We are coming along all right, and I think we'll finish on time
or nearly on time. We're far enough along, in fact, that I can ven-
ture to say that this is the most compact and simple presentation
of poetry that we've managed, that no other book of poems we've done
(certainly not The Wedge) presents the poetry so clearly and obtrudes
the "fine printer" so little. You remember what you once told me
about how you wanted the book, how the king of England maybe did
after all have some function if only he weren't too pompous? Well,
we've had that on our minds. Also, the book is the most craftsmanly.
To make it so has been our principal attention, and we haven't
given any thought to making it "beautiful."

Oh yes, we'll need to have the list of acknowledgments as soon
as you can get to it.

Yrs &c.

The Cummington Press

Craftsmen Printers and Publishers at Cummington School of the Arts

Telephone number 2612: Frazier House: Cummington, Massachusetts

15 June 1948

Dear Bill,

We send you by parcel post today the first signature of the signed copies for your signature. This Highclere paper is soft and the ink will blur a little, but not enough to hurt I guess. We're sending 62 copies, two extra in case you blot one or the binder should spoil a copy. These are to be signed on page 1 towards the top, about in the same place that the title occupies on page 3. The blue ink you use to sign your letters to us would be fine--or black, as you wish.

Will you send these after signing direct to Peter Franck, the bookbinder? Here's a label for you to use. The sheets can be packed in the same box (unless it gets beat up on the way to you), and there should be enough crumpled paper around them that they won't be smashed.

Last night Paul and I met some new neighbors, a couple who've been in Cummington only a year or so. They've opened a tourist house and restaurant directly down the hill from us, and we had a steak dinner last night for 75¢. The man, named Joseph Myer, is Swiss, snow-white hair, long sideburns, an eye of palest blue; his wife is from Cardiff Wales and says she came up to die but has taken a new lease on life. They are fine, plain people. I tell you all this because they came from a little town near Rutherford and said they used to have you as physician.

Best,

The Cummington Press: Cummington, Massachusetts: 11/13/49

Dear Bill, If the New Colophon article gave you any pleasure, I'm glad. And I appreciate your kindness writing us about it. After all, there are things important beyond all this fiddle, and the little poem by Marianne Moore seems to me to say all I intended and much better than I. People require, though, what you call the "load of ill-defined matter." And it does seem to me that a book is a public appearance and should no more present literature sloppily than an orchestra symphonies or an actress Shakespeare.

Any time you can make it up here, we'll both be pleased to see you. There's no need to let us know too far ahead--we're most always on the spot, though we occasionally have to go to town.

THE CUMMINGTON PRESS

Printers & Publishers at Cummington School of the Arts

CUMMINGTON: MASSACHUSETTS: U.S.A.

22 March 1950

Dear Bill,

Can we start setting up your Two Pendants? The
princess bought two poems from me--did Paul write
you that?

I don't know of anyone writing (or who has written, for that matter) who effects such a constant and moving realization of things as "fresh matter," as you have in all these later things. This in reference to Paterson III and your group in New Directions XI, for which I am, believe me, grateful. If it weren't that the Pendants are so marvelously a thing in themselves, and will make a genuine book, I'd be tempted to beg from you some of these others to go with it. We've ordered some paper from Finland especially for the Pendants (the Swedish was too brittle, too hard-sized for them), a candid, fresh, delicate paper that you'll like. It should get here around April first.

Paul too sends

All best,

Cummington

April Fools Day 1950

Dear Bill,

Here are proofs of the first of the two Pendants,
all we have type enough for. Please don't worry about
the placement of page numbers: as they appear in the
proofs, they're the shards of an unsuccessful experi-
ment. Please do give attention to the long-tailed
letters we've used certain places that seemed to re-
quire a pause or break but don't have punctuation:
Do you like them or not? if not, we'll take them out.
Is the motto "The particulars of morning are better
than night's vague images," meant to go with the
first or to serve for both Pendants? (By the way,
Paul somewhat objects to "better" as being a little
moralistic and suggests "fresher" in its place; I
think also of "purer": what do you think?)

It is a magical poem; setting the type I fell as
deep in its spell as on first reading. The underlying
connections firmly lock without sticking through,
and swell in the fertile dark. You should consider
carefully what's put with it, whether anything should
be. We don't know your "Birth of Venus," only the
beautiful Song from it that appeared in The Tempers;
I'd guess it's fine, you're the doctor. And the prose
piece Theory sounds good too. Things fit together by
contrast as well as similarity of course. The Clouds
&c is well unified through its many thrusts from
diverse directions. But the Pendants, unlike the
poems in the earlier book, contains in one (or two
possibly) shape the diversity. Hence the rapid and
unannounced transitions. Somehow (aside from the
other considerations) a group of shorter things with
the Pendants doesn't seem so right as the prose or
The Birth of Venus (which I'd assume is a longer
poem) might be. How about both?

