Collecting Publishers' Biographies and Publishing Histories
How Neglected Literature can Yield Unexpected TreasuresFirst appeared in LOGOS.‘Collect what excites you’ is the best piece of wisdom anyone who loves books can ever impart. I’ve been doling it out for decades; extraordinary, though, how long it's taken for me to actually heed my own advice, or more accurately, to figure out how best to apply it.It took a flock of orange penguins; those that adorn the end-papers of Jeremy Lewis’s Penguin Special. This, I thought, when I first plucked it from the bargain shelves of a big-box store in downtown Ottawa, is a well-made book - which of course befits its genre. Publishers publishing books about themselves would typically put extra care and attention into production. If I truly loved ‘books’, what better to collect than books about books. And what better books about books than those published by publishers about their own publishing efforts.Not sure why I love books. My father used to tell me the story of how, when I was two or three years old, he once came home from work to find me buried under a huge pile of paperbacks I’d removed from his study shelves; of how, whenever guests used to show up at the house the first thing I’d do once they’d seated themselves, was to rush for volumes that I could place in their laps.I’ve bought books for as long as I can remember; collected them ‘seriously’ for about 15 years. Modern Firsts mostly; Coetzee, Huxley, Auden, Iris Murdoch for the Chatto and Windus dust jackets, signed editions of work by the contemporary poet Robin Robertson, Booker Prize Winners, Canadian Governor General Award winners, Frank Newfeld-designed books, the Britain in Pictures series…Over the years it seemed a new collecting idea took hold at least once every other month.The origin of this insanity might dwell in a young boy’s desire to hunt, find, please, and connect. The fun part of this quick-gelling Publisher’s history collecting project, from my perspective, lay both in ferreting out information found in the books, and in putting it to practical, exciting new use; in the acquisition of intelligence, the compilation of lists, the strategic, tactical application of knowledge, the actual hunt; the time in used/antiquarian book shops. It’s the tracking and tracing, excavating and applying of found knowledge, the discovery of unknown undervalued treasure that drives this enterprise; which explains why I love collecting and reading publishers’ histories and memoirs, and why I’ve decided to persevere with this project.It took the repeating orange penguins to open my eyes; to prompt the realization that Lewis’s book, and its kin are what genuinely excite me. Books that teach me about books, books that inform and nurture uneducated passion - the kind that had taken hold at about the same time I’d learned to walk.Books about publishers and publishing houses tell of how books were born and raised, birthed, and released into the world; of which ones to go after; if they’re signed, so much the better.Here was a collection that would hold up not only aesthetically -books published by publishers typically display the best a house can produce – but also intellectually. Founding travails and struggles, allies and enemies, best-sellers and bankruptcies yes, but also hidden intelligence. Though written to mark corporate accomplishment, and hence of interest to historians, practitioners and scholars - these books could also yield precious clues to the inquiring mind of the collector.Similar in nature to LOGOS, with its mission of communicating practical experience and advice to various disparate parts of the publishing enterprise, this publishers’ histories project had at its core the re-purposing of information written for one sector, to be used and analysed by another. These works render not only inherently interesting stories, but treasures of another kind. Original content from one field could be applied profitably to another.The plan was, and remains, to seek out and acquire as many British, American and Canadian publishers’ histories and memoirs as possible (to date the collection sits at about 400 titles), to read them, to identify and seek out 'experts' (former executives, employees; academics) who could talk knowledgeably about specific publishing houses, to conduct Interviews with them, and to develop a list - culled from conversation and reading - of 'desirable' collectible titles, important for their innovative, trend-setting, influential design/content/production/presentation/ and/or marketing values. To assemble a collection of these titles with the intention of their serving as illustrators of how the book developed from say 1830 to 2010.The end result? At least a comprehensive bibliography. A physical collection of publishers’ histories/memoirs for use as a practical resource. A related audio archive. A physical collection of books referred to in the histories and interviews serving as representative samples - again for use as a reference library. At most, a striking new idea, or brilliant thesis offering up some profound thoughts/conclusions about the development of the book over the 19th/20th/21st centuries? Who knows. But thanks to those orange birds, an idea and the motivation to turn it into something concrete came together and now drive me forward.Here are some examples of collectible gold that has to date been mined from publishers’ histories, memoirs, and interviews:Mitchell Kennerley...I’ve just finished reading The Fortunes of Mitchell Kennerley by Matthew J. Bruccoli. In it we learn that Kennerley Old Style type was designed by Frederic Goudy in 1911, because of a ‘dissatisfaction’ with the ‘openness’ of Caslon type used on sample pages printed for the limited edition of H.G. Well’s The Door in the Wall and Other Stories.As Kennerley put it: "He [Goudy] wanted an appearance in the whole page of more solidity and compactness, but he wanted to secure it without putting any more color in the individual letters than was already in the Caslon shown in the specimens… Mr. Goudy knew of no type that seemed to possess exactly this character – those available were either too formal or refined or too free and undignified for use in a book of this sort."Kennerley Old Style type was soon acclaimed as one of the great original faces produced in America. As B.H Newdigate put it in 1915: " Since the first Caslon began casting type about the year 1724, no such excellent type has been put within the reach of English printers."Bruccoli continues: "As with many of the events in Kennerley’s career, it is impossible to be dogmatic about when Kennerely Old Style was actually first used in a book. The Door in the Wall is usually credited with this distinction, but it seems clear that Kennerley type was used to print 1911 books that appeared before the Wells volume. Kennerley stated that the first use of the type was in the four page prospectus printed for The Door in the Wall."But then this footnote: "There is a strong probability that Heinrich Heine was in fact the first book published by Mitchell Kennerley from Kennerley Old Style and Forum types…The Monahan volume was copyrighted on 3 November 1911; the Wells on 11 December 1911.”No one knows or cares much about the Heine book, hence, you can pick it up for under $50. Similarly, William Watson’s Lachrymae Musarum (London: Macmillan, 1892) can be had for nothing, despite Kennerley’s belief that it was " one of the most perfect pieces of bookmaking of the 19th Century", one upon which he modelled perhaps his most famous book, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Renascence. *** New Directions…James Laughlin was the son of a wealthy Pittsburgh industrialist. During one summer in the mid- 1930s, between terms at Harvard, Laughlin worked as a driver for Gertrude Stein in Paris. From her he acquired a taste for experimental poetry. It was suggested that he study with Ezra Pound in Italy. Pound didn’t see much poetic promise in young Laughlin, but did see talent, and so suggested he go home, finish his studies and then do something useful with his time and money, like publishing young poets who might not otherwise be able to get their work into print. Laughlin followed Pound’s advice and proceeded, in 1936, to set up New Directions which was to become one of the most revered literary publishing houses in America.Leslie Morris, Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at the Houghton Library, Harvard University knew Jay (as he was called) Laughlin, and has studied the published output of New Directions for years. There’s a lot to look at. One way of focusing, she suggests, if you want to collect the imprint, is to go with the plays. Tennessee Williams for example wrote many. He also liked to tinker with and re-write what he’d written, so that, while the first editions of his work may be expensive, later editions aren’t, despite delivering original , albeit altered, content to the world. Morris also suggests that because there were so many stage productions of Williams’ work, collecting playbills, although not published by New Directions, could also be a fun, inexpensive, long term collecting enterprise.New Directions in Prose and Poetry was the first in a series of anthologies put out by Laughlin in the 1930s and 1940s. They’re fascinating because they reflect his personal taste, his interest in new poetry, and its evolution over many years. Collecting these anthologies offers a way to track Laughlin as he tries out those poets he thinks will stand the test of time. Poets of the Month was another series that met with success. They were published primarily for utilitarian purposes, to provide students with inexpensive editions of important writings.In the forties Alvin Lustig showed up to work at New Directions. With the company, he designed some of the most striking dust jackets ever produced, anywhere. Lustig began designing jackets in 1937. The first he did for New Directions was Henry Miller's Wisdom of the Heart in 1941.Steven Heller co-author of Born Modern: The Life and Design of Alvin Lustig (Chronicle Books, 2010) suggests that the ‘current preference for fragmented images, photo-illustration, minimal typography and ‘rebus-like compositions’ can be traced directly to Lustig's ‘stark black-and-white cover for Lorca: 3 Tragedies. Heller calls it “a masterpiece of symbolic acuity, compositional strength and typographic craft “. Consisting of a grid of symbolic photographs linked in ‘poetic disharmony’ this and other New Directions covers, transformed, according to Heller, “an otherwise realistic medium -the photograph- into a tool for abstraction through the use of reticulated negatives, photograms and still-lifes.”When Lustig's started out, jackets were primarily illustrative and decorative. Hard-sell conventions were the norm. Lustig's use of abstraction and Rorschach-like splatterings and squiggles, busted this model; he didn’t believe it was necessary to "design down," in order to generate more sales. Lustig's jacket designs for New Directions were not ‘point-of-purchase visual stimulants.’ According to Laughlin, Lustig let the design problem act upon him freely and without preconceived notions of the forms it should take. The results are striking, disturbing, thought provoking.As a teenager Lustig developed diabetes. As a result he later went blind. He died at the age of 40 of diabetes-related complications in December, 1955.In addition to its dust jackets, New Directions is also renowned for introducing foreign writers in translation to American audiences. Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha was first published in English by New Directions. The company has also published Céline, André Gide, Yukio Mishima, Italo Svevo, Octavio Paz, Eugenio Montale, and more recently, Roberto Bolaño. Firsts in translation are for some reason much more affordable than ‘mother tongue’ Firsts; collecting the same title in different languages can offer pleasing insight into how graphic appeals to attract readers vary from culture to culture.Finally, Laughlin was responsible for resuscitating unduly neglected titles in his New Classics series. Believe it or not, much of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work, including The Great Gatsby had by the 1940s gone out of print. New Directions brought them back. These books are worth collecting. Ticknor and FieldsThe history of Ticknor and Fields can be traced back to 1832 when William Davis Ticknor and John Allen established a publishing house which operated from the Old Corner Bookstore in Boston, Massachusetts. Allen exited the firm a year later, leaving Ticknor to operate it on his own until the mid-1840s when John Reed and James Thomas Fields became partners. Ticknor and Fields is an interesting house because from the 1840s to the 1860s it published many of what are now considered to be the greatest American literary works of the period, and because it was the first American publisher to pay foreign authors for their works. The firm’s impressive list included Dickens, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Tennyson, Thoreau and Twain. Over the years Ticknor and Fields developed close ties with the Riverside Press, founded by Henry Oscar Houghton. In 1878 Houghton became a partner. The firm would later morph into Houghton, Mifflin, and Co.According to famed book scholar Michael Winship, Ticknor & Fields were particularly skilful at making books that looked distinctively their own. Two company designs stand out. The first was a plain brown corduroy cloth binding (Walden, The Scarlet Letter and Emerson’s Essays all first appeared in this format) the second, what has become known as the Blue and Gold editions. Although the company didn’t invent the brown bindings - there was nothing new in its component parts - it did invent the idea of using it as a kind of brand for their books.In 1856 Fields instructed Houghton to create a small handy volume, printed in easy to read type ‘on thin but good paper.’ The result was a volume of Tennyson’s poems. Bound in bright blue cloth, with gold edges, the book was strikingly different from anything else on the market. The pocket book was a great success, and spawned the Blue and Gold editions series which became a standard, like Penguin books in the 1930s, featuring mostly collected poems. These Ticknor and Fields books are, according to Winship, very collectible, as are the ‘household’ collected works of various New England poet, gift books, and books produced on hand made paper a bit later on, circa 1895-1910 at the Riverside Press, by famed typographer Bruce Rogers. The ‘best’ book published by the firm, is, says Winship, a biography of William Prescott, written by George Ticknor, a cousin of the publisher, produced in 1864, the final year of the American Civil War.In addition to printing beautiful books, Ticknor and Fields was also very good at playing the niche marketing game: packaging the same book up in multiple ways, and pricing them so as to appeal to a variety of different markets. In this regard, the company pre-figured what John Lane and The Bodley Head was to do in the 1890s. John Lane, Elkin Mathews and The Bodley HeadAccording Jeremy Lewis in his aforementioned Penguin Special, both John Lane and his young nephew Allen were “stocky, dapper men, impeccably turned out, with china-blue eyes…both were impatient, bored by routine and the ‘sombre tyranny of the desk’, evasive, dilatory in replying to letters and liable to absent themselves at moments of crisis; both were unusually energetic…had strong visual sense…and a passion for collecting…and were endowed with that inexplicable, almost psychic ability to sniff out a publishable book or series of books without reading more than a page or two of the works in question.”Young bibliophile John Lane and antiquarian bookseller Elkin Mathews set up their publishing firm in 1887. They soon met the handsome young Liverpudlian poet Richard Le Gallienne who’d recently self-published his first collection of poetry. It served as a model for the first Bodley Head book, Le Gallienne’s Volumes in Folio (1889), and many that followed. Printed on Van Gelder handmade paper at the Chiswick Press, it was beautifully designed with red ink titles and plenty of white space, and produced in a short run of 250 small and 50 large paper size copies; a sort of commercial version of what the fine presses were producing at the time. Before long The Bodley Head – in a similar way to the future New Directions - began attracting and publishing talented young poets and ‘New Women’ writers, many of whom might not otherwise have appeared in print.Keynotes, for example, written by George Egerton (pseudonym of Mary Chavelita Dunne ) is not only an attractively produced book, it also contains a fanciful Aubrey Beardsley title page, and refreshing content: a new (for the time) feminist outlook on the world. It was so successful that Lane decided to produce what turned out to be a 33 volume series of books under its name. Famed collector Michael Sadlier called it the most elegant fiction series of the 19th century.Bodley Head books were clearly produced with the collector in mind. Mark Samuels Lasner, who has accumulated one of the great Bodley Head collections in the world, claims that the company almost single handedly created the cult for the limited edition. The firm employed innovative printers and typsetters who were responsible in large part for the beautiful design and production of its ‘standard’ books; it also reached out to some great artists. Charles Ricketts designed stunning covers for de Tabley’s Poems: Dramatic and Lyrical, In the Key of Blue, by John Aldington Symons, Silverpoints by John Gray, and Oscar Wilde’s Poems, and The Sphinx; Aubrey Beardsley put his distinctive stamp not only on The Yellow Book series and Wilde’s Salome, but the whole ‘decadent’ era. These books are not inexpensive. But most of the pre-1900 Bodley Head output are; they go for between $25-$200; quite affordable, considering what you get.Titles of particular interest for their design qualities and illustrations include Laurence Houseman’s simple elegant covers (Sister Songs, Poems by Francis Thompson, Cuckoo Songs, and E. Nesbit’s A Commander of Verse) and volumes illustrated by Walford Graham Robertson, Charles Robinson, Mabel Dearmer, and Beardsley’s successor, Patten Wilson anthologies, and John Buchan’s Scholar Gypsies. Faber & FaberThere is no formal history of Faber & Faber. The closest thing to it may be John Connolly’s Eighty Years of Book Cover Design. It contains a brief summary of the firm’s origins and activities (the company started out as Faber & Gwyer in 1925; Sigfried Sasoon’s Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man was ff’s launch title in 1929), and, more importantly, hundreds of beautiful, chronologically displayed dust jacket images. There’s an appreciation of Faber’s great jacket designer/typographer Berthold Wolpe at the front of the book. Wolpe, an avid book collector himself, is credited with having designed well over 1500 jackets. Identifying, let alone finding, them all would be an impossible task. Some do however bear his initials ‘BLW’ (Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape, George Sava’s Surgery and Crime, The Serpent, by Neil M. Gunn, and Corporal Jack by David Scott), others credit him on the flap. Chasing these down could be fun.Though some of the sales reps at the time complained about all of their books looking the same, Connolly discounts this, suggesting that Wolpe’s genius lay precisely in making every title look unique while at the same time – by using his famous Albertus type - clearly identifying each as a Faber book. Regardless of your take, it is evident that a great deal of thought went into both content and container at Faber.Unlike others, Faber didn’t publish many series. They did however produce a run of charming pamphlet’s called The Ariel Poems. In all, thirty-eight volumes in this first series were printed between 1927-1931; each was a small 8vo size, and contained four pages including a full page wood cut illustration. Sewn in the original printed wrappers with a further illustration to the upper covers, these single poem productions contained the works of many of Britain’s best writers and artists; Eliot’s Journey of the Magi, for example, first appeared as number eight in the series. It is illustrated by E. McKnight Kaufer.Toby Faber, grandson of founder Geoffrey - bringing our story up to the present - told me recently of another series of Faber books published in the mid-to-late 1990s. It too could appeal to book lovers: elegant jacketed paperbacks designed by Pentagram, the company that came up with the current ff logo; these books are slightly narrower than the standard trade paperback, with two-colour illustrations on the inside covers that beautifully reflect the full colour outside jackets. The Whitbread Award-winning Last king of Scotland is one of the better known books to have been published in this format. In total there are some 50-100 in the series. Since there is no bibliography, you’ll just have to figure out a way to find them all by yourself.