One summer nearly forty years ago I bought a modest pamphlet of a poem called Deuteronomy by a poet I had never read named Robert Bringhurst. The late, redoubtable William Hoffer sold it to me. His pitch consisted of handing me the pamphlet and saying “Guy named Bringhurst. Three bucks. You’ll like it. It’s intelligent.” It was. Moreover, it was a dramatic monologue, and having been raised on Browning and Shakespeare, I was ready for a break from the self-absorbed sociological confessions which seemed to be dominating new poetry then. I read the poem carefully many times, and by the end of the summer I had it virtually memorized.
In the fall I moved into my new office in the English Department at UBC. The fact that my name was misspelled on the plastic strip on my office door was annoying, but my disgruntlement eased a little when I saw that my neighbour’s was spelled correctly, and that his name was Robert Bringhurst. He wasn’t in, so I typed up a copy of one of my own poems I thought passable, enclosed it with a note introducing myself, and put it in his mailbox. Some days later the poem reappeared in my box with a note on the bottom of the page: “Thanks for the chance to look at this. What are all the commas for?” I had to look to answer the question, and in the process I discovered that three commas were, indeed, unnecessary. So I began to learn from Robert as soon as I met him, and I have continued to learn ever since.
Deuteronomy, the pamphlet which began this, is beside me as I write, rather worn and slightly foxed from having been stored unwisely at some point. It was published in 1974 by J. Michael Yates’ Sono Nis Press, then in Richmond, BC, and its design is undistinguished, little different from many other poetry chapbooks of the time. The most notable feature of its design is its freedom from fuss, and its consequent emphasis on the text. The type – semi-bold something-or-other – was, I assume, typed on something like an IBM Selectric. The piece was apparently not designed by Bringhurst – at least we are not told it was – but at the time it never occurred to me that it would have been. Certainly it met with his approval.
One of the connections between Robert and me which I hadn’t realized at the time we met was our mutual interest in types and printing. My wife Jan and I had established ourselves as Barbarian Press three years earlier, and by the time I met Robert I was regularly setting type by hand and trying to learn how the stuff worked. Robert had a few years’ head start. He has told me that his interest in typography sprang from a self-imposed crash course in the subject when he was left to design his own first books of poetry, The Shipwright’s Log (1972) and Cadastre (1973), for Kanchenjunga Press in Bloomington, Indiana. Since he had studied a bit of architecture, he said, it was decided by the group involved that he must know something about putting lines and letters on pieces of paper, so he became the designer by default. He went to the library and by good fortune laid hands on Daniel Berkeley Updike’s Printing Types: Their History, Form, and Use (1922; 1937). Reading that considerable text, and re-reading it many times over to the point where he had “almost memorized it,” he came to feel that “typography put the broken pieces of [his] world together.”
Forty years later, in 2010 at Rochester, New York, Bringhurst spoke about the joy of a reader encountering a finely made Renaissance book:
It’s like the sun coming out on a fine spring day, the finches singing and the apple trees in bloom. We inhale those carved, cast, printed letterforms as if each one had been handmade by a first-class scribe. And not just the letterforms. The fine rag paper, the fine black ink, the way the letters nestle in the paper, and the way the book is sewn and cased. Those books are real because they were made with tremendous craft and they were made with fine materials . . . they are real because the shapes in front of your eyes embody a serious craftsman’s deep understanding of what printing was all about. (What is Reading For? 23)
Robert’s development as a typographer in those forty years is something for which anyone who cares about books and recognizes their intellectual, aesthetic, and cultural pertinence must be deeply grateful. One may be the more thankful because that development carries with it so much else, inseparable from the whole, which might be characterized broadly as cultural history: poetry from many cultures, music, botany, grammars and morphologies, mythology, the proper care of cooking utensils, cataloguing systems for libraries, folk tales and story-telling . . . the list goes on. I find it impossible to write about Robert’s work as a typographer and book designer without also writing about many other things – his poetry, his writing and speaking, his translations, his profound study of languages, his knowledge of and taste in music, and his friendship – that, perhaps most of all. Friendship is implicit in all Bringhurst’s work, whether the reader knows him personally or not. Writing about Robert in any of his pursuits is a process rather like a puppy’s tracking a beetle, perambulating all over the shop in continuous fascination, with deep curiosity and robust contentment. His work and thought are so homogeneous that particular concentration becomes bafflingly obtuse.
The developments of typographical design derive, as does any other organic and thoughtful practice, from the interconnections of aesthetic impulse and practical application. Typography’s progress through the last five hundred years is, at every point, coterminous in meaning and development with architecture, music, philosophy, science, painting, sculpture, medicine, ethics, garden design, and indeed any other human endeavour which transmutes so-called “abstract” conceptions into the means to live in some harmony with the spirit and necessities of the world. The progressions of these many endeavours are simultaneous and reciprocal – any one of them can reflect and illuminate the others anywhere along the way – but typography, because it is used to provide through printing our best repository of cultural and social knowledge and awareness, is the most striking and generally familiar of them all.
Now it is interesting to look back at those first books designed by Bringhurst and to try to see some faint trace of the consummate designer and typographer he has become. There is little to help us in the materials of the books themselves. Both are printed on decent commercial stock of the time, unidentified anywhere in the books, but with the aid of strong light their watermarks designate them as Beckett (for The Shipwright’s Log) and Andorra Text (for Cadastre). The type is a standard typewriter font, printed offset. The titling for The Shipwright’s Log is a roughly hand-drawn, squared off, ultra-bold lettering in black for the title and Bringhurst’s name, with one word – “POEMS” – in an outline version of the same design. But Cadastre’s titling is the designer’s first evident purely typographical choice, and it is a good one: handset Solemnis, with some glyphs from Linear B, handwritten by Bringhurst, within a single ruled frame.
There is something else, to do with structure: the formats of both books, slightly more square than tall, aim to provide proper space for the longest lines in each book; they are made to accommodate their texts. The Shipwright’s Log doesn’t quite come off in this respect: there are perhaps half a dozen line drops to accommodate the longest lines – something which I can imagine must have niggled badly – and the gutter margins of every page are the same throughout. In Cadastre, however, there are no such line breaks, and the designer has learned to place the left-hand margin in one of two different positions so as to allow the longest lines to breathe where required, but to move poems with shorter lines slightly right on the page to avoid the reader’s eye’s drifting into the gutter of the book.
It may seem picayune to dwell so long on two books which Robert would now probably disavow – although several poems from these books went on to be included, with some revision, in his Selected Poems of 2011 – were it not that the poet and the designer were learning together, and from one another. I sense in these books something it took me much longer to learn myself about the relation between thought and craft: that it is increasingly difficult to think deeply about anything, or to do anything really well, without eventually thinking and working in the awareness of everything. Structures of craft or of thought grow together, like a fan vaulting where in due course all things combine in support. Putting it another way, thought and craft are congruent, each both as abstract and as material as the other. In Bringhurst’s thinking, in his writing and design, this dichotomy becomes a play of opposites, a fugue. Its first flicker is here, in Cadastre.
There are other elements of Bringhurst’s later work in these early books too. Other languages have already made a strong appearance, not only in the epigrams, which include Greek, French, Latin, German, and Spanish, but in the English versions of poems from Arabic, Nahuatl (via Spanish), and Italian – not to mention the somewhat jocular title of one of the drawings in Cadastre, Poseidvn calkeoqwrax [“Poseidon in armour,” as I read it], which shows three (presumably bronze) hydrant nozzles clamped shut. A silver-fork irony also appears in the credit given to George Payerle in 8 Objects (Kanchenjunga Press, 1975): Excudebat Georgius Payerle, architypographus Kancheniungiensis. There is a growing attention to the Greek Presocratics who will emerge with greater importance later, particularly in The Fragments of Parmenides, which has its precursor in the poem “Parmenides” in 8 Objects. There is also a beginning interest in storytelling: the epigram for the fifth section of Bergschrund, published by Sono Nis Press in 1975, is a quotation from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” and one of the poems in the section, “The Fish Who Lived to Tell about It,” is a tale, a parable.
5.1 Bringhurst working with type for The Fragments of Parmenides at Peter Koch’s print shop in Berkeley, CA, 2003.
What things come together in Bergschrund, Bringhurst’s next book? First of all, it is far and away the most professional piece of design and printing of his work to have appeared at the time. Published simultaneously in cloth and paper, with a fine colour photograph of a double fountain in Cusco for the cover, set in Baskerville with Centaur for display, and jointly designed by Bringhurst and Bev Leech (a much underrated Canadian designer with whom I also once worked), this is the book where Bringhurst’s distinctive feeling for the page begins to emerge. The margins are generous, the type for the first time is worthy of its text, and the book is sewn in gatherings, not “perfect bound” – that vile misnomer and oxymoron denoting a stack of separate pieces of paper glued on the spine side with flexible paste and slapped into a cover. It is a real book, with real type, on real paper which, although unidentified, is a decent wove sheet which has not discoloured in the nearly forty years I have owned it.
The qualities which lift this book several steps above any earlier productions under Bringhurst’s name are hard to define. Indeed, the nature of typographical design is often, even usually, chary of description. The easiest way to suggest, at least, what is different about Bergschrund as a book is how well it works in the hand, and in the eye: there is nothing about the typography or the arrangements on the page, the page formats, the titling, or the facility with which the book lays open, to separate the reader from the text. Bringhurst has said that good typography should have “a statuesque transparency”; like the best film music, it must be noticeable only when it is absent.
About eight years later, in his essay “Finding the Place” which opens Ocean Paper Stone, “the catalogue of an exhibition of printed objects which chronicle more than a century of literary publishing in British Columbia,” Bringhurst gave what may be his earliest description of the nature of a book: “A book is a discontinuous space, a moving two-and-a-half-dimensional object, like a manually operated, tactile, abstract film. It requires a runner’s sense of breath and a monk’s (preferably an ecstatic monk’s) sense of rhythm” (Ocean Paper Stone 24). Not until 1979 would Bringhurst begin to work professionally as a designer other than for the publications of Kanchenjunga Press, the imprint which he and his partner Miki Sheffield had brought with them to Vancouver in 1973. From then until 1978 Kanchenjunga published nine chapbooks and some broadsides, issued from Vancouver and San Francisco, but all in fact produced in Vancouver. Seven of these were designed by Bringhurst, and all were “produced after hours in a series of typeshops owned or inhabited by novelist George Payerle. There, as usually where small-press pamphlets are made, the type was, in good cheer, found rather than chosen” (90). The equipment consisted of an IBM typesetting machine which had some minimal ability to tune word- and (presumably) letter-spacing. What type was used depended on a selection of the “golf-balls” like those used in IBM Selectrics, so that if italic was required one had to remove the roman ball, insert the italic, type the word or words, and replace the roman ball. The copy produced was scrolled out on a continuous roll of clay-coated paper which would then be cut and pasted up for camera-ready proofs.
It was under these somewhat constrained circumstances that he began to design for other writers, to create “two-and-a-half-dimensional objects” for other people’s words. The two of these I have – Dennis Lee’s The Death of Harold Ladoo and The Gods – demonstrate an increasingly idiomatic approach to the page, a growing ease with the relation between type and the space it inhabits, and a strong sense that the structures of the book and the poem between them create their own dimension. By 1979 this acquired ability had become a profession. Kanchenjunga was no more, and he was designing trade books for other publishers, notably Douglas & McIntyre.
Giving a portrait of Robert as a designer is difficult without several large tables and a few dozen books with a willing audience. His gifts as a designer are implicit in his writings about type and books, but at the risk of clumping through what could seem interminable lists and examples, I will try a few observations.
Bringhurst’s taste in type is very wide, and his knowledge of the characteristics of various faces profound. He has inclined to European designs, and in particular to those of Hermann Zapf (Palatino and Aldus especially), Friedrich Poppl (Pontifex), and Jan Tschichold (Sabon). Beyond these, he uses a very wide range of types including many of the Monotype revivals, notably Centaur (often for display), Garamond, and Bembo, and Robert Slimbach’s Minion has become a favourite. He is also fond of several sans serif faces, among them Syntax and Scala Sans. Working almost entirely with digital founts he has the opportunity to experiment widely, which results in fascinating combinations of types giving unexpected colour and balance in even the simplest of his pages. For me, working exclusively with foundry and Monotype and setting by hand, this is unimaginably bewildering, but it deepens my awareness of his skill and eye for rhythm in text settings, characteristics which have been clear in his designs since the beginning. As he has designed more and more books, his style has naturally strengthened. Bringhurst is one of those artists – and that is not a term I use easily at all – whose knowledge of his craft is absolute. Robert Schumann wrote somewhere in a letter that “One is not master of the thought until one is master of the form.” This sums up Robert’s mastery of his book design as much as of his poetry and his prose. Once having spent any time with his designs, it is impossible not to recognize a book he has designed as his. His title pages, especially in “art” books, are alluring but never cluttered. They draw the eye because of the balance of elements, but one never has to search for whatever information is needed.
One book in particular which to my eye is masterly, and shows Robert’s work at its best, is The Surface of Meaning: Books and Book Design in Canada (2008). Designing a book with scores of illustrations combined with text is a balancing act. When the illustrations are all of books – title pages and bindings and text pages and pages with illustrations – the difficulty is compounded, because the reader’s eye, used to the form of the page, will unavoidably be drawn in several directions with some openings showing several books. Robert’s solution to this is delightfully simple: he has all the books photographed in openings (that is, showing both recto and verso pages), and prints the most important photograph in any spread across the double spread of the book, so that the gutter in the illustration falls into the gutter of the book the reader is holding. Other images of the same book, printed in reduced size, will be placed on the right and left pages of the book, sometimes overlapping the main illustration, as books laid on a table will sometimes overlap one another. The effect is lively, engaging, and continually interesting, because the balances of every opening are different from every other, but the whole is held together by the use of the gutter to frame the book being illustrated. The main texts are brief, no more than twenty-four pages divided into three brief essays, set into the centre of the page, and so leaving very wide margins on either side for shoulder notes, small illustrations, and captions.
Here we need to back up a little and scurry over a few years and a number of titles. Bringhurst’s work as a designer has clearly informed his views of the book in general, and also allowed him time and energy to explore widely varying formats – in particular art books, in whose design he has become a master. It has also, by circumstance, given him time to investigate with real intensity the indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest, a subject which has intrigued him for years and has led to much work on oral literatures, most notably of course his seminal work on the Haida mythtellers. As well as designing a substantial monograph on Bill Reid for Douglas & McIntyre, he also wrote The Black Canoe: Bill Reid and the Spirit of Haida Gwai (with Ulli Steltzer’s photographs), and collaborated with Reid in writing and designing The Raven Steals the Light. At the same time he was designing other books, especially books of poetry for McClelland & Stewart: Dennis Lee’s anthology The New Canadian Poetry and books by Don McKay, Milton Acorn, Christopher Dewdney, Paulette Giles, and Irving Layton, with many others. Among these were his own first selected poems, The Beauty of the Weapons (1982), and two further volumes of poetry, Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music (1986), and an updated selected poems, The Calling: Selected Poems 1970–1995 (1995). Then, in 1992, Hartley & Marks published the first edition of Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style.
The jacket blurb for the first edition of The Elements of Typographic Style suggests that the reason for the book was that the sudden appearance of personal computers had offered everyone who owned one the opportunity to produce printed work using an astonishing array of typefaces. “Long the preserve of specialists alone,” we are told, “typography is a territory newly opened to everyone who has access to a computer.” Of course Bringhurst’s purpose is much deeper than merely to offer guidelines to the many-headed so that they might avoid setting an undertaker’s letterhead in Comic Sans. I wonder in fact whether such things were in his thought at all as he wrote the book. This is where my contention that friendship is implicit in all Robert’s work comes into play. He wants people to know, because knowing is both essential to life, and joyous. Anyone who has ever taught knows this; anyone who has had children understands it.
Robert had been thinking about type and the page and the codex for many years by this time: his introductory essay to Ocean Paper Stone, eight years earlier, was not at all the work of a man who had merely been offered a job of writing. In eighteen closely argued pages he had set out a history of literary publishing over one hundred years in British Columbia, paying attention not only to the nature of what was published and why, but how well it was produced, and how whatever progress there had been had come about. His critical perceptions of many key books in that history were original, profound, and exciting. I had been born and raised in British Columbia, and had always been a reader, and every sentence of that essay brought me up short. This was virgin territory, and it must have required considerable research and a great deal of time to write the piece. Whether or not that process itself provided Robert with the impetus to write a book on typography, no one who had read that essay can have been altogether surprised at the extraordinary brilliance of The Elements of Typographical Style, although typographers and designers were universally knocked sideways by it.
5.2“The dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand”: The evolution of typefaces shown in The Elements of Typographic Style.
The cry goes round, “Consult Bringhurst!,” and so Robert has, probably to his dismay, become the only eponym in my acquaintance. After sixty-four years in which only two or three books could be thought sine qua non for any typographical library (chief among them Updike’s Printing Types), here was a new look at the nature of type and its history, and a book which treated a new technology which threatened to unleash typographical chaos on us all with respect and common sense. Moreover, the clarity and humanity of the writing and the pleasure of the thought are overwhelming. Type classification, which had settled into a dreary drone of “old style, transitional, and modern,” is suddenly refreshed by classifications which are detailed, specific, graphically presented, and sensible. Above all, sensible: Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-Classical, Romantic, Realist, Geometric Modernist, Lyrical Modernist, and Postmodernist. Even more important, they bring alive those reciprocal and simultaneous connections with the other humanities and epistemologies I mentioned earlier: Baroque music – Baroque type; Romantic poetry – Romantic type, and so on. Typography, the voice in the page, is, through these classifications, entwined with a broad range of human endeavour. So much is clear, and the first principle of the book, on the opening page, is given a context by those connections: “In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency. Its other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.” He goes on to write “One of the principles of durable typography is always legibility; another is something more than legibility: some earned or unearned interest that gives its living energy to the page. It takes various forms and goes by various names, including serenity, liveliness, laughter, grace and joy” (Elements 17).
This, it seems to me, is a crucial point in Bringhurst’s thinking, something which he has continued to develop and to grow from. Reading his speeches and essays from the last twenty years, I see him come back continually to that almost indefinable – almost – realization of the unity of thought and being which is touched by the serenity, the laughter, the grace. Something of what it is I believe George Puttenham meant in his sixteenth-century text The Arte of English Poesie, in his use of decorum to mean the interconnectedness, even interdependence, of moral gravity and figurative grace, where each subsumes itself in the other. Matthew Arnold means something similar when he speaks of the sublime. But it is clear in many of Bringhurst’s arguments that the knowledge which decorum requires is not easily gained, and requires a willingness to be open to the new. That openness means the acquiring of skill, mental and spiritual, which in the broad sense one might speak of as “craft.” The late Dan Carr, the craftsman who cut the punches for a new Greek typeface used in the Editions Koch publication of The Fragments of Parmenides, wrote “I have found that craft is an investigation of being” (Carving the Elements 85). But of course one must go about acquiring craft, in whatever one chooses to learn to do, before one can come to this realization. As Puttenham says, “verely it seemes to go all by discretion, not perchaunce of euery one, but by a learned and experienced discretion.”
5.3Bringhurst’s design for the front cover of Alkibiades’ Love: Essays in Philosophy, by Jan Zwicky.
Robert’s talks and “pieces of thinking” make it clear to me, at least, that he can believe such “craft” to be within the reach of all. Even the craft necessary to cook a fine omelet is a skill which results from examination and testing. In fact, one of the most remarkable elements in Bringhurst’s writing and speaking is a decorum allowing him to say profound and complex things quite simply. “Books, whether written or oral, are and have to be utilitarian objects” (What Is Reading For? 10).
To return to Robert’s “something which is more than legibility,” to that grace: earlier I said that I found it all but impossible to talk about his work as a typographer without also talking about his poetry, his teaching, his understanding of languages and trees and so many other things, probably including shoes and ships and sealing wax. I am no idolator, and Robert would not thank me for writing him a shrine to inhabit. Nor perhaps will he thank me for saying that his “earned or unearned interest . . . serenity, liveliness, laughter, grace and joy” is, to me, the Tristan chord in his work, a sudden event from which he is impelled to go on. It is that moment of genius – by which I mean dazzling recognition – which by its nature cannot be resolved, but continues to aspire, and reach out, and learn, and to talk of that learning. Robert Bringhurst has taught me a great deal about many things, and it is fine to write about a dear friend whom I admire so deeply. With so much in his work to celebrate, it is difficult to find a cadence, a place to pause. As so often, a story will help.
Years ago, in a subway train in Toronto, I was sitting near two young people clinging to stanchions in the rush hour, swinging and juddering with the movement of the car. The woman was reading, to my surprise and delight, one of Robert’s poems, reading it aloud to the young man she was with. It was a poem called “Death by Water.” She read in a clear, quite deep voice, read it very well. Other people than me were listening. She finished the poem, and the young man said, “Read it again.” “Didn’t you understand it?” she asked. “Yes,” he said. “I understood it. Now I want to listen to it.”
Grace, you see.
Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style. Vancouver: Hartley & Marks, 1992.
– Ocean Paper Stone. Vancouver: William Hoffer, 1984.
– What is Reading For? Rochester: Cary Graphic Arts Press, 2011.
Carr, Dan. “Parmenides: Craft and Being.” Carving the Elements. Robert Bringhurst and Peter Koch, eds. Berkeley: Editions Koch, 2004.
