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Pomona College Magazine is published three times a year by Pomona College
550 N. College Ave, Claremont, CA 91711
Online Editor: Mark Kendall
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Editor: Mark Wood
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Freedom of the Press
Robin Price '84 finds a creative outlet
and a satisfying career in the whimsical yet rigorous art of fine press
bookmaking ...
By Janice O'Leary
For a woman immersed in art and surrounded by trays of metal letters,
Robin Price '84 has spent an awful lot of time lately doing math, adding, subtracting and multiplying with the number 43, which happened
to
be her age when she started on this project. Forty-three has sent her
diving
into favorite poems, river guides and maps of Toronto’s transit system.
The book she works on in her Connecticut studio, 43, According to Robin
Price, with Annotated Bibliography, is a perfect example of the
combination
of the seemingly random nature and the precision of her art. Price is
not an
author; she is a book artist, designing and printing books that are more
than
mere shelters for story or reproductions of art. They are art.
For this book, Price has calculated various iterations of 43—for
instance,
she’ll print 86 copies of the book (43 times 2) with a dozen (4 times 3)
deluxe editions. It will contain 43 maps, all taken from spots along the
43rd
parallel, divided into sections such as: Water, Flora, Fauna, Senses,
Hands. A
river runs through it, wending along each page spread.
 “The number evolved into my lens for obtaining text
excerpts from more than 100 books significant to me as an
artist,” she says. “Simple formulas, using modular arithmetic
with the number 43, were applied to categories such as page
number, paragraph, sentence, line of poetry, etc. Sometimes I
counted from the end of a book instead of the beginning. I kept
counting until I got something I liked.”
Grouped on a page, the excerpts seem almost fanciful in their
randomness (one, appearing in Flora, reads: “Even a fly has a
spleen.”), but the formula of counting and the topical grouping
lend connective tissue. She has been at work on the book now
for more than a year and hopes to finish it by the time she turns
45. “I’m sick of counting to 43,” she says.
PRINTING BOOKS on a letterpress as Price does is a slow
labor and a lost art. Those who stumble upon it these days do
so often in pursuit of elegant wedding invitations, not books. In
her studio, housed in a former gun factory built in the 1700s,
are several huge letterpresses, including an 1,800-pounder nicknamed
“the beast,” that Price operates by hand, reveling in the
tactile work.
She chooses the individual metal letters from a compartmented
tray, called a case—in bygone eras there was both an upper
and a lower case—and each letter is its own mirror image. The p
appears as a printed q does, for instance, giving rise to the
phrase, “mind your p’s and q’s.” The compartment for the e is
largest.
When Price is ready, she arranges the type in sequence on a
form that will represent the page. Lines of text are separated by
strips of lead (leading, as most publishers know it), and then
Price inserts the “furniture,” wood blocks in measured pica
lengths to denote the space for margins and other large spaces
on a page. She locks up the “page” with a key inserted into two
sides, so none of the letters or furniture moves during printing.
She applies ink to the rollers and hand feeds each sheet of
paper. She can control the impression and the colors by changing
the amount of ink she uses, where she places it on the rollers
and by adjusting the roller height.
 Price takes her inspiration from poetry and art, but also from
rare books and illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages.
“That’s part of why this is such a rich field, the history before
the printing press,” she says. “Monks used to spend 12 hours a
day copying liturgical text, and the beauty of it came from making
an object for God. It had to be beautiful.”
It’s that intersection between language and visual art that
holds Price in thrall. At Pomona, she majored in studio art with a
concentration in photography. But in her senior year she took a
letterpress printing class at Scripps College and produced her first
book, Miss Price’s Primer. Each letter of the alphabet became
personified—F was for Francesca, who was friends with Winifred.
After that, Price apprenticed herself to the director of a fine
arts press at the University of Southern California. “It was rigorous
training,” she says, “equivalent to getting a master’s
degree.” There she learned the perfectionism and attention to
detail required to produce fine books.
NOW CONFIDENT in her art, Price allows herself to sometimes
abandon “high control” for “chance operations.”
One of her favorite editions, now, unfortunately, out of print,
is Slurring at bottom: a printer’s book of errors, printed in 2000.
Each book was comprised of 18 years of rejects. She sanded
down the cotton sheets of paper, creating a palimpsest—a layer
where what was erased is still partially visible— and sent the
defect-ridden pages out to 10 artists and asked them to do what
they would with them.
“It was like Christmas when I’d get these pages back from
the artists,” she says. Some chose to sew designs into the pages,
some to paint with watercolors.
One contributor, an alchemist as
Price calls him, burned streaks into
his batch of pages. Price printed
text excerpted from other books
and collated the pages in different
order so each book would be
unique.
“You can see traces from other
books in each page,” she says. She
even included in the books the
Oxford English Dictionary’s definition
of palimpsest. In printing, she
varied typefaces randomly and used
odd capitals speckled throughout
the text and hand colored lettering.
 She thrives on the collaborative
aspect of her projects and, for the
book of errors, the collaboration
was blind; no artist knew the other
parties contributing. “It’s a democratic
approach to art making,” she
says. “With this project, I took
away the ego, took away likes and
dislikes.”
She thinks of the book of errors
as a visual version of Japanese renga, a form of poetry where
many people each contribute one
line. “There is a balance to it,” she says.
A poem by Charles Simic is tacked to a post in her studio,
giving words to Price’s current artistic philosophy. It is called
“Elementary Cosmogony,” and one verse reads: “for a long
apprenticeship/ that has as its last/ and seventh rule:/ the submission
to chance.”
EVEN THOUGH HER STUDIO is dominated by hulking
behemoths of machines rather than oil-painted canvases, it’s a
creative and colorful place. Her chocolate lab mix snuffles in
sleep on a dog bed the size of a crib mattress. An extra-long
gold velvet antique sofa commands a corner, beckoning Price to
take a nap. The spines of many-hued books, conjuring the visits
her mind has made, cram the shelves near the couch. A
California license plate juts out of them like a bookmark, calling
attention to the place Price still misses.
“I really miss good Mexican food and the western landscape,”
she says. “The mountains, the beach, the desert.”
Though her heart led her east, where she remains, she grew
up in Texas, infused with the southwestern landscape. Her
mother painted as a hobby, and her father, a mechanic, worked
with his hands.
As a child, Price recalls, she loved books, transforming a
small closet into a library.
As an adult and an artist, she has combined these disparate
threads—an appreciation for beauty, the satisfaction of working
with her hands and the spiritual and intellectual nourishment of
books—to weave into a career. But it’s not without slubs, especially
financial ones.
Because her books are printed in such small quantities, never
more than a few hundred, and because they are so labor intensive,
each fetches a high price. Her most modestly priced book,
The Journey of the Guitar: A Portrait of Pepe Romero, costs
$375. Her most expensive, a medical text of which only two
remain, goes for $4,000.
She has regular subscribers and several universities and art
museums with standing orders for her work, but she still has to
borrow enormous sums to fund her projects before they even
earn a cent, paying calligraphers, woodworkers and binders as
much as $20,000 apiece.
“It took a decade for my parents to stop urging me to quit,”
she says.
Once in a while she’ll find she has under-priced a project.
One, Altar Book for Górecki, she originally set at $450, and it
didn’t sell. When she raised the price to $750, it sold like
lemonade on a hot day, eventually selling out.
That book was a tribute to Polish composer Henryk
Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, the “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,”
with lyrics printed in Polish and English. It was illustrated with
reproductions from 17th-century ornithology and an abstract
woodcut by Price’s husband, artist Keiji Shinohara. The piece is
a triptych, with letterpress printed paper dry mounted onto
three pieces of balsa wood, hinged with vellum and housed in a
custom-made cherry box.
Price first heard the somber song performed on the radio,
while driving in California. “I had to pull over to the side of
the road and listen to it,” she says of the hauntingly beautiful
symphony.
Price printed 60 copies of the Górecki book in 1996, the
same year her mother died. Her mother saw the book before she
died, proclaiming it her favorite of all of her daughter’s work.
Producing the book, Price says, “was a way for me to begin
mourning her death.”
Just as 43, her current book, is a way for her to celebrate
life.
Janice O'Leary is a freelance writer based in Cambridge, Mass. |
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