Mark Strand writes in his introductory essay ‘On becoming a Poet’ in The Making of a Poem:

In short, it seems to me, a need to grasp, capture, prove, commemorate and convey something of the strange fact that once we didn’t exist, now we exist, and in future, we will not exist.

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Locks’ Press, according to the  Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild’s Ottawa Chapter website, "was founded in 1979. Since then it has printed eleven books, fifteen pamphlets, and twenty-four broadsides. The editions are small, 30 to 80 copies. The press prints mainly illustrated editions of unusual but enduring texts, ranging from classical Greece to the early twentieth century.

Fred is the editor and has provided translations for about a third of the titles (from Greek, Latin, Middle English, Provençal, and German). Margaret does the woodcut illustrations, design, typesetting, printing and binding.

The character of the press is conservative and scholarly. Most texts are presented in their original spelling and punctuation. Many of the texts have an underlying serious moral. The presentation is enlivened by the illustrations.

Simple, strong, sometimes slightly comic, the woodcuts encourage the reader to reconsider the text, and remember its message."

I spoke recently with Margaret about her press, its history, her approach to illustration, her work philosophy, and what she looks for in fine press books. Please listen to our conversation here:

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It was

doors knobs

in Le Mans

1950s American

cars,

and walls in Havana;

here in

Austin, Texas

it’s

boots

courtesy

of

Allens Boots, where

they also happen to sell

Stetsons.

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…a ‘Texas size’ one…consumed, quickly, in its entirety, with an extra shot of tequila, at an establishment found, if memory serves correct, along the River Walk in San Antonio.

Then again, they have bottles that grow on trees here

fire hydrants that wear jewelry

and people who wear these kinds of boots

All of which to say, this is one fun, funky, weird town.

This from Geoff Dyer on his allergy to DFW:

Must be contagious.

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Allan Blakeney (September 7, 1925 – April 16, 2011)

…While these detials of refinement are important in a book, the main objective should be to invest the book with a personality. The skilled designer will do this unobtrusively but effectively. No two literary works are alike; the subject matter, the author’s literary style, his philosophical approach make each book different from every other book. The fine book will reflect this difference. Those who argue that the designers hand should not be apparent in the book overlook the fact that if a book is to have any personality, the designer’s hand is bound to be evident. The very people who so argue are often designers whose good sense of typography shows through so much that the bibliophile can identify their work as once.

Personality can be achieved by the use of exotic types or luxurious paper, and some texts call for this. But the skilled designer can take a workaday type and a standard paper and, through the sheer artistry of weaving the texture of his type and placing it within the space of a page, can create a book which gives the reader a sense of aesthetic pleasure before he starts to read."

from Design with Type, by Carl Dair (2nd edition, U of T Press, 1967). The first Canadian book to be a recipient of one of the Book of the Year awards presented annually by the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

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If there’s one thing I fucking hate its the gratuitous use of swear words to get attention. A blazing, red-letter example of this can be found in the Winter 2011 edition of ARC magazine.  Chris Jennings’s use of the word ‘fuck’ to express his sentiments about an innocent poetic form in his essay ‘On the Sonnet’ is not only inappropriate, it’s also, ultimately vacuous.

I’ll leave intelligent engagement with Jennings’s misgivings to others more qualified. Here, all I’d like to say is that: you don’t fuck a poetic type, any more than you fuck a genre, or species, or an asparagus for that matter. You don’t fuck the sonata, or the polonaise.  What you ‘fuck’ or condemn, is a poorly written sonnet, a plodding polonaise, a chicken-shit book review.

Let’s say you’re in the mood for steak. You go to Ruth’s Chris Steak House. Here you can depend on being served a delicious cut every time. You’re not always going to feel like steak. So it wouldn’t be terribly smart to go to Ruth’s Chris every time you felt the urge to dine out. That would be fucking stupid. Similarly, if every restaurant in town for some reason started serving asparagus, and only asparagus, with every dish, it’s hardly the fucking asparagus’s fault that people get tired of eating the thing all the time, now is it?

A chicken-shit book review?

Not only does Jennings fuck up his ARC essay, he also, in the same issue, writes a chicken-shit review of Michael Lista’s Bloom, complete with backhanded slights, groundless objections and tiresome, opportunistic word play. Thankfully, however, he doesn’t resort to using the F word.

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