“PRINTING, ILLUSTRATION, TYPE DESIGN, typefounding, type engraving, bookbinding, graphic design, stone cutting and digital type design are things that have occupied me for over seventy years, and do to this day.  Excepting the bit of letter cutting in stone, these occupations have all put dinner on the table; but it has been my good fortune to have loved the work.”

This is how Jim Rimmer (1934-2010) starts off his Pie Tree Press, Memories from the Composing Room Floor (Gaspereau Press, 2008)

Rimmer was a mainstay of the letterpress/private press community in Vancouver for much of the past 50 years. Trained as a commercial compositor in the 1950s, his aesthetic taste,  artistic talent and mechanical know-how combined to produce a long, significant career as a graphic artist, printer, type designer and caster.  Despite the many fonts he designed, engraved and cast, despite his beautiful linocuts, and despite the fact that in 2004 he completed the first engraving and casting of Carl Dair’s Cartier face in metal, Jim is remembered most of all for love.

The love of a business that he was passionate about; and the love that he instilled in so many, for books, the printed word, and the letterpress printing process.

An archive containing much of Jim’s work is held by the Special Collections Library at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., where I met recently with Eric Swanick, Head of the Library, to talk about Jim Rimmer. Please listen to our conversation here:

The Alcuin Society’s Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada have been recognizing achievement in this field since 1981.

As Marlene Chan put it in the preface to the 2009 winners’catalogue,

“The hallmark of the judging process in all of the Alcuin competitions is, and has always been, that each book is considered as a total entity. The discerning judges examine every aspect of each book, including the dust jacket, binding, endpapers, half-title page, copyright page, title page, page layout, typography, integration of illustrations, chapter openings, running heads, reproduction of illustrations, clarity of printing, choice of paper, footnotes and bibliographical references. The judges select books in eight categories to encourage the very best in Canadian design, only where they see exceptional merit.”

I met recently with Leah Gordon, Chair of the Book Design Committee, at her home in Vancouver to talk about the history and goals of the society – and, in particular, its Awards program; about some of the books the society has published over the years, and about how in addition to the judging criteria cited above, appropriateness and usefulness also factor into the judges’ decision making process.

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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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His December, 1941 portrait of a bulldoggish Winston Churchill, symbolizing Britain’s wartime resolve, brought Karsh international attention.  Among the most widely reproduced portraits in the history of photography, ‘Churchill’ was also one of the first to carry the famous "Karsh of Ottawa" copyright.

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Rosemary Furtak has been librarian at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for 25 year. She is co-curator of ‘Text Messages’, an exhibit on artist’s books currently showing (until April 2009) at the Center. We talk here about her early championing of the artist book genre (her definition being: "a book that refuses to behave like a book (like the 35,000 books that sit in the stacks"), the line between books and art, and words and art, and librarians and curators…and how to go about collecting artist books. We talk too about the challenges of cataloguing artist Ed Ruscha’s 26 Gasoline Stations,about the prolific and surprising Dieter Roth, inexpensive materials and Richard Tuttle, and Lawrence Weiner, his Statements and his art making process. The works of these four are highlighted in the exhibition.

Please listen here:

Copyright © 2009 by Nigel Beale. www.nigelbeale.com

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David Carruthers, owner/proprietor of St. Armand Papers in Montreal takes us through the process of how he produces paper that is used in the letterpress 

printing of books. We talk here ( please see bottom of this post) about pure fibre rags,

old jute coffee bags, cover stock, denim  

and blue paper, beaters

vat-like

structures

and machines that take 95% of the moisture out of pulp

and flatten it so that it can been stored in sheets that look and feel like blotting

paper, 

and then treated with substances such as potato starch, clay and/or chalk, depending upon the end use of the paper. We also talk about opacity, smooth laid paper, end leafs, machine grain and bookmarks. 

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