The Bookman's Wake Read Online Free PDF

had made his reputation as a publisher of fine
     books, producing twenty-three titles in his twenty-two
     years. The books were what made collecting the scraps
     worthwhile and fun: without the books, the Grayson Press
     might have been just another obscure printshop. But Darryl
     Grayson was a genius, early in life choosing the limited
     edition as his most effective means of self-expression.
     When Grayson began, a limited edition usually meant
     something. It meant that the writer had done a work to be
     proud of, or that a printing wizard like Darryl Grayson had
     produced something aesthetically exquisite. Scribners gave
     Ernest Hemingway a limited of
A Farewell to Arms
, 510 copies, signed by Hemingway in 1929 and issued in a
     slipcase. But in those days publishers were prudent, and it
     was Hemingway’s only limited. Covici-Friede published
The Red Pony
in a small, signed edition in 1937, with the tiny Steinbeck
     signature on the back page. Perhaps the nearest thing to
     what Grayson would be doing two decades later was published
     by a noted printer and book designer, Bruce Rogers, in
     1932: a limited edition of Homer’s
Odyssey
, the translation by T. E. Lawrence. People can never get
     enough of a good thing, and around that time the Limited
     Editions Club was getting into high gear, producing some
     classy books and a few that would become masterpieces. The
     Henri Matisse
Ulysses
, published in the midthirties, would sell for eight or ten
     grand today, signed by Matisse and Joyce. Slater would find
     that interesting, but I didn’t tell him. It would be
     too painful to watch him scratch his head and say,
Joyce who?…What did she do
?
    Like almost everything else that was once fine and
     elegant, the limited edition has fallen on hard times. Too
     often now it’s a tool, like a burglar’s jimmy,
     used by commercial writers who are already zillionaires to
     pry another $200 out of the wallets of their faithful.
     There are usually five hundred or so numbered copies and a
     tiny lettered series that costs half again to twice as
     much. The books are slapped together as if on an assembly
     line, with synthetic leather the key ingredient. As often
     as not, the author signs loose sheets, which are later
     bound into the book: you can sometimes catch these literary
     icons sitting in airports between flights, filling the dead
     time signing their sheets. Two hundred, four hundred, six
     hundred…the rich get richer and God knows what the
     poor get. The whole process has a dank and ugly smell that
     would’ve horrified the likes of Bruce Rogers,
     Frederic Goudy, and Darryl Grayson. According to Huggins,
     Grayson was the last of the old-time print men, the printer
     who was also an artist, designer, and personal baby-sitter
     for everything that came off his press. Look for him no
     more, for his art has finally been snuffed by the goddamned
     computer. Grayson was the last giant: each of his books was
     a unique effort, a burst of creativity and tender loving
     care that real book people have always found so precious.
     The Thomas Hart Benton
Christmas Carol
had been Grayson’s turning point: he had worked for a
     year on a new typeface that combined the most intriguing
     Gothic and modern touches and had engaged Benton to
     illustrate it. The book was sensational: old Charles
     Dickens was covered with new glory, said a
New York Times
critic (quoted in Huggins), the day the first copy was
     inspected by the master and found fit to ship. The
Times
piece was a moot point: the book was sold-out, even at
     $700, before the article appeared, and it mainly served to
     make the growing Grayson mystique known to a wider
     audience. People now scrambled to get on Grayson’s
     subscription list, but few dropped off and Grayson refused
     to increase the size of his printings. The
Christmas Carol
was limited to five hundred, each signed in pencil by
     Benton and in that pale ink that would later become his