Godine at 50: A Retrospective of Five Decades in the Life of an Independent Publisher - Hardcover

Godine, David R.

 
9781567926767: Godine at 50: A Retrospective of Five Decades in the Life of an Independent Publisher
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1567926762 ISBN 13: 9781567926767
Verlag: David R. Godine, Publisher, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

David R. Godine, Publisher

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David R. Godine was born in Cambridge and educated at The Roxbury Latin School, Dartmouth College, and Harvard University. After a brief stint in the Army, he worked for year as a printing apprentice to Harold McGrath at Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press in Northampton. In 1970, along with co-founders Lance Hidy and Martha Rockwell, he converted an abandoned cow barn on a Brookline estate into a printing office from which the company began issuing broadsides, pamphlets, and, ultimately, books, mostly printed from hot metal. By 1975, both the barn and the ambition to make a living as letterpress printers were abandoned in favor of publishing. The company moved to offices in Boston’s Back Bay and subsequently to other locations in the area, remaining a part of the city’s publishing fabric until this day.

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Excerpt from Introduction & Brief History of the Press

In most ways, it was Harold McGrath at Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press in Northampton who was the godfather of the company. After I had graduated Dartmouth, served in the Army, and gotten a one year “advanced” degree in education at Harvard, I decided to follow my first love, printing. And the best printing being executed within driving distance, or perhaps anywhere in the country, was in Baskin’s little shop with its oriental rugs on Railroad Street in Northampton, Massachusetts, the undisputed domain of Harold. For reasons, I still cannot explain, Baskin took a liking to me and hired me as an “apprentice” for four days a week at the rate of $125/week (which he couldn’t afford then or ever). It was an act of unspeakable generosity, for he needed an “apprentice” like a Buick needed a fifth hole. Harold was probably not consulted about this, but took the appointment of someone who knew next to nothing about serious printing gracefully and spent the next month’s showing me the ropes–how to insert paper into the jaws of the Thomson Laureate without losing a finger, how to create the make readies for Leonard’s engravings, which were detailed and exquisite, but required endless fussing with thin strips of India paper (at which Harold was a genius) and how to run the big Kelly Two 30” cylinder press which was pretty much held together with bailing wire and gum, and which Harold would periodically kick and swear at.

Into this mix came Lance Hidy, who had begun printing at Jonathan Edwards College at Yale where he had, from what I can tell ex nihilo, produced some superb work. Baskin must have recognized Lance’s talents immediately, for he took him on as a “student” at once and Lance moved to Northampton that year and began showing up at the press. Martha Rockwell, the third member of the founding team and a student at Bennington College, I had known her from her days at the Putney School. She was an excellent “comp,” devoted and careful, but was hampered by being selected for the 1970 Olympics in cross country skiing. She took this very seriously.

Two years earlier, I had found an abandoned cow barn on the property of James Lawrence in Brookline, Massachusetts. This was the last “working farm” left in the county, if not the entire eastern half of the Commonwealth, and James, a very formal but very liberal Democrat, gave me permission to use it for ten years at the rent of one book a year. It needed everything―new windows, a furnace, floors, electricity, a cesspool and plumbing. But my family had recently sold Market Forge, the old family business to Beatrice Foods and I was left with a small legacy or, as we say, a trust fund. I went through this very quickly over time, but both my father and the trustee, Paul Siskind, were enormously indulgent, perhaps far too indulgent, as we slowly worked our way through the challenges of bringing in enough electricity to run a press, a furnace big enough to heat an uninsulated barn, wooden floors, doors, and finally, a working bathroom. We were plowing through capital pretty quickly too, but since we did most of this work ourselves and my father had plenty of “friends in the trade” willing to help us out, we were more or less ready to print by 1970.

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Verlag
David R. Godine, Publisher
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1567926762
ISBN 13 
9781567926767
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
292
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
KreGa Onlinehandel GmbH
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