UCSC Review Fall 1992

The Making of a Book by Joan Ward

Alumni lovingly convieve a fine-press edition of poet William Everson's "A Canticle to the Waterbirds"

When he was named Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year in 1991, nationally revered poet and master printer William Everson asked book artists Felicia Rice and Gary Young--two of his former students at UC Santa Cruz--and artist Daniel O. Stolpe--his longtime friend--to prepare a broadside of the first two stanzas of one of his best-known poems, "A Canticle to the Waterbirds," to celebrate the occasion.

Stolpe created a powerful woodcut--a parallel slash of outstretched wing and the elongated beak of a heron in profile--for the piece. As they prepared the design for printing, Rice and Young were simultaneously struck with the realization that this could be more than a broadside. "We saw this incredible strength in the imagery and the poem," recalls Rice. "We knew it had to go on--it had to become a book." Once the poster-sized broadside was published, the printers launched into their next project, the "Canticle" in book form.

Rice and Young, who had studied with Everson at Santa Cruz in the 1970s, planned to publish a fine-press edition of the entire eight-stanza poem. They envisioned the project as a collaborative effort with other UCSC alumni who had been Everson's students and who, like them, have since become recognized professionals in the book arts.

The collaboration was formed in short order. Felicia Rice of Moving Parts Press and Gary Young of Greenhouse Review Press were to be the printers; Peter Thomas of The Good Book Press, the papermaker; and Maureen Carey, the bookbinder. Stolpe agreed to join the group and originate a series of woodcut illustrations for the volume.

"It's a curious thing to get all these independent spirits together," says Young. "These are very independent people who are doing a project that each would ordinarily do individually. And that has been difficult; but it's also been very pleasant, as well."

As UCSC undergraduates, Rice, Thomas, and Carey had all worked as Everson's apprentices at the University Library's Lime Kiln Press; Young had been a student in Everson's legendary course "The Birth of a Poet" at Kresge College.

"We've all come to the point in our careers where we're getting a lot of attention," says Young. "We thought we would pay tribute to Bill and at the same time strut our own stuff, not in the pursuit of any kind of ego, but to show him that this is what we can do, and we can do it in great measure because of him."

Now just past his 80th birthday, Everson wrote "A Canticle to the Waterbirds" in 1950 during his fifteen months of service in a Catholic Worker House of Hospitality in West Oakland, where the "broken, shabby, wine-sotted, hopeless" men of skid row were offered food and refuge.

Seeking solitude, Everson and his co-workers would walk out to the Oakland estuary and along the quiet piers on summer evenings. One evening, wrote Everson in the preface to an earlier publication of the "Canticle," "Something sudden and conclusive broke bondage within me, something born of the nights and the weeks and the months. My mind shot north up the long coast of deliverance, encompassing all the areas of my ancient quest, that ineluctable instinct for the divine--the rivermouths and the sand-skirled beaches, sea-granite capes and bastions and basalt-founded cliffs-- where despite all man's meanness a presence remains unspoilable, the sacred zone between earth and sea, and pure--pure action, pure purpose, pure repose. Its image and instance is, of course, the birds."

Everson composed the entire poem in a single day. "Looking at the first draft now, a pencil scrawl on binder paper done in a kind of birdtrack uncial, it seems everything it was to be came in direct flow," noted Everson. "As a writer I am not a believer in the cult of nonrevision, but this poem is of the element. What it became it was...."

Their master's voice echoes throughout his former apprentices' 24-page edition of the poem, completed early this summer. Everson's clean, clear aesthetic, simple in its elegance, dictated the makeup of the volume--from paper, type, and ink to illustration and binding materials.

With Felicia Rice taking the role of project manager, the bookmakers held two group meetings where they discussed the preliminary details of the book, from the texture and color of the paper to various ideas that Stolpe had sketched for illustrations.

For the text, they elected to use Weiss--a typeface personally favored by Everson--and they borrowed several cases of it from their mentor's own Kingfisher Flat Press for the project. They decided on a horizontal format--19 inches in width by 14 inches in height--to carry the poem's long lines to their full extension. On being shown the page proofs--printed as never before with the lines unbroken­Everson is said to have marveled that he was "seeing the poem for the first time."

For the woodcuts, carved in masonite and mounted on wooden blocks for the presswork, Stolpe turned from the impressionistic style he had used for the broadside to a more subdued classical presentation of shorebirds for the book. He created full-page scenes of black-necked stilts and other avocets for the end papers and four- color images of nesting egrets and bitterns for a double-page spread. A cormorant decorates the title page leading into the poem, and-- like an avian exclamation point--a wingspread tern faces the closing lines of Everson's provocative text.

With the design concept in hand, the physical process of the book began.

Early in January, Peter Thomas began making up the 1,400-odd sheets of paper needed for the project. For the content of the paper, he used a formula of 75 percent rag, 20 percent linter, and 5 percent abaca. The rag gives the paper strength, the linter--short fibers that stick to cottonseed after it's ginned--adds softness and opacity, and the abaca--Manila hemp--helps to stabilize the sheet, releasing tension so that it flattens out.

Mixed with water in a beater, the various fibers are broken down and made into a mucilaginous pulp. A large dollop of the finished pulp is diluted in a huge vat of clean, fresh water. Then a mold--a wooden frame with wire mesh stretched over the top--and a deckle--another frame that fits over the top of the mold and keeps the pulp from running over the edges--are slowly dipped into the mixture and brought up horizontally through it, leaving a layer of pulp on the screen of the mold. This motion, known as the stroke, is critical to the papermaking process.

"I'm mostly a self-taught papermaker," says Thomas, "but several years ago I traveled to Europe to meet some older papermakers. By watching and talking with them, I was able to isolate those techniques that are essential to sheet forming. When I returned home, I applied those techniques to help develop my own methods."

Shaking the pulp-filled mold from side to side and forward to back gives paper its grain direction and helps to determine the thickness of the paper. After the sheet is formed and drained briefly, the deckle is removed and the sheet is rolled off onto a piece of wet felt. The felts and paper are stacked into "posts"--sets of 25 or 30 layers--and put into a press to squeeze out the water. Then the paper is removed from the felt and dried. "I use a drying system with blotter-corrugated cardboard, similar to that used for drying flowers," says Thomas. "That way, the sheets dry flat. It takes two days for the paper to dry in the dryer. It's good if the paper has a little while to set, to mellow after it's been made. Internal stresses sort of relax, and it gets into its most stable shape."

After two months of work, Thomas packaged the cream-white paper--watermarked "Santa Cruz 1992" and with Thomas's own watermark, a wooden shoe--and loaded it into his van for the trip across town and up the coast to Gary Young's Bear's Tooth Studio in Bonny Doon.

In the studio, Felicia Rice and Young had been busy finalizing the setting of type for the "Canticle" and locking the page galleys into metal frames called chases. As soon as the paper arrived, they were ready to ink the type and begin page pulls on Young's mammoth Vandercook Press.

"On a book like this, you want the inking to be the same throughout," said Young as he and Rice examined a freshly printed page with a magnifying glass. "You want to make sure that the ink's not slurring and that it's consistent. You don't want to have a dark page and then a light page. In effect, the first page sets the inking standard for every page to follow."

The sheets of paper are placed in position and fed into the press one by one. The pressman handturns the heavy metal cylinder of the Vandercook taking the paper over the chase and back again, leaving the inked type or image embossed in the sheet. Unlike the offset process in which the ink "kisses" the paper, leaving an image on the surface of it, letterpress bites cleanly into the fibers, depositing ink neatly in the depressions. "In letterpress, the type becomes one with the paper and gives a textural feel to the book," says Young. "The words come alive on the page."

After every pull, the printers held the sheets up to the light to make sure that the lines of poetry on one side of each page were in exact alignment with those on the opposite side. The most demanding pages were those of Stolpe's woodcut, "Nesting Egrets and Nesting Bitterns." Each sheet of the double-page spread required multiple runs--one for each of the four colors--and perfect alignment or registration of one color with the others.

Following eight weeks of intensive labor, 1,464 precisely printed pages in 61 sets of 24 were ready for delivery to Maureen Carey at her bindery just below the UCSC campus.

"Bill always used to say, 'Start thinking about your binding early on'," says Carey. "And he's right. The binding has to be considered at the beginnning. You may not have to have a finished idea of the ornament--that end of it--but you've got to have a good idea of the structure of the book--the covering materials, the weight of the board (the foundation for the front and back bookcovers), what type of thread you're going to use, the type of sewing--those kind of details, before you start printing."

Carey decided on a lighter weight board to give some feel of flexibility to the book. To cover the boards, she chose a rugged weave of linen and cotton made up in a beige flecked with grey and black, suggestive of grasslands. Since the spine was too narrow, the title was to be placed on the cover. "We tried some stamping experiments on the cloth," says Carey, "but it didn't stamp well, so that meant we would print the title on a strip of paper and recess it into a well. Felicia had some Moriki, a Japanese paper, in a red that perfectly matched the color we'd used on the title page in the book, so we decided to use that as an accent under the title strip."

Myriad techniques of measuring, cutting, collating, sewing, and gluing--many of them handed down through the centuries--are involved in the actual binding process. Carey calculates that she spent seven hours binding each of the 61 copies of the "Canticle" that were to be signed and numbered for the edition.

Turning the pages of the first completed copy, Carey remarks on its flow. "The beauty of the type on the cover and the red of the Moriki in the well behind it moves you right into the book," she muses. "As you open it, you go from the grassland onto the beach with the avocets and black-necked stilts, then out into the marshland with the nesting bitterns and egrets. Next, you're into the poem; by the time you finish it, you're out of the book and onto the beach again. As you close the cover, you find yourself returning to the grassland. The binding is simple, not ornamental," she says. "It encompasses and protects the poem and its imagery; it doesn't overwhelm them. No one element of the book overpowers any other."

As for their mentor, William Everson sums up his reaction in an Author's Note that concludes the volume: "I take joy in the company of my apprentices who learned well everything I taught them, without requirement," he writes. "The consolations of life yield such evocative dimensions. My gratitude is complete."