The Bookman's Wake Read Online Free PDF Page B

trademark by Grayson. There were no lettered copies and the
     plates were destroyed after the run.
    I skimmed through the history and learned that Darryl
     and Richard Grayson were brothers who had come to Seattle
     from Atlanta in 1936. Their first trip had been on vacation
     with their father. The old man had their lives well
     planned, but even then Darryl Grayson knew that someday he
     would live there. He had fallen in love with it—the
     mountains, the sea, the lush rain forests—for him the
     Northwest had everything. After the war they came again.
     They were the last of their family, two boys then in their
     twenties, full of hell and ready for life. From the
     beginning Darryl Grayson had dabbled in art: he was a
     prodigy who could paint, by the age of eight, realistic,
     anatomically correct portraits of his friends. It was in
     Atlanta, in high school, that he began dabbling in print as
     well. He drew sketches and set type for the school
     newspaper, and for an off-campus magazine that later
     failed. He came to believe that what he did was ultimately
     the most important part of the process. A simple alphabet,
     in her infinite variety, could be the loveliest thing, and
     the deadliest. Set a newspaper in a classic typeface and no
     one would read it: use a common newspaper type for a fine
     book and even its author would not take it seriously. The
     printer, he discovered, had the final say on how a piece of
     writing would be perceived. Those cold letters, forged in
     heat, sway the reading public in ways that even the most
     astute among them will never understand. Grayson
     understood, and he knew something else: that a printer need
     not be bound to the types offered by a foundry. A letter
Q
could be drawn a million ways, and he could create his own.
     The possibilities in those twenty-six letters were
     unlimited, as long as there were men of talent and vision
     coming along to draw them.
    Personally, the Grayson brothers were the stuff of a
     Tennessee Williams play. They had left a multitude of
     broken hearts (and some said not a few bastard offspring)
     scattered across the Southern landscape. Both were eager
     and energetic womanizers: even today Atlanta remembers them
     as in a misty dream, their exploits prized as local myth.
     Darryl was rugged and sometimes fierce: Richard was fair
     and good-looking, giving the opposite sex (to its
     everlasting regret) a sense of fragile vulnerability. In
     the North the personal carnage would continue: each would
     marry twice, but the marriages were little more than the
     love affairs—short, sweet, sad, stormy. The early
     days in Seattle were something of a career shakedown.
     Darryl got a job in a local printshop and considered the
     possibilities; Richard was hired by a suburban newspaper to
     write sports and cover social events— the latter an
     ideal assignment for a young man bent on proving that
     ladies of blue blood had the same hot passions as the
     wide-eyed cotton-pickers he had left in Atlanta. Having
     proved it, he lost the job. Huggins covered this thinly: an
     academic will always find new ways to make the sex act seem
     dull, but I could read between the lines, enough to know
     that Richard Grayson had been a rake and a damned
     interesting fellow.
    A year of this was enough. They moved out of town and
     settled in North Bend, a hamlet in the mountains
     twenty-five miles east of Seattle. With family money they
     bought twenty acres of land, a lovely site a few miles from
     town with woods and a brook and a long sloping meadow that
     butted a spectacular mountain. Thus was the Grayson Press
     founded in the wilderness: they built a house and a
     printshop, and Darryl Grayson opened for business on June
     6, 1947.
    From the beginning the Grayson Press was Darryl
     Grayson’s baby. Richard was there because he was
     Darryl’s brother and he had to do something. But it
     was clear that Huggins considered Darryl the major figure:
     his