Robert R. Reid’s Wise Consciousness
First appeared in The Devil's Artisan
Thanks to a contagious passion for the art and practice of printing, Robert Reid has, over some 85 years, lived a life filled with peaks and few, if any, valleys; this, largely due to the kind acts and generosities of others who’ve shared in his considerable enthusiasms, and been charmed by his ebullient personality.Born in 1927 among the natural gas fields of Medicine Hat, Alberta - a town known for having "all hell for a basement", according to Rudyard Kipling - Reid moved at age nine with his family to Vancouver. At ten he spied and was besotted by a tin printing set that sat on the shelves of the toy department at the local Hudson’s Bay Company.
Thus began a love affair that continues to this day.
An uncle bought Robert one of the printing sets that Christmas. The first thing he printed on it was a run of share certificates in the ‘RR Printing Company’ that he sold to family and friends in order to raise money to buy more rubber type. He was soon printing miniature newspapers complete with bold headlines modeled after those found in wartime Vancouver’s daily press. Later, at Kitsilano High School, Robert did brisk trade printing business cards for his classmates. During his second year at UBC he fell in love once again, this time with two beautiful rubricated pages in a book he’d seen on display in cases under the steps leading up to the campus library’s reading room. Inspired, he decided that he would produce a book like this of his own. The year was 1947.
It took time and a lot of work, but the results were impressive. First, on the advice of Librarian Kaye Lamb (who later went on to become Dominion Archivist of Canada) he chose his subject. Alfred Waddington's The Fraser Mines Vindicated, was a scarce old book that at the time was believed to be the first published in B.C. He would reprint it; and so, set to typing - not typesetting, typing. Xerox hadn’t yet arrived on the scene - photocopying wasn’t as easy back then as it is now - so, not knowing any better, he spent the entire summer tapping out the text of Frazer Mines on a typewriter.
At about this time a friendly librarian named Ann Smith rounded up all the books she could find on printing, and piled them on a table for Robert to read. While he didn’t learn any specific lessons from these books, he did get a strong, welcome sense that he was not alone in his love of typography and fine printing. To know that others considered these significant serious endeavours, and that they shared his passion and interest in the practice of making beautiful books, was an inspiration. The titles with their illustrations and instructions gave him a standard to shoot for in his own bookmaking.Once he had his text, Reid spent many more months hand-setting the type for what turned out to be a hundred page book, beautifully printed on his Platen press in two colours. As the colophon puts it, the book was:
“Handset in 12 point Caslon old style and printed two pages at a time on Hurlbut Cortlea antique paper with an 8 x 12 foot-treadled platen press. Marbling was executed by the printer and it was "bound by hand at the shop of Mr. M. I. Sochasky."
The copy I own comes with a soft, grey felt protective glove (they were made by Reid’s mother). The boards, bound in quarter leather, have a striking red, blue, black and white marbled design on them. The book is as crisp, clean and square as it was the day it, and 109 companions, came out of the bindery wearing a price tag of $10 each. Reid’s ‘Printer’s Note’ at the beginning of the book reads, in part, “Fine books have literary value, and they have commercial value, but it is their value as works of art which distinguishes them from other books. This intangible, aesthetic quality is not easily obtained. The designer’s use of binding materials, of type, of paper and of inks all contribute to a feeling of luxuriousness and of fineness. There is another element: personality, without which a book is lost. It results from the designer imparting something of himself — his love for fine books, his consequent sincerity of purpose, his grasp of the elementals of the printing craft — into his books. This book then is an attempt in that direction. Its designer is not insensitive to the charms of a fine books and trusts that a little of his personal interest and enthusiasm has found its way into this volume.”
Copies were sent to the Western Book Show in California, where they met with immediate success. It was the first Canadian book to win a Rounce and Coffin Club Award. As a result, Reid received a warm welcome when he visited the Bay Area in 1949. Colonel Harris of the typesetting firm MacKenzie and Harris introduced him to many friendly collectors and printers in the area including the Grabhorn brothers. Fraser Mines quickly sold out, with 80 per cent of them going to Americans.
After graduation, Reid set up a printing business, renting the back end of larger print shop in downtown Vancouver for $25 a month. He bought an automatic Platen press to add to his manual one and started getting business from local architectural firms and art galleries, printing business cards and letterhead, throwing in design at no charge. At first, things were slow, so he offered to print a literary mag for free for some university kids, one of whom later became his wife. The first two issues of PM magazine are now highly collectible containing Bert Binning silk screens, and tipped in artist-designed Christmas cards, among other treasures.
Building on this success, Reid won some significant journal business, designing and printing publications such as the B.C. Library Quarterly, which featured covers by George Kuthan, a graphic designer from Czechoslovakia whom Reid had befriended (Kuthan worked his whole life in a saw mill. The two collaborated on many projects), and George Woodcock's Canadian Literature quarterly (with Kuthan linocuts frequently serving as tail pieces to fill empty spaces). Reid also served as typographic advisor to the University of British Columbia, designing dozens of their publications, many of which were printed by Morriss Printing, of Victoria; one in particular stands out, 'Academic Symposium', an anthology containing colourful decorative initials by Kuthan.
Several years after setting up shop, Reid, as he tells it, was bought out by a bigger firm, Grant-Mann. They wanted to establish a letterpress department, so out to Burnaby went Reid with his wife and kids. At Grant-Mann he was given cart blanche to buy all the type he wanted. Among other classics he ordered Caslon, cast with punches made by Caslon himself in the 1700s, Bauer Bodoni, and Augusta. These were used in high-end commercial printing jobs that included among them the Vancouver School Board’s Annual Reports.With the security and time allowed by a full-time job, Bob again turned to making private press books. The first, in 1958, was a reprint of F.G. Claudet's 1871 book Gold: Its Properties, Modes of Extraction, Value, Etc. Produced in 275 copies jointly with his friend Takao Tanabe, the book was quarter-bound (10 were full-bound) in Oasis Niger by his wife Felicity, with marbled boards by Sherry Grauer. (Tanabe went on to design and produce a number of elegant books for his own Periwinkle Press, and Bill Maconnell’s Klanack Press, the first of these being Marya Fiamengo printed in Bob’s basement.
Several years on, Tanabe chose to concentrate his efforts on painting which, over the years, proved to be a very wise career move).Then came The Journal of Normal Lee, a man’s account of his (unsuccessful) efforts to supply fresh beef to hungry Klondike gold-seekers on-site, up North. Reid had heard the manuscript read aloud by Eileen Laurie on CBC Radio and promptly secured the rights to print it from the author’s brother. The book is set in Linotype Eldorado; paper is English Ainsford Ancient Laid; presswork is by Ib Kristensen, and binding done in Victoria by Fritz Brunn.
Next was John Newlove’s first collection of poetry Grave Sirs. You can identify the true first edition of this book by the indented title letters on the cover. They were letterpress printed, later versions were offset printed. Three hundred copies where produced by Reid and Ib Kristensen.
Perhaps the most impressive of the five private press books published during this Vancouver period is Kuthan’s Menagerie of Interesting Zoo Animals. It is justly lauded for its striking, intriguing multi-coloured linocuts and considered by many to be the most outstanding work by a Canadian private press in the 1960s. Only 60 of the edition’s 130 copies were ever bound; the balance remained in the bindery, forgotten but thankfully, not lost.Fifty complete copies were issued through Rollin Milroy’s Heavenly Monkey Press in 2003. As their website puts it
“Rather than attempt to recreate the original binding, [these copies] were issued in the livre d’artiste manner – loose, with a new wrap and custom-made clamshell box. Kuthan’s Menagerie Completed feature a new title page; the two-page preface by Robert R. Reid, the original publisher; and an additional colophon, all printed at Heavenly Monkey in 18-point Perpetua on the same Golden Hind paper used in the original book. The original sheets are surrounded by an inner wrap of the yellow Japanese paper used for end-sheets in the copies bound in 1960. All of the sheets are held in an outer wrap of handmade St Armand paper. The colophon is numbered (50 copies) and signed by Robert Reid. (Please note these copies do not bear George Kuthan’s signature. The copies issued in 1960 were numbered and signed after being bound.) The clamshell box, made by Simone Mynen, is covered in red Japanese fabric with decorative printed labels debossed on the front and spine.”
Reid’s five private press books are significant, says Milroy, because they represent the first sustained body of work by a Canadian that truly fit into the private press tradition established in the United Kingdom and the United States during the first half of the 20th century.
What’s interesting about these five is their variety. Although clearly influenced by a private press sensibility, the choice of content, differences in layout, graphic design and type styles, and selection of colour schemes, suggest a healthy appetite for exploration and innovation, and display a talent capable of producing an impressive, varying range of aesthetically pleasing formats.By 1957 Reid was working one day a week at the Vancouver Art School (later named the Emily Carr School of Art & Design) where he’d bought a press and some type and set up shop. Under his guidance, students’ work started winning design awards ‘down East’. None other than Carl Dair wrote glowing reports about its high standards. Early editions of ‘The Raven’, a UBC students’ magazine, illustrate this achievement. Issues can still today be found online. Don McLeod at McLeod’s Books in Vancouver makes a point of stocking as many as he can lay his hands on.
After a stint working full-time at the School, Reid received a Canada Council grant to travel overseas and visit as many printing shops, type foundries, papermakers and typographers as he could find. While he was in Europe he heard that McGill University was planning to establish a press. He wrote, offering his services, and landed a position as director of production and design.
During his time at McGill Reid not only published some lovely scholarly trade books - Posthumous poems of Shelley, for example, filled as it is with English Monotype Garammond swash letters, plus a selection of other titles printed in England - he also established a fine printing division, calling it The Redpath Press. Thanks to a deal brokered with a former student who worked at The Toronto Star, he was able to secure a couple of Heidelberg cylinder presses, a Platen press, lots of type (including Oldrich Menhart's typefaces that the McGill library had purchased from the Grafotechna Type Foundry in Prague), and Ib Kristensen to supervise printing. “We were,” recalls Reid, “up and running very quickly”.
Under this imprint he published the Lawrence Lande Bibliography of Canadiana in celebration of the donation of Lande’s collection to McGill. No expense was spared in the production of this lavish, beautiful volume, largely because Reid worked away under the misapprehension that Lande was paying for everything.
As Reid notes, “Every time Lawrence came to check on how things were going, I’d tell him more of my thoughts, and he would say ‘Wonderful...do it.’ Presuming Lande was paying for all this, I merrily went ahead, ordering paper from Spain, leather from England, the works. When the bills came in there was hell to pay, because it turned out the press was footing the bill. But what a beautiful book!”*It is this book that Reid is most proud of having published, not just because of its majestic form, but because of all the work involved in setting up the Press that eventually printed it. Rollin Milroy calls it Reid’s magnum opus, a book that remains “one of the most ambitious and beautifully crafted limited editions in Canada's publishing history”. Unbelievably, you can buy a copy today in fine condition for a mere $300.During this period Reid, in addition to the Lande, produced some truly superb books for McGill. A two-volume set, Willis’s Anatomy of the Brain and Nerves, with drawings by Christopher Wren, for one. Read this poetic description:
“Limited to 2000 sets printed on Spanish mould-paper made by L. Guarro Casas, Barcelona. The type face used throughout is Monotype Bembo, set and printed by The Stinehour Press…The portrait of Willis’s contemporaries have been printed by gravure in Holland at Joh Enschede en Zonen on a German mould paper. The other illustrations in this volume have been printed in offset lithography by The Meridien Gravure Company, who also printed the facsimile volume by the same process. The two volumes have been bound in Linson Vellum by Villemaire Freres Limitee of Montreal The design and typography are by Robert R. Reid of McGill University Press, and the Willis coat-of-arms on the general title page of each volume was cut in wood by Fritz Kredel in New York.”
This book can also be had for a pittance.
Another classic is Portrait of a Period: A Collection of William Notman Photographs 1856-1915. Choosing 174 photos from approximately 400,000 items in the Notman archive, plates were reproduced directly from glass negatives. After experimenting with traditional processes, Reid and a talented young German photographer named Klaus Unterberger, who’d worked on the Lande Bibliography, went down to New York and, thanks to typical American generosity, were shown how to perform an uncommon “double dot” procedure that faithfully rendered the fine detail, and subtle tones and contrasts of the original photographs. American matte paper and the choice to go with sepia and black ink resulted in a finished product that the MOMA called one of the five most beautiful photography books ever produced.
Freelance work at this time included design of the printed material for the Canadian Pavilion at Expo '67 and participation in a redesign of the Montreal Star. Another famed Reid book came into the world some years after, as a result of the Canadian federal government engaging in high seas battle with the Japanese and the Danes.
The dispute was over fishing – the over-fishing of salmon to be precise. In order to stop it, Canada needed to make its case to the 1974 United Nations Law of the Sea conference in Caracas, Venezuela - to make a splash, in other words, in order to save the fish. Reid was their man. He ended up printing about a thousand portfolios, complete with beautifully illustrated reproductions of salmon, leather bindings, and well-crafted prose. Roderick Haig Brown was recruited to do the writing, Indian artist Bill Reid to do the design. “Can you whip up a traditional looking salmon for us to inlay on the boards?” Reid inquired of Reid. “There is no traditional design,” came the response. “We just eat ‘em.”
In the end Bill drew one up from scratch and small replicas in Argillite were crafted for the 1000 books, with 150 in silver for deluxe editions that were presented to heads of state and ambassadors. Cost was not a concern. Here’s a description of this fabulous production, courtesy of the Heavenly Monkey website:
"Atlas folio box (20 x 25 inches) containing 21 plates in five porfolios loose as issued, and a copy of The Salmon by Roderick Haig-Brown (9 x 12 inches, 79 pages) profusely illustrated with color photographs. The five portfolios (each 18 x 24 inches) are: "The Ceremony of the First Salmon" (drawings and research by Hilary Stewart, six pages of text and drawings); "The Salmon: Canada's Plea for a Threatened Species" (six pages of text and small reproductions of the prints to follow); "The Legacy" (five silkscreen prints by Bill Reid); "The Atlantic" (five reproductions of 19th-century chromolithographs of salmon by A.F. Lydon and J. Stewart); "The Pacific" (five gouache paintings by David Denbigh); and "The Cycle" (five watercolors by Rudi Kovach of salmon in the Adams River)."
Copies were issued in a cloth-covered portfolio, or more elaborate box constructed with oak sides and cloth-covered boards.
The government realised that the more money spent on the project the better. As word, and Reid’s beautiful presentation got out, it became clear that the Canadians were very serious about this issue. ‘They had to be, just look at all the dough they’d put into this.’
Sure enough, the package made a mark, and Canada won its case. Back in Japan the newspapers condemned its side not only for losing the war, but for the cheap, shoddy little pamphlets it had put out in the effort to win it. With profits from the Salmon book, Reid moved to New York. Here, and in New Haven, he spent the next 23 years in the ‘book packaging’ business, successfully pitching ideas for commercial trade books to Simon and Schuster and other big publishing houses. He hired writers and photographers, designed books and basically made a decent living doing exactly what he enjoyed doing best. During this period, despite having built up a very nice print shop of his own, he didn’t do much private press work; there was, however, one notable exception, a book called Pixie Meat (1990). He and his partner Terry Berger were commissioned to print this limited edition comic book featuring the work of Gary Panter, Charles Burns, and Tom De Haven.
After years producing Country Inn and B&B travel guide books for Holt Reinhart and Winston, the Internet showed up and put these lucrative enterprises to bed. In response, Reid returned to Vancouver in the late 1990s to enjoy golf and retirement.
Well, hardly.
He joined the Alcuin society, and has since produced some lovely books in runs of 50-100 (instead of 200-300) copies each. Titles such as Dorothy Burnet Bookbinder , Takoa Tanabe: Sometime Printer A tour de force of Letterpress printing, and Duthie’s Bookmarks, a book that features 50 years’ worth of bookmarks produced for the famed Vancouver bookstore Duthie Books by a who’s who of West Coast artists including Jack Shadbolt, Takao Tanabe, Celia King, Carel Moiseiwitsch and 20 others.
He completed a six volume very limited edition of his memoirs. You wont find these on Amazon - there were only enough produced to go to close friends, family, and some of the larger special collections libraries across Canada. You’ll have to haunt the McGill Special Collections Library in Montreal, the Bruce Peel Library in Edmonton, SFU Special Collections in Burnaby or the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library in Toronto to crack one open. But again, well worth the trip.
In addition to all of this, Reid has collaborated with Heavenly Monkey publisher Rollin Milroy on two titles (Reid’s Leaves: A Bibliography of Robert R. Reid’s Private Press, and A Letter from Carl Dair About the Papermills of Amalfi, Italy), and has worked with countless enthusiasts who’ve approached him for help publishing their own books.
On November 16, 2007 the Alcuin Society and Simon Fraser University put on “Reidfest” in celebration of his book designs, presenting him with the inaugural Robert R. Reid Lifetime Achievement Award for “his extraordinary contributions to the Book Arts in Canada." Subsequent winners include Frank Newfeld, Stand Bevington and most recently, Will Rueter. In 2008 Bob finished a major book in collaboration with Toni Onley's former wife. It reproduces a series of letters exchanged by the couple during the 1990s.
I interviewed Reid last year for a podcast I host called The Biblio File. The last thing he mentioned during our conversation was a book on Afghanistan that he was pitching to a scholarly press. It’s clear that he still sees everything in the world as material for a potential book.
In the Printers Note to Fraser Mines, Bob refers to an essential element that books must possess, one that without which they’re lost. “It results from the designer imparting something of himself—his love for fine books, his consequent sincerity of purpose, his grasp of the elementals of the printing craft—into his books.” This element is personality, and if there’s one thing Bob possesses it’s personality.
Just as he has incorporated personal interest and enthusiasm into the hundreds of books he has so skillfully produced over the years, so too has he incorporated these very human qualities into his life. Little wonder that it has been one filled with peaks and no valleys. When someone loves what they do as much Robert R. Reid loves making books, others naturally want to do him kind deeds, for, when you love what someone else loves, you love each other. Or, to put this more eloquently, as Tolstoy did, “love is life,” and everything is united by it alone. What is this feeling of love? Why, “a manifestation of that what is acting in an individual who is obedient to his or her wise consciousness”.