Thanks for your check, which we are returning
because we wished to give you the pamphlets--and
which even if in order would be excessive.

The paper hasn't got here yet from Finland, so
there's no particular hurry with the proofs. I hope
you can get up here while we're printing the book
--not that the technical process itself is much of
a show.

With thanks,

THE CUMMINGTON PRESS

11 May 1950

Dear Bill,

The paper still hasn't got here from Finland, and we're about out of patience. Meanwhile, though, Paul's been improving his time learning to etch, and there'll be two small etchings, printed in relief, for the Pendants. Now these won't look like the etchings in the academies at all.

We didn't think ever send you a bill for the copies of the Cricket pamphlet mailed to Wells and Zukofsky. One's enclosed, and thanks.

What would you think of the following for the titlepage:

The Lesson
TWO PENDANTS
&
To Close
by
William Carlos Williams

The late spring is finally busting out, everything mellown. I'll let you know immediately the paper comes (for we intend to put the Pendants to press straight off it does), and we'll hope you can come see us then--the etching *is* a show.

All best,

Cummington / 28 May 1950

Dear Bill,

The Finnish paper's either in Boston or en route here. I'm sorry
that the delay in its arrival has been a source of annoyance to you
as well as to us. We haven't felt quite easy about going ahead with
the Pendants: months ago I wrote Princess Caetini asking if it would
be all right for us to go ahead since the poem had already appeared
in her magazine, but she's never replied. We'd have been best satis-
fied to have gone ahead with the book directly your ms came, but
understood monetary loquacity. Perhaps we should have got another
paper as soon as she'd issued the poem, but our money was tied up
with the Finnish and we expected its arrival from day to day.

You mention putting the material in another book for late fall.
Is this Laughlin's issue of your Complete Collected? He wrote me
about this the other day, and I'd thought to reply that you own the
rights to everything of yours we've published but that it would be
a favor to us if we had a chance to sell the Pendants, which aren't
published yet. Although the book will be finished before September
certainly, even six months' grace doesn't give us an even chance
for selling even the 300 copies--"The Clouds" isn't out of print
even yet, several copies of the signed not being sold.

I see we're sort of a fifth wheel anyhow. Paul's left, without
ceremony; he was to return yesterday, but didn't; probably he'll
return shortly, but I haven't heard from him and cannot be sure.
So there may not be etchings. The poems are so moving to me that I
want to print them despite everything. Maybe we'd better make it
100 copies? We'll bind the book here, can bind it up as it sells,
and so have it ready very soon after printing's done.

Please do come over from Bard. I'm reasonably sure the Pendants
will be in press by then.

All best,

THE CUMMINGTON PRESS

25 July 1950

Dear Bill,

Have you seen Thomas's "Twenty-six Poems" printed by Mardersteig and published by Laughlin? Its price is $15.00. Our "Pendants" book would have been better typographically, included two original etchings, and appeared in a smaller edition. You are, or should be, better honored in your own country than Thomas.

It's the waste I regret. Having worked some time on the format, ordered the appropriate paper, done studies for the illustrations, set a good portion of the type, and focused the book generally, we feel that a work of art has been frustrated for us. If that phraseology strikes you as high-falutin, pick your own words.

We have to be more circumspect in the future.

I've written you what I think of the poems. I still think it. Believe me, we look forward to the "possible future writing" that you mention.

All best,

THE BOOK OF JOB: XIX

out of the world. He shall neither have son nor nephew among his people, nor any remaining in his dwellings. They that come after him shall be as-tonied at his day, as they that went before were affrighted. Surely such are the dwellings of the wicked, and this is the place of him that knoweth not God.'

Then Job answered and said, 'How long will ye vex my soul, and break me in pieces with words? These ten times have ye reproached me: ye are not ashamed that ye make yourselves strange to me. And be it indeed that I have erred, mine error remaineth with myself. If indeed ye will magnify yourselves against me, and plead against me my reproach; know now that God hath overthrown me, and hath compassed me with his net. Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard: I cry aloud, but there is no judgment. He hath fenced up my way that I cannot pass, and he hath set darkness in my paths. He hath stripped me of my glory, and taken the crown from my head. He hath destroyed me on every side, and I am gone: and mine hope hath he removed like a tree. He hath also kindled his wrath against me, and he counteth me unto him as one of his enemies. His troops come together, and raise up their way against me, and encamp round about my tabernacle. He hath put my brethren far from me, and mine acquaintance are verily estranged from me. My kinsfolk have failed, and my familiar friends have forgotten me. They that dwell in mine house, and my maids, count me for a stranger: I am an alien in their sight. I called my servant, and he gave me no answer; I entreated him with my mouth. My breath is strange to my wife, though I entreated for the children's sake of mine own body. Yea, young children despised me; I arose, and they spake against me. All my inward friends abhorred me: and they whom I loved are turned against me. My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.'

'Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me. Why do ye persecute me as God, and are not satisfied with my flesh? Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever! For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine

CHAPTER XIX
Job, complaining of his
friends' cruelty, sheweth
there is misery enough in
him to feed their cruelty.
He craveth pity. He be-
lieveth the resurrection.

48

'He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment....'

THE BOOK OF JOB FROM THE CUMMINGTON PRESS will be limited to three-hundred copies, printed by hand, in two colors, on dampened Dacian paper from the Worthy Paper Company. The types are Poliphilus and Blado, set by the Plimpton Press on the monotype and at Cummington by hand. The three preceding pages exactly represent the title, a page of text, and a full-page illustration. All the illustrations, twelve full-page and some twenty-five of various smaller sizes, have been engraved in wood especially for this edition by Gustav Wolf, who will collaborate in their printing. The binding, in calf and paper, will be by John Marchi. Your subscription is solicited now, at $10.00 the copy. After publication, probably in March, the price will be $12.50. This offer expires February 5.

GUSTAV WOLF had in Germany considerable reputation as a graphic artist of powerful phantasy. But upon Hitler's ascendency, he left for America. Here he has already published a Vision of Manhattan, etchings that show his versatile gift undismayed by towering strangeness, an inward climate equal to the most overwhelming landscape. That power informs his vision of Job.

ALFRED YOUNG FISHER is author of the long philosophic poem, The Ghost in the Underblows, and of both prose and poetry published in New Directions. He teaches at Smith College. In Job, Mr. Fisher finds a poetic vision of the same order as Dante's, and helps to discover its theme.

CUMMINGTON · MASSACHUSETTS

THE CUMMINGTON PRESS

BY HARRY DUNCAN

*With a Poem by Marianne Moore*

LOOKING back at the origins of an endeavor that is still engaging involves a temptation. Orpheus, I suppose, succumbed to it when he turned his backward glance into fatal reassurance. The temptation is particularly strong if the endeavor seems even yet to be in its beginnings, without fruits which one can display as its fulfilment. One would like to find at least a purpose manifest from the start to direct the ends still served, a point of reference among so much that has been callow and haphazard. But if such purpose guided the origins of The Cummington Press, I cannot discover it. There were of course "things in the air" at which I could snatch; but a plan clear and articulate is another matter. What I do find is sufficiently ineffable: the valiant, impassioned character of Katharine Frazier, founder and till her death director of Cummington School of the Arts, and certainly, if anybody was, the only begetter of the Press.

Within the School (which is in session during the summer and offers courses in writing, painting, music, and allied subjects), there used to be an organization called Town Meeting, intended like its prototype for self-government by the electorate, which comprised students and teachers. Miss Frazier managed to throw elections and otherwise corrupt pure democratic procedure so that Town Meeting did work with some efficiency, occasionally expressing concerns larger than immediate ones. Each member paid a Poll Tax, compulsory and levied alike on rich and poor in the true New England manner; and part of the proceeds were spent by an Acquisitions Committee (of which Miss Frazier was ex officio a member) for books, reproductions, and recordings to increase the School library. In the summer of 1939, more than usual must have been in the Acquisitions Fund, for a painting student, who is also a craftsman in furniture and jewelry, moved

From THE NEW COLOPHON Part VII.

THE CUMMINGTON PRESS

that it be spent for a hand press; Miss Frazier, I suspect, had done some lobbying beforehand, and his motion carried.

The will of her people having spoken, Miss Frazier with inveterate fervor set out to learn how to invest their money well and to master, even in her sixtieth year, yet another exacting technique. She appealed directly to the highest oracles; and Messrs. Carl Rollins, Ward Ritchie, Dard Hunter, Will Ransom, and others gave generously of advice. When a Taylor press (aet. circ. 80) had been located, she induced Frederic W. Goudy to look it over. He approved it, but said that missing tympanes and frisket must be supplied. The Poll Taxes being now obviously insufficient, friends of the School were solicited and made up the deficit. And by the summer of 1940, the press had been set up in a corridor of the old barn that serves the School as men's dormitory, a font of Centaur type laid in cases, and all the minor essentials procured as advised by Mr. John Kraushar, printer of the School catalog.

A rickety frame of soft wood that came with the press looked useless and nothing like “tympan” and “frisket” (words of charming quaintness if uncertain application) as expounded in Ringwald’s *American Encyclopaedia of Printing* (Philadelphia, 1871). An expert cabinetmaker and a welder from Cummington village made, respectively, an inner and outer tympan of oak and a frisket of steel according to plans drawn up from the *Encyclopaedia*. The tympanes were strong, beautifully made, and fitted so perfectly that the inner tympan rubbed the sides of the platen; and the frisket weighed ten pounds. Not until years later did we discover their inadequacies and clumsiness of design, due to our mistaken assumption that proper specifications could be made from an encyclopaedic definition and our theoretical analysis of the required functions. For hand printing, being a craft, presents difficulties different from those of the fine arts, different even more from those of discussion and research. Its principle is simple enough—merely to press paper evenly against type set and inked; and its tools and gear involve nothing more complex than the inclined plane or the toggle joint. But in practice its success depends upon innumerable rules of thumb, knacks acquired only through experience, when they become almost unthinking responses. Such experience was once handed down most efficiently from master to apprentice. But we, attempting to control the process with the inexperienced and Olympian intellect, had our trials and, inexorably, our errors for instructors. And we came to feel the actual process as the Shadow falling between idea and reality, a baffling ordeal to show up our incompetence and humble our pride.

222

## SEASONS OF THE SOUL

Allor porsi la mano un poco avante,
e colsi un ramicel da un gran pruno;
e il tronco suo gridò: Perchè mi schiante?

### I. Summer

SUMMER, this is our flesh,
The body you let mature;
If now while the body is fresh
You take it, shall we give
The heart, lest heart endure
The mind's tattering
Blow of greedy claws?
Shall mind itself still live
If like a hunting king
It falls to the lion's jaws?

FROM ALLEN TATE'S *The Winter Sea*

223

THE CUMMINGTON PRESS

I believe, however, that this very quality of printing, its simultaneous dis-
ciplining of body and mind, was one thing that engaged Miss Frazier's inter-
est and held it till her death.

In any case, the press became before long a central concern of hers and so
of the School. At first it sat idle in the barn, the object of vague hopes that
painting students might turn to block printing and writing students to setting
up their own poems and stories. I believe I was the first to play with the
types; and when I showed Miss Frazier something or other I'd set up (some
verses, I think, of Robert Frost), she immediately proposed, being anxious
perhaps that so massive an investment not be disregarded, that we print a
quotation from *Ars Typographica*:

Simplicity is the last thing learned. It comes from simple
thinking, not from a conscious attempt to be simple.

The types, when I came to set them, seemed singularly rigid, unplastic; so, wish-
ing perhaps to be "original" and to expand so short a text into more impres-
sive dimensions, I letter-spaced the lowercase letters and used em quadrats be-
tween words. Thus, the maxim of the text was negatively demonstrated in
our first attempt. Our second was more coöperative. A collection was made
of student writings, eleven poems and a short story, and given the title
*From This Hill 1940*; after the summer-session had closed, a number of us
stayed, taking turns at stove, sink, composing stick, brayer, and press-handle,
and in two weeks finished the printing. We had a good time, as I remember,
despite our ignorance of consistent leading, f ligatures, imposition, proper
makeready, and other essential matters. Later, all remaining copies of this
ugly pamphlet were burnt; and I think that none of us, even at the time,
espaned disappointment at our results. Still, doing it had taught us a little
and some of us had got the taste for printing. The next spring two of us with
Miss Frazier had the temerity to set up and print a longer text, old letters to
and from the captain and crew of a whaler. An imprint "The Cummington
Press" was decided upon and set at the bottom of the title; and the book
was hard bound and put on general sale. We had dampened the sheets,
and the results, while still far from satisfactory, were enough improved to
encourage us.

Greater impetus came from that summer's writing course in the School.
A new plan, the conference system, had been adopted, and five leading
writers came to conduct it. Would the Press have developed without the

224

HARRY DUNCAN

interest of these men of letters, and of the others who came the next summer,
and without the direction that they gave its publishing program? Certainly
it must have developed differently. Reprints might otherwise have been a
recourse, but new editing or illustrations to give them point we probably
could not have managed. Americana, a line begun with the whaling letters,

A FACE: A POEM BY
MARIANNE CRAIG MOORE

PRINTED AT THE CUMMINGTON PRESS

FOR THE NEW COLOPHON

MDCCCCXXXXVIIIJ

grew up in the Press. We even drew up a plan whereby, we
hoped, the Press would become the first in a series of craft-units, to include
ceramics, weaving, bookbinding, and cabinet-making, and to compose a
nucleus for the re-growth of the School after the war. I regret that this com-
munity of craftsmen did not materialize. Although the quixotism of the

225

THE CUMMINGTON PRESS

In any case, the press became before long a central concern of hers and so
of the School. At first it sat idle in the barn, the object of vague hopes that
painting students might turn to block printing and writing.

"I AM not treacherous, callous, jealous, superstitious,
supercilious, venomous, or absolutely hideous":
studying and studying its expression,
exasperated desperation
though at no real impasse,
would gladly break the glass;

encourage us.

224

HARRY DUNCAN

when love of order, ardor, uncircuitous simplicity,
with an expression of inquiry, are all one needs to be!
Certain faces, a few, one or two—or one
face photographed by recollection—
to my mind, to my sight,
must remain a delight.

The Press. We even drew up a plan whereby, we
hoped, the Press would become the first in a series of craft-units, to include
ceramics, weaving, bookbinding, and cabinet-making, and to compose a
nucleus for the re-growth of the School after the war. I regret that this com-
munity of craftsmen did not materialize. Although the quixotism of the

225

THE CUMMINGTON PRESS

In any case, the press became before long a central concern of hers and so
of the School. At first it sat idle in the barn, the object of vague hopes that
printing students might have to found a school.

This poem was in "Horizon" (London) for October 1947.

§ About 2500 copies pulled

by hand from Romanée type on Hand and Arrows paper.

Cummington, Massachusetts. June 1949.

W W & H D finx. & fecerunt.

encourage us.

224

HARRY DUNCAN

interest of these men of letters, and of the others who came the next summer,
and without the direction that they gave its publishing program? Certainly
it must have developed differently. Reprints might otherwise have been a
recourse, but new editing or illustrations to give them point we probably
could not have managed. Americana, a line begun with the whaling letters,
might have been extended—Miss Frazier had already done considerable work
on another batch of old letters in the Jones Library at Amherst, and letters
to one John Albee from Emerson, Longfellow, Lafcadio Hearn, and others,
had been offered us. Or, perhaps most probably, the Press might have re-
mained a local interest, subservient to the immediacies of the School, print-
ing its concert-programs, the annual anthology of student work, Christmas
cards, and so on, with something more ambitious only once in a while, as it
happened to fall. I cannot conceive any of these alternatives as providing the
convinced incentive that new imaginative literature did. A book is no better
than its text; and the best contemporary writing has a peculiar urgency for
the reader (the printer, of course, is one reader, his work a way of reading):
it is crucially ahead of accepted opinion and formulated response. When we
had printed, during the next year, poetry by R. P. Blackmur and Wallace
Stevens, a purpose for the Press had become evident. This has continued to
be its prime cause.

After 1942, the summer session of the School was suspended; for the war
was taking away students as well as the donations that had covered each
year's deficit, and Miss Frazier, whose entire life had been a series of triumphs
over grave illnesses, was bedridden with what proved two years later to be
her last. We had done the printing till then during the summer or, through
her hospitality, at odd periods in the spring and fall when one or another
of us could steal time from other commitments. Now, if the Press was to
continue at all, less casual arrangements had to be made. The idea that it
might run the year round and become self-supporting had appealed to us for
a long time; and we determined to try it. After being turned down by the
Army, I'd had six weeks of invaluable apprenticeship with Mr. Edmund B.
Thompson, the most munificent of our typographical godfathers; and I was
appointed manager of the Press. We even drew up a plan whereby, we
hoped, the Press would become the first in a series of craft-units, to include
ceramics, weaving, bookbinding, and cabinet-making, and to compose a
nucleus for the re-growth of the School after the war. I regret that this com-
munity of craftsmen did not materialize. Although the quixotism of the

225

THE CUMMINGTON PRESS

plan is obvious now and must have been visible even as our unfunded en-
thusiasm was framing it, the very inevitability of its failure is a reproach. As
it turned out, we did keep in operation some intentions that the School had
tried to realize, and this facilitated the resumption of the summer session in
1946. Soon enough it became apparent that the Press was sufficient to occupy
my time and exhaust my abilities.

Miss Frazier, who had begun her career as a concert harpist, sold her harp to buy for us a Golding Pearl treadle press. We had the notion that greater speed would be necessary to keep us from starvation. Five books were done on it, but loss of quality quite outweighed the gain in time: automatic inking invited unevenness of color (we had no fountain), and to facilitate register, which we seldom got anyway, we no longer dampened the paper; furthermore, the press was not strong enough for book-work, causing eccentricities of impression and, three times, bad breakage. Admittedly, it was a compromise, which appeared then to be unavoidable; for Miss Frazier could no longer, of course, do any physical work, and, whereas a hand press should be served by two men, I could operate the Golding alone. We were concerned, though, to resume better work on the hand press, and other arrangements had in any case to be made for the winter, when she would leave to be cared for in the city. As it happened, the late Gustav Wolf, a painter and wood-engraver from Karlsruhe, was then staying in Cummington village at a hostel for German refugees; and he wanted to continue his work in America. It was arranged for him to join the Press to illustrate and help print an edition of *The Book of Job*, and for his wife to keep the house and cook for us. Funds were raised by subscriptions and by gifts from trustees of the School. We moved into the only building on the grounds that had heating equipment: the dining hall and women's dormitory; presses and type frames were set up in the kitchen, cooking was done in the butler's pantry, and of course we had bedrooms to spare. Luckily, the winter of 1943-44 was mild and open; even so, the furnace, intended merely for the cooler spring and fall days, scarcely ever kept us warm enough—despite which and other tribulations, the book slowly took form, our first and only attempt, I think, in the grand or "symphonic" style.

We had not quite finished printing it, however, when Miss Frazier died the next May. What the Press lost in her is inestimable, at least by me for whom the personal loss was absolute. Her spirited solicitude for our work was unflagging to the last, and her aspirations and promptings would not

wondered whether it would hit one of the clear
places under the top girder of the bridge and get
through, or whether it would get tangled in the
drift and trash which had pulled against the up-
right girders and arches. Someone remembered
how about ten years before so much driftwood
had piled up on the bridge that it was knocked
off as it was on the cow hit. It hit the
edge of the drift against one of the girders, and
lung there. For a few seconds it seemed as though
it might tear loose, but then we saw that it was
really caught. It bobbed and heaved on its side
there in a slow grinding, uneasy fashion. It had a
yoke around its neck, the kind made out of a
forked limb to keep a jumper behind fence.

“She shore jumped one fence,” one of the men
said.

And another: "Well, she done jumped her last
one, fer a fick."
Then they began to wonder about whose cow
it might be. They decided it must belong to Milt
Alley. They said that he had a cow which was
a jumper, and kept her in a fenced-in piece of
ground up the creek. I had never seen Milt. Alley,
but I knew who he was. He was a squatter and
lived up the hills a way, on a shirt-cail patch of
set-on-edge land, in a cabin. He was pore white
trunk. He had lots of children. I had seen the chil-

28

FROM *Blackberry Winter* SHOWING MILT ALLEY'S COW

dren at school, when they came. They were thin,
faced, with straight, sticky-looking, dingy black,
ored hair, and they smelt something like old
oatmeal, not because they認me so much
but because that is the sort of smell
which children out of those almshouse tend to have.
The big Alley boy drew dirty pictures which he
showed to the little boys at school.

That was Milt Alley's cow. It looked like the
kind of cow he would have, a scrawny, old,

sway-backed cow, with a yoke around her neck.
I wondered if Milt Alley had another cow.

"Poppa," I said, "do you think Milt Alley has
get another cow?"

29

227

THE CUMMINGTON PRESS

brook denial. There was no question of not continuing. Moneys were ex-
hausted, and Mr. and Mrs. Wolf had to go as soon as Job was done. Manu-
scripts by Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, and William Carlos Williams were on
hand, however. And Mr. Wightman Williams, who had joined us shortly
before, was willing to stay and cast his lot with the dubious one of the Press.
He learned to keep house and I to cook, and together we have managed one
way or another to persist ever since. When the great storm of January 1945
caught us with coal exhausted and kept us snowed in for two months, we
moved into the pressroom-kitchen, cut wood for the stove there, and main-
tained communications on skis. And there have been other rigors not less
severe than the weather and considerably more unfavorable to printing. I
believe that we have endured them in the surmise that there is something to
be done together and with the Press as Miss Frazier left it that we are un-
likely to accomplish elsewhere.

Mr. Williams tended to illustration and the handling of paper, I to type-
setting and makeready, but our collaboration has consistently been close.
Printing Mr. Tate's poems, *The Winter Sea*, we began to make out a fit
objective for "fine" or painstaking typography—not that we gained it then
or indeed have yet, but that the compulsion of the poems woke in us a
response we had to heed. Let me hasten to say at once that we did not con-
ceive of our object as a distraction rival to the text. The commonplace typo-
graphic precept of the age is, in Stanley Morison's words: "Any disposition
of printing material which ... has the effect of coming between author and
reader is wrong." We hope that when scientists have made possible its total
observance with the thought-transmitter or whatever machine for immacu-
late communion of mind to mind, when language itself has been outmoded,
printed books will still be of human interest. But to make books unreadable,
to deprive them of their proper use would have seemed to us a primary
aesthetic blunder. Nor did we think to make them so mediocre that they
would pass the psychologists' "legibility" test at the top of the class. Perhaps
to conceive of useful things as objects of integrity rather than of traffic is
old-fashioned, but surely it isn't completely unheard of even in this age of
rapid communication and utility when things are apt to be "consumer goods"
more than embodiments. Now Mr. Tate's poems are the latter, are original
substances and not a mere means or agency to extrinsic ends. It is well for
them to be read as widely as possible; and I suppose that no matter how they
are printed, just so long as they are legible a good reader will find their body.

228

18

followed a bird; he busied himself with a shad-
ow. The very path as it went off and was lost
filled him with meditative insight, which ap-
peared to him the purer as he knew himself in-
dependent of it. Where else bis sojourn was be
could not have thought; but that he was only
returning to all that was here, that he stood in
this body as though deep in an abandoned win-
dow looking beyond—of this be was for a few
moments so thoroughly convinced, that the
sudden appearance of a fellow-guest would
have been a painful shock, now while bis mind
was prepared to see Polyxène or Raimondine,
or some other departed member of the family

AN EXPERIENCE

appear from the turn of the path. He under-
stood the still infiniteness of their embodiment;
be accustomed himself to see what
had taken earthly shape employed
so fleetingly and absolutely, that the purpose-
ful consistency of their ways thrust from him
every preconception. He was sure they would
not notice him were he to move in their midst.
A periwinkle standing near him, whose blue
gaze he had surely met at some previous time,
touched him now from a more spiritual remove,
but with such boundless significance as though
there were no longer anything to bide. In gen-
eral he could make out how all objects appeared
more distant and at the same time somehow
more valid. This may have been due to his own
glance, which was no longer directed forward
and was becoming tenuous there in the open.
He looked back at things as though over his
shoulder; and to their existence, locked from
him as it was, was added a sweet and audacious
flavor as though all were spiced with a trace of
the flowers of farewell.—Telling himself from
time to time that this could not last, he still
did not fear the cease of this remarkable con-
dition, as though from it as from music one
might expect only some infinitely just and
proper outcome.

All at once his position began to grow irk-
some. A ware of the trunk, of the lassitude of
the book in bis hand, he emerged. In the tree
a palpable wind now fluttered. It came from the
sea. Up the slope the busies clasped against
one another.

FROM RILKE'S Five Prose Pieces, 1947

229

THE CUMMINGTON PRESS

But we felt another responsibility than distribution alone to be involved in
our printing them for the public. This was of recognition, celebration, and
homage, to be discharged not by making the book "look nice," but by mak-
ing it appropriate in a formal way. Even at the time, we were aware that to
take so much on ourselves was unprincipled according to the second sentence
of Mr. Morison's *First Principles of Typography*:

*Typography is the efficient means to an essentially utilitarian and only accidently aesthetic end, for enjoyment of patterns is rarely the reader's chief aim.*

It seemed to us, however, that one essential aim of a reader of poetry (and of imaginative prose, too) should be, precisely, enjoyment of patterns; and that a typographer is enjoined to bring his copy to typographic form. If reading is to be "essentially utilitarian," of course typography should correspond; but our copy did not claim that kind of reading. Nor did it, on the other hand, provide a field for the self-expression of a printer's personality, whatever that is. An appropriate book, we thought, should *become* the text, and therefore exist as it communicates. This was the beginning, I now think, of dissatisfaction with imitation, "applied" design, eclecticism, revivals, all that Sir Francis Meynell calls "the principle of allusion—allusive typography"; with those very things that constitute, with few exceptions, the chief accomplishment of twentieth-century book-work from "modern incunabula" to the manufactured and unhistoried types cut at the Bauhaus that "allude" mainly to piston rings and valve rods. It is one thing (I do not know that it is necessarily a good thing) to print an edition of Dryden, for instance, with decorative echoes of baroque style; but it is another thing to subject contemporary original poetry to the same treatment—although preferable, perhaps, to treating it like a road sign with one of the Victorian sans serifs lately used as if they were the last word. We wanted *The Winter Sea* to be as well unified, clear, and right as the chairs or bedroom stoves that the Shakers made. For the poems held the past essentially, not superficially but as actually experienced. Such an admission refreshes my sense of how far we failed, but also of how much remains to be done. One continues to learn, and essentiality, simplicity, comes last. What typographic order we achieved then is fragmentary indeed, even within our scant means and incompetent technique. The type-face was the Aldine revival, Poliphilus. Mr. Williams made a colored drawing for each of thirty copies, however, and these illustrations had an integral relation to the poetry that the typesetting missed; yet we

SOMEONE PUTS
A PINEAPPLE TOGETHER

26

FROM WALLACE STEVENS'S *Three Academic Pieces*

231

It is something on a table that he sees,
The root of a form, as of this fruit, a fund,
The angel at the centre of this mind,
This book of Cuba, tufted emerald,
Himself, may be, the irreducible x,
At the bottom of imaged artifice,

27

THE CUMMINGTON PRESS

failed to get them inside the book, they were stuck on the cover of the
rather flimsy case.

Ever since, we have been trying, with varying degrees of failure, to make
each book as clear as possible and to get everything inside it that belongs
there—finding ourselves again in disagreement with Mr. Morison as he rec-
ommends a different typographic approach to text-pages from that to the
title and other front matter: all parts of a book intend to make its text readable,
and we think *integration* of the whole composition should be a typographer’s
chief concern. Our intention has never been “pure”; and I do not wish to
imply that we have been uninfluenced by the exigent and temporal con-
sideration, or to claim as choice what has too often been mere chance. Mr.
Williams, however, has progressed (some would say “regressed”) from
photo-engraved drawings through linoleum cuts to whittled plank woodcuts.
My typesetting has been more wayward. Our problems are still rudimen-
tarily technical, and I suppose they will continue to be until we attain that
last thing which is so long to learn and for which “simple thinking” hardly
seems adequate. The vexed issue between hand and machine printing has not
come up for us practically, for we have never been within sight of capital
to buy even the crudest power press; but precarious as our control of the
process is, even with the elementary tools we have, I cannot think that we
would rush to introduce yet another complexity between ourselves and the
desired result, the clear page. Our friend Mr. Victor Hammer more than
anyone else has helped us with the troubling technicalities—and perhaps, as
Mr. Will Ransom has remarked, “the interesting things in printing are all
technical.” For Mr. Hammer has not only been lavishly generous to share
his extensive, practical discoveries and recoveries with us, but is the only
printer we know who is also devoted to that laborious, “inadequate mecha-
nism,” the hand press. Through his good offices, we printed one book at the
Wells College Press; and we have wished that we might work with him in
closer collaboration. All arrangements to this end have so far fallen through,
however, perhaps for the sufficient reason that such a collaboration would
be too one-sided, we having so much more to receive from it than we could
possibly return. His superb craftsmanship and manifold typographic achieve-
ments we cannot aspire to emulate: he has actually cut the punches for a new
type, had it cast, and only *then* looked about for something to print in it—
while we are without any typographic form whatever until we have copy
that engages our attention. For this reason, we may seem to fall between

232

FRAGMENT OF A
MEDITATION/MCMXXVIII

BY ALLEN TATE

En l'an trentiesme de mon aage
Que toutes mes bontes j'ay beues...

CHRISTMAS MCMXXXXVII

233

THE CUMMINGTON PRESS

two stools and appeal completely neither to the bibliophiles nor to the literati. Yet we think that devotion to books and devotion to literature need not conflict.

Formerly, like the poor relation it is, the Press had been shifted about from one School building to another, excepting only the music auditorium and the sculpture studio. But when the summer session of the School resumed in 1946 and we couldn't, of course, stay in the kitchen, a trustee gave the money to provide a place for us; and now, at Frazier House, we occupy a loft remodeled specially for our needs. Here, are we drawing near the end of our apprenticeship when we shall gain technical certainty, check gratuitous experimentation, and produce a book satisfactorily finished in all details? I cannot be sure. It is disheartening to survey what has been done and to see things that once seemed telling or ingenious as now obvious blemishes, bringing neither clarity nor integrity to the page. Each new manuscript that we take on presents new technical problems, for we do not wish to make a Procrustean bed of our limitations and inexperience. Without experiment, which necessarily exceeds the beaten bound of propriety, there could be no discovery. And I doubt that the realized object can be a product wholly of the will: it must to some extent be given through a fortunate, unpredictable conjunction. Of course, to say that we have been apprenticed at all is only a manner of speaking. T. S. Eliot makes this observation:

> *The apprentice* (ideally, at least) did not merely serve his master, and did not merely learn from him as one would learn at a technical school—he became assimilated into a way of life which went with that particular trade or craft; and perhaps the lost secret of the craft is this, that not merely a skill but an entire way of life was transmitted.

I do not know an equivalent for that kind of training. Mr. Eliot also observes, however, that "if we lose anything finally and irreparably, we must make do without it"; and perhaps the amateur status has certain compensations. So far we have been granted the time and place to work at our transgressions. Probably that, together with incentive texts, is the most that any printer today can hope for.

234

A LIST OF BOOKS

PUBLISHED & PRINTED BY
THE CUMMINGTON PRESS
AT CUMMINGTON MASSTS
JUNE 1941 / DECEMBER 1943

1. Incident on the Bark Columbia, being letters received & sent by Captain McCorkle and the crew of his whaler, 1860-1862. Edited by Helen Halsey. 300 copies. 64 pages. $3.00

2. The Second World, a book of poems by R. P. Blackmur. 300 copies. 30 pages. $2.50

3. Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, a poetic sequence by Wallace Stevens. Second edition. 330 copies. 45 pages. $2.00

4. American Decade, 68 poems for the first time in an anthology. Edited by Tom Boggs. (Printed by The Southworth-Anthoensen Press.) 475 & 25 copies. 96 pages. $3.50, & $7.50 hand-bound

5. Primal Sound & Other Prose Pieces, two stories and two essays by Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated by Carl Niemeyer and illustrated by Paul Wieghardt. 175 copies. 48 pages. $3.50

6. The Vigil of Venus, Pervigilium Veneris with an introduction and translation by Allen Tate. 400 & 30 copies. 28 pages. $2.50 & $5.00

7. Time of Year, by Samuel French Morse, a first book of poems, with an introduction by Wallace Stevens. 275 copies. 53 pages. $2.75