D Press originated in Alaska in 1967 after I acquired a 1927 Kelsey Excelsior handpress. I’d come home from a day’s work at the back shop of The Ketchikan Daily News, and I’d print 100 pages and hang them to dry on a cotton string along the attic roof of my apartment. On the weekends, I bound my books together, set more type, and prepared for the next week of printing. The printing was smudgy and uneven, but I pressed on. The typefaces were worn, so I over-inked and pressed harder, pressing the letters into the paper, embossing the page, letting the ink bleed through. Grant Risdon taught me how to cut linoleum blocks, and in a rush of visual imagery, I tipped my linoleum nudes into the books, alternating poems and blocks, giving color to the words.

  After reading How to Live in the Woods on $10/Week, I moved wife and child and press to Deep Bay, fifteen miles from the nearest road by boat. D Press moved into a new dimension. Pouring the words right into the type case seemed natural. I began to break my poems into smaller and smaller units and tried to express myself with just the Anglo Saxon. I was printing with 60 point Bodoni type, and this limited the number of big words that could be arranged in a 4X6 inch type case.

  People said, “These aren’t poems! What are you doing?” Well, I was working with the physics of the poem, the subatomic particles, semiotic murmurs, getting down to the hub and nub, nothing behind itself, no ideas but in things as applied to the letters of the alphabet. My idea of the book consisted of five poems: one political, one religious, one erotic, one psychological, and one about language.

 

a

y

e

i

o

u

 

I posited the vowels, the basic building blocks—anagogical in the sense that these sounds can be considered sacred. Internal rhyme scheme, i with y. Reads, “Yes, I owe you.” Zen take on the alphabet, beginner’s mind discovery that if I wrote a longish poem, I could find shorter poems in it. I looked for visual echoes.

 

Something primal about the stitch

 

On my return to the Bay Area, in 1975, while working at Ārif Press, I learned how to make a signature stitch from Wesley Tanner, and I applied this bindery technique to my book making format, fusing of high-tech and low-tech elements.

  You need a needle with a large eye. Darning needles are dull; get a sewing needle long enough to grasp. I use linen bookbinding thread, which has a strong weave. Dental floss? Sure, I’ve used that, but book-binding thread is best. Cut the thread to length by wrapping it once around the length of the book; thread your needle with a few inches of string sticking through and punch it through the middle, from the inside, outward. Make sure you go straight, or the stitch will come out off center. Next, go to the top or bottom of the spine on the back cover, a couple inches from the edge, and poke straight through to the inside. Then, go back to the center hole, and, being careful not to run the needle through the thread, stick the needle through the center hole. Now, go to the opposite end of the spine and poke through the back cover to the inside. The stitch is complete except for tying it off. Run the needle and what’s left of the thread under the piece going into the center hole and cinch the two ends tight, not so taut that the book bows but taut enough to remove any slack. The two ends should be about the same length; but if not, work the shorter end forward, and tie the two ends in a square knot, not a slip knot. Trim the two ends to equal length. I leave them long, so if the knot slips, you have enough thread to retie the ends. Sew together a few pages and, voilà, you have a chapbook.

 

And what is a chapbook?

 

According to the 1911 Encyclopedia (www.1911encyclopedia.org), the chapbook was first mentioned in 1824, when the bibliographer Dibdin described a work as being a chapbook, printed in rather a neat black letter. The source of the word is from the OE, chap, to buy and sell, and is a comparatively modern name applied by booksellers and bibliophiles to the stitched tracts written for the common people and circulated in England, Scotland and the American colonies from the late 15^th century onward by itinerant dealers, or chapmen. I’ve also heard that the derivation of the word comes from an apron worn by the chapman, which had pockets that contained items for sale, but this might well be a term confused with the leather pants called chaps (from the Mexican, chaparajos) worn by the American cowboys to protect their legs from the bramble bush known as chaparral. In Poets & Writers Online (www.pw.org/mag/ae_trent.htm), Therese Eiben claims that the origin of the word is either cheap book, sold at newsstands during the era of Penny Dreadfuls or chapter book, because of its scant number of pages.

