by Maria Popova
“You pit your faculties against concrete problems. The victories are
concrete, definable, touchable.”
Celebrated diarist Anaïs Nin has
previously given us some keen insights on life, mass movements, Paris vs. New York, and what makes a great city. Besides artist and author, Nin was also a publishing entrepreneur. In
January 1942, she sets up her own small press in a loft on Macdougal Street,
and soon set out to print and self-publish a new edition of her third book, Winter of Artifice, teaching herself typesetting and doing most of the manual work
herself.
From The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3:
1939-1944 (public library) comes this beautiful passage on the joy of handcraft, written in
January of 1942 — a particularly timely meditation in the age of today’s
thriving letterpress generation and the Maker Movement. (Especially interesting
is the parallel to what developer Ellen Ullman articulates in describing the mesmerism of programming software.)
Anaïs Nin operating her handpress in Macdougal
Street studio
The
relationship to handcraft is a beautiful one. You are related bodily to a solid
block of metal letters, to the weight of the trays, to the adroitness of
spacing, to the tempo and temper of the machine. You acquire some of the weight
and solidity of the metal, the strength and power of the machine. Each triumph
is a conquest by the body, fingers, muscles. You live with your hands, in acts
of physical deftness.
You
pit your faculties against concrete problems. The victories are concrete,
definable, touchable. A page of perfect printing. You can touch the page you
wrote. We exult in what we master and discover. Instead of using one’s energy
in a void, against frustrations, in anger against publishers, I use it on the
press, type, paper, a source of energy. Solving problems, technical, mechanical
problems. Which can be solved.
If I
pay no attention, then I do not lock the tray properly, and when I start
printing the whole tray of letters falls into the machine. The words which
first appeared in my head, out of the air, take body. Each letter has a weight.
I can weigh each word again, to see if it is the right one.
I
use soap boxes as shelves, to hold tools, paper, inks. I arrive loaded with old
rags for the press, old towels for the hands, coffee, sugar.
[…]
The press mobilized our
energies, and is a delight. At the end of the day you can see your work, weigh
it. It is done. It exists.
Nin then offers a
wonderfully vivid vignette, in which her partner in the venture, Gonzalo,
engages in a wild wrestling match with the press — a near-primal struggle we’ve
all experienced in the face of an unruly letterpress or even a plain old office
printer jam:
Once
there was something wrong with the press. It did not work. Gonzalo would not
send for the workman, or the repairman. He literally battled with the press, as
if it were a bronco, a bull, an animal to be tamed. His hair flew around his
face, perspiration fell from his forehead, his centaur feet were kicking the
pedals. The machine groaned.
It seemed almost like a
physical battle which he intended to win by force. He towered over it. He
seemed bigger than the machine. I never saw anything more primitive, more like
a battle between an ancient race and a new type of monster. Both as stubborn,
both strong, both violent. Gonzalo won. He was breathing heavily. The wheel
suddenly began to spin again. He looked absolutely triumphant.
Ultimately, the practical
handiwork is for Nin a disciplining agent for the creative process of the
conceptual. In a diary entry from April of the same year, she writes:
Take
the letter O out of the box, place it next to the T, then a comma, then a
space, and so on.
Count
page 1, 2, 3, and so on. Select the good ones while Gonzalo runs the machine.
Day after day. We are nearing the end. I have difficulties with the separation
of words. And it is a problem in setting type.
(My
separation of the word lo-ve became years later the favorite of the
faultfinders!)
The writing is often
improved by the fact that I live so many hours with a page that I am able to
scrutinize it, to question the essential words. In writing, my only discipline
has been to cut out the unessential. Typesetting is like film cutting. The
discipline of typesetting and printing is good for the writer.
Nin recounts the
hard-earned triumph of her handcrafted masterpiece:
The book was finished May
fifth. Gonzalo and I printed the cover. The bookbinder was objecting to the
nonstandard measurements. The machines were set for standard measurements. We
finally found a bookbinder willing to bind three hundred books of an odd size.
It was delivered all bound May fifteenth. The Gotham Book Mart gave a party for
it. The book created a sensation by its beauty. The typography by Gonzalo, the
engravings by Ian Hugo were unique. The bookshop was crowded. Otto Fuhrman,
teacher of graphic arts at New York University, praised the book. Art galleries
asked to carry it. I received orders from collectors, a letter from James
Laughlin, offering me a review in New Directions by anyone I
chose.
A surviving hard-bound copy of the limited edition
of Winter of Artifice, self-published by Anaïs Nin in 1942, with engravings by
Ian Hugo.
The book was, indeed, stunning. (The artwork
on cover of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944 is also by Ian Hugo, an engraving he created for another one of Nin’s
books, Under a Glass Bell.)
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