Horror Vacuui by Alastair Johnston (1986)

Horror Vascuui

Alastair Johnston

Jungle Garden Press

Fairfax, CA

(1986)

There just isn't anything like getting a surprise item in the mail from the author themselves, which is how I got to hold, admit, and now write (perhaps intelligently) about this specimen of letterpress excellence. 

Jungle Garden Press was started by Marie C. Dern in Berkeley, CA during 1974. Berkeley, like Iowa City, and other college towns of note, became a hub of creative expression and liberation. All the books published during its run (1974-2006) were letterpressed and hand stitched. When asked about her process and intentions, Marie C. Dern with Jungle Garden Press in San Francisco said: “My intention in printing and bookmaking is to elucidate a text by the shape, binding, design, typography, and drawings of books, to make the experience of reading beautiful to the touch and the eyes as well as the mind, and to make the text understandable to the reader in the way I interpret it.” Jungle Garden Press was well known in the Graphic Arts community and their archives are stored at the University of Utah special collections space in Salt Lake City. 

According to Mr. Johnston, he was asked to provide a mss. for publication and whipped this together in short order. Some of the poems seem almost LANGUAGE poetry-esque although I am not certain Mr. Johnston would agree. 

There are some well known names attached to this project. Walter Hamady (founder of Perishable Press Limited) suggested the title. The book was designed and printed by Marie (Christensen) Dern. It was bound by Shelley Hoyt. The cover paper was painted by Victoria Weiss-Bohlman. The color drawing which appears on the page facing the title page was done by Carl Dern. 

Outside of something created by Perishable Press Limited, I can not imagine a more lovely and well conceived book than this one. It's astounding and I graceful to have it in my collection. 

it bears repeating....

It bears repeating: I am not a cheerleader. I am a publisher as well as a poet. I write this blog to acknowledge the work of publishers and poets and "one-time" presses that bubble to the surface through the existence of the work. If someone thinks I should only focus on the poems, they miss my point. Or rather, they are not aware of the quote by El Lissitsky that is a guiding principle of mine:

The book must be the unified work of the author and the designer. As long as this is not the case, splendid exteriors will constantly be produced for unimportant contents, and visa-versa.
El Lissitzky
from Do Not Separate Form from Content!(1931)

If a chapbook visually sucks but the words are good, I will say so. If the chapbook is stunning but the words are god-awful, I will also say so. No tree should ever be felled for tripe or self-serving navel-worshipping. If you have a friend whose work you like a lot and it doesn't matter to you what their chapbook looks like: that fine, but that's not my "job". I respect the people who have taken the time and considerable effort to make a thing of beauty. Putting out a book on the cheapest photo-copy paper available with the grainiest picture imaginable and touting it as your "work of art", I will decline climbing on your bandwagon.

Certain publishers from the past, say from the late 1970s through today, deserve to be recognized as establishing the structure by which "the bar" is placed, let alone raised. The truth is that they publishers cared what their chapbooks LOOKED LIKE as much as the words or images, or both, were INSIDE. I have listed some of these presses before but it is worth mentioning again: Toothpaste Press (Allan Kornblum), Perishable Press Limited (Walter Hamady), The Fathom Press (Robie Liscomb), The Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs (Brenda Iljima), Pentagram Press (Michael Tarachow), and many others.

I would urge lovers of the chapbook form to image that there is a history to this all, that you are part of it, and that you haven't created the wheel. It's been done. Dozens of times over. Hundreds of times over and then some. There is a historical element to my blog that I perhaps haven't overtly presented but I think it's time that I did. We are all part of something that dates back to the 1940s. If you wish to consider the chap(ter) books that were published in England earlier, then we are talking about the 1600s.

My particular focus is poetry chapbooks of the second half of the 20th century and now into the 21st.