Swirling in the mists that cling to the hills of western Massachusetts are the spirits of writers and poets. Herman Melville. Emily Dickinson. Robert Frost. It`s a literary climate that struck Barry Moser anew when he flew back after a recent trip to California.
Perhaps, he said, it was landscape, ”the dark drama with the rocks, the deep green of the evergreens.” Or New Englanders. ”I love their distance, the respect for the individual.” Probably it was the atmosphere. ”It`s almost as if there are ghosts here. They make me comfortable,” he said. ”At home.”
Home, to Moser, is a white farmhouse filled with shelves of books. Out back is a second building with a chitty-chitty-bang-bang machine to set type, an elegant old letter-press, stacks of good paper and wafting printerly smells. Moser has been called the best wood engraver in the country. He is a publisher, designer, artist, illustrator, printmaker and the chief force behind Pennyroyal Press. A rotund, wild-bearded man of enormous energy, he calls himself a ”booksmith.”
Moser is not perfect. A review of ”Frankenstein” praised his nine menacing portraits of Victor, the hulking laboratory monster, but noted that they needed so much ink that a nearby lower-case ”e” had filled in. Still, no one comes to mind who is better at what fine-book dealer Edwina Evers calls ”this lovely personal precise form of bookmaking where books, made so lovingly, are meant to be held, smelled and stroked.”
”There has been a great revival in fine printing,” James Wells, custodian emeritus of the John M. Wing Foundation on the history of printing at the Newberry Library, noted in an interview. In the last two decades, the number of private presses has increased. These days, a printer in residence, like a strong football team, is a mark of prestige for an academic
institution. ”It`s part of the renewed interest in craftsmanship,” Wells said, ”in doing things yