I went to Books on the Square–best bookstore in town–last night where I listened to Michael Stewart read his prose poetry (textual constructions). His book is The Hieroglyphs. Young Stewart read and generally comported himself in standard relaxed, anti-formalist fashion. This included his apparel and grooming. He looked as if he’d just awakened, thrown on some week-old clothes, and happened onto an audience. I once castigated a neat, buttoned-down style, and I dressed, as I wished to seem, careless. Baloney, said a friend. Look at you, she said, in your blue JCPenny workshirt; you might as well be wearing a uniform. I was artfully dishabille, she said. She reminded me of a mutual friend who really did wear whatever came to hand: shiny slacks, pointed shoes, rumpled dress shirt. That was careless. Now, here was Michael Stewart and he looked like that old friend. Forty years later, last night, so did each of the rest of the students and friends who turned out for him.
MARGARET MEAD AT THE BOOKSTORE
Posted: June 10, 2011 in FlanerieTags: Books on the Square, Michael Stewart, The Hieroglyphs
Like many other pieces on view at Boston’s ICA, Francesca DiMattio’s “Banquet” installation came with a prose catalog description. She (or a museum scribe) writes of the art of “in between spaces.” These are instances of the edge or area between outside and in, exterior and interior. The wall hanging—it’s a collage, a painting, a mural—was composed in a way that overlaps images. It was splendid, but it’s hard to explain. Why try? The language of gallery descriptions is uniformly vapid. And who, really, cares what the artist thinks is going on? Like a poem, the piece is mine once it’s “published.” All of the items on view came with “explanations” posted nearby. Museums do this. Artists are expected to make a statement. But the whole point of visual art is its disregard of words. Do I need “assistance”? Explanations at the ICA seem like justifications, not help.
How long has The Atlantic been hanging its punctuation? Does any other magazine do this? The Atlantic of April 2011 is at hand, hanging its marks left and right. A quick visit to the bookstore and a cursory flip through the magazines puts Atlantic in a class by itself. I occasionally have hung punctuation, usually in lead, but I did it as far back as the earliest Peregrine magazine. QuarkXpress, I understand, offers an “exdention” option in its software package. So do a couple of other typesetting programs. I’m impressed that Atlantic takes this trouble, especially when others don’t. Atlantic isn’t exquisite, after all. But it’s surely well composed.
A word about flax. Bronson Alcott, at Fruitlands, told his Little Women to wear flax (linen) clothing because wool came from animals and cotton from slave labor. Socks made of flax made high moral sense and cereal from flax should, too. Except that flax cloth is real cloth, and flax seed ain’t real food. It’s edible, of course. Many insist it’s good for you. They also say that flax seed tastes “nutty.” It doesn’t. It doesn’t taste at all, which is fascinating. Flax seed is completely and, maybe among foodstuffs, uniquely nondescript. Its taste is incomparable, truly indescribable. I’ll try. It’s like chewing on little specks of cardboard. And there’s more to this. When I mix the morning flax seed, in its blandness, into my Grape-Nuts/Bran Buds combo (itself a tough sell, some might say), it actually diminishes the flavors in a breakfast already needing encouragement. It’s granular dilution.
A while ago, a friend was talking about blogging and electronic literature and such. She welcomed what she thought was the waning of public libraries. No one, she thought, used them any more, and with good reason. “My God,” she exclaimed, “who knows who’s been using that book?” She wiped her nose with an extravagantly gesturing finger. The episode startled me. My friend is smart and social and . . . normal. I didn’t know what to say, how to respond. I’m a bibliophile, and I had missed the moment when my library became a health risk.
Then, a copy of the New Yorker arrived, and in it Nicholson Baker twice made the same point. Kindle electronic books was his topic, and he quoted someone in their favor. “I’ve always been creeped out by library books and used books,” said Baker’s source. “You never know where they’ve been!” And later in that article, Baker revisited the point, quoting a former library patron whose books always smelled of smoke, but who now, thanks to electronic books, could read in a smoke-free environment.
These comments constituted three references to something dismayingly new in my culture.
Or was it new? I did some research. I Googled “unhealthy library books” and turned up references to unhealthy content—mental morbidity of one kind or another—and occasionally a librarian spoke of depressing work environments. But nothing on personal cleanliness. So, it is a new thing. Reading has joined the public health debate, a fresh toxin in the antiseptic society.
THE DURANGO KID
Posted: June 3, 2011 in FlanerieTags: Bonanza Town, Charles Starrett, Durango Kid, Hardacre Theater, Tipton
On a nostalgic whim I rented Bonanza Town, a 1951 western starring Charles Starrett as The Durango Kid. The movie is perfectly awful, weak in plot, character development, dialog, acting, and every other department of art and intellect. None of these was of the slightest importance to youngsters watching the Friday-Saturday double features at Tipton’s Hardacre Theater. We watched for the car chase scenes, which in B-movie westerns sixty years ago were horse and stagecoach chases. And we studied for style—the ways of shooting a six-gun, of stealthy crouching, and, especially, how to fall over dead. All of this is far clearer to me now than then. Why I watched, that is, not how to crouch.
See Part 1 of A Museum of Box Colophons.
Exhibit P-21. Brush and News Gothic, in red ink.
Morris Benton designed News Gothic for the American Typefounders company. It was a narrower and lighter version of Franklin Gothic, a sans serif letter Benton had introduced in 1905.
Exhibits N-77. Some Text Alternatives.
Brief.
Briefer.
Briefest.
Exhibit P-21. Some Design Alternatives.
Exhibit P-44. Brush script and Park Avenue, in black ink.
Ward Wegner expands the genre by using three typefaces! A pair of scripts, Brush and Park Avenue, join a generic serifed roman, which is a letter style not often used on boxes. The result is splendid, if busy. Alas, Mr. Wegner then neglects to letterspace his ellipsis, permitting purists to fault it all as wretched excess.
Exhibit P-36. Typo Upright, in black ink.
Tom Krautkramer’s signature is a version of a script called Typo Upright, a letter deriving from French handwriting styles of the seventeenth century. One of these styles, called a ronde, became a staple of financial writing rooms. The famously busy typographer Morris Benton designed a ronde for the American Typefounders company that first appeared in the firm’s 1906 catalog. It remains typical of fancy social printing—of wedding planners and Tom Krautkramer’s box printing crew.
Exhibit N-49. Souvenir bold and Brush script, in black ink.
Nice line spacing exhibited here by Ed Mitchem, Jr., accompanying a crisp impression of Souvenir bold and Brush. A misstep there on that first line, “it’s” spoils his fine work. Printers who are otherwise careful often neglect the simplest copy editing requirements.
Exhibit N-1. A type and ink sampler.
This concludes A Museum of Box Colophons.
Bibliography
Giulia Bologna. Illuminated Manuscripts. New York: Crescent Books, 1995.
Johanna Drucker. Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics. New York: Granary Books, 1998.
Philip Gaskell. A New Introduction to Bibliography. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972 (1974).
Gerard Genette. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Alexander Lawson. Anatomy of a Typeface. Boston: Godine, 1990.
J. Ben Lieberman. Type and Typefaces. New Rochelle, New York: The Myriade Press, 1978.
Printing, like most trades, is a continuum of sophistication. “Fine printing,” the meticulous and time-consuming combination of ink, paper, type, and design, is at one extreme. The printing of cardboard boxes is at the other. Exquisite printing produces costly limited editions of fiction and poetry to suit the taste of literary connoisseurs. Shipping cartons, on the other hand, are everywhere, and printing them defines the prosaic. Nonetheless, real printers do this work. In fact, they announce themselves by signing their boxes.
When printers announce themselves at the end of books, it’s called a colophon and it’s there for all to see. Box printers such as Mr. Ramos (left) hide their colophons under a flap at the bottom of the box. The following exhibit, probably unique, honors these tradespeople.
Exhibit P-1. Brush script, in black ink.
Charles Texeira is here, as well as F. Stuber and Orlando Singleton, printers whose time has arrived. In June 1991, The Nation’s Alexander Cockburn 
assessed modern Bolshevism and thought many Muscovites remained favorable to the goals of the original revolution. And then, parenthetically, he wrote: 
“Sandy McCroskey, type-setting this column, asks, ‘Does the “revolution” equal Lenin’s hijacking of it by force?’ ” It did, replied Cockburn . . . but suddenly that was no longer the point. An author was conversing with his compositor. Boundaries were blurring.
Exhibit P-5. Brush script, in black ink.
The box colophon of Raymond Cox and his crew is typical, in layout and inking as well as the wording itself. Cox set his statement in a condensed version of a standard sans serif print-shop typeface called News Gothic. For his signature, Cox used heavy script lettering in a style called Brush, which, in 1942, Robert E. Smith designed for the American Typefounders company. Traditional graphic design frowned on the awkward mixing of light script letters with unadorned sans serif typefaces. For many printing purposes, Smith’s Brush typeface replaced older pen-drawn characters. Brush remains a shopfloor typographic favorite. Most box “signatures” are versions of it.
Exhibit N-8. Typo Script and Helvetica, in blue ink.
This script is a bold adaptation of a letter called Imperial Script, the original rendering of which was based on that of the Frenchman Firmin Didot’s Anglais typeface, of 1809. The American Typefounders company called its version of this face Typo Script. The box dates to August 1992.
Exhibit P-17. Brush and Helvetica, in blue ink.
Carton printing is high-volume work, done quickly on pliant surfaces. Tom Clements’ brisk design and neat imposition are exceptional. His secondary colophon type is Helvetica, the classic workaday san serif face in the English-speaking world. Helvetica is not, however, the usual choice among box printers, who often favor News Gothic. Apparently their task is prosaic enough as it is.
Exhibit N-12. Brush and News Gothic, in black ink.
For many, typeface recognition shares a kinship with birdwatching. Birding aficionados discriminate among dozens of seemingly identical “peep” sandpipers. They are wicked amid warblers. In the same way, graphic design recognizes the many renditions of a generic sans serif typeface called gothic. Among these, box printers favor one called News Gothic.
See Part 2 of A Museum of Box Colophons.
Mizuno
Exhibit 9
Much—theological, zoological, and golfing—is offered the visitor to southeastern Thailand. The Buddhist Wat Yanasangwararam Woramahawihan contains the Mondop where a replica of the Buddha’s footprint is enshrined. In addition, the private Sri Racha Tiger Zoo features several hundred tigers, thousands of alligators, and, according to its website, “some other animals.” There are daily performances at the zoo’s Amazing Circus and Crocodile Show. Scorpion Lady’s shirt is covered with scorpions. And, of course, the area offers a dozen world class golf courses, including the Laem Chabang International Country Club, a layout designed by Jack Nicklaus.
TaylorMade
Exhibit 8
The Titleist/FootJoy plant at Laem Chabang Industrial Estate is about 15 miles north of the southeastern Thai city of Pattaya, some 80 miles from Bangkok. Once a sleepy fishing town, Pattaya first boomed as a Vietnam War R&R locale. That got the place trashed, however, and left Pattaya with a lingering “seedy” image. Happily, much is improved, as the city reformed itself into a family-friendly hot spot. These days, there is plenty more to see and do than drink and assess folks with nothing on.