  There are many kinds of books, books such as a pre-Columbian codex (where a manuscript is painted on strips of deerskin which are glued together to form a single band, then folded accordion-fashion and glued onto wooden boards) to Jackson Mac Low’s pages made from two-by-fours. The signature stitch has been used since the renaissance, where it was employed to sew a quarto page (a large sheet of paper, printed on both sides, folded twice and cut along the folded edge to form eight pages). Sewing the pages to the cover is part of the foundation of the book, what holds it together, and it contains a utilitarian element as well as an esthetic element. Jerome Rothenberg remarks in his editor’s note to The Book, Spiritual Instrument (Granary Books, New York, 1996), “To say again what seems so hard to get across: there is a primal book as there is a primal voice, & it is the task of our poetry & art to recover it—in our minds & in the world at large.”

 

Toward the book through the computer

 

One of the basic uses of a computer is to solve the problem of justifying lines. Justified lines are the even alignment of words at the margins of a text. It is the demarcation of where a line of type ends, not the end of a rhythmic line, where the number of scanned syllables makes one line a bit longer than the next because of the constituent parts of the sentence in various scripts and fonts.  It’s the printer’s task to choose the right font and make the line end at a given spot, to choose the point size of the font so the longest line fits in the type case, within the margins. Poetry is usually justified to the left margin and proceeds as a dance of consonant and vowel. The carcass of prose is anchored to both margins with hyphenated word breaks. In letterpress printing, lines are justified by filling the space between pieces of hand-set lead type. In a computer, this operation is accomplished in a text box by clicking the desired format on the tool bar.

 

Mapping the book

 

Mapping the book. First, I estimate the size of the book. Then, I make a dummy of the book by figuring out how much of my text will fit on a page, say 8½x11 inches, folded in half, or half-letter size. I count the lines and estimate how many pages it will take, adding a title page, a page for acknowledgements, a dedication, and so forth. I divide by four since there are going to be four pages on a sheet of paper folded in half. I take that number of blank sheets, fold them, and write the page number and an abbreviation of what text will appear on each page. This guides me since the opposite sides of the page are not consecutive. For example, in a 32-page book, page 1 is next to page 32, page 2 is coupled with page 31. If a given page is going to be blank, I write “blank” on it. I design the page setup in landscape and create my master pages, using either Publisher or Quark programs. All this to say, if I want to add a new page of text, I have to think in terms of four pages.

    Although the cost per copy decreases slightly when you reach certain print amounts, the unit cost per book is essentially the same for one book as it is for one hundred. This is in contrast to offset and letterpress processes where the setup cost is much higher and the runs must be longer in order to make back the initial investment in labor and materials. I make short runs. I use the book as an editing tool and print off one copy at a time until I am satisfied with the layout and content, then I run a handful of copies to be archived in the collections of a few friends. I sell books at readings and exchange books with poets that I meet, but, at present, I am not as interested in marketing my books as I am in the process of creation.

 

Backward process

 

I work from the final form, the book that is already accomplished, like in a Tantric visualization, I develop the book by extending the vision, adding the ornaments, which are the poems.  Marllarmé conceived of the book as a spiritual exercise. To me, the book fuses Newtonian sequence and Blakian simultaneity. It’s a vehicle to write poems, the book as pen. I am writing with the book.

  Jack Spicer, winning out against the poem, is my inspiration for molding serial poetry into small books. The poem arrives on the page, whether I collage it together from bits or carve it from a single block, whether I dream it or work it out as a puzzle. Once it makes it onto a sheet of paper, the poem is already a part of a book. And, once in a book, it gets lonely, wants to speak to other poems.

  I let it breathe, let it percolate, let it draw to itself it’s magnetic companions, let them be a piece of a larger poem. The process begins with a metaphor, perhaps, or a joke off the washroom wall, some gossamer thought, a little synaptic firing in my mind. I get these firings into words and onto a page because I have developed a modicum of mind-hand coordination, and the words might even mean something. I just keep making books, this book overlapping with the next, always leaving a bit undone, like a Navajo weaver, letting the spirits come and go.

Richard Denner
http://www.sonic.net/~rychard/

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