. One had $50 on it. The other $975.

The law [1981 Loi Lang] stipulates that the publisher has to print the price of the book on the back cover, and retailers are not allowed to offer more than a 5% discount on that price. It is the reason behind the quality of books published and the abundance of independent bookstores in France; it prevents large retailers like the Fnac or Amazon from putting small bookstores out of business; in theory it is also meant to prevent consumers from going to small bookstores to check out a book and then buying it in discount stores or, now, online.

The editor Sabine Wespieser, who owns her own publishing company, says that in the US, houses of her size can only function with the support of non-profit foundations, whereas in France, her books can compete on the market alongside the big publishers."

Another collecting idea: books that have the same design on both their boards and dust jackets. These slay me:

Hamish Hamilton’s The Novel Library  series

King Penguins

Collins’ Britain in Pictures series.

This from the Collegiate Book Collecting Championship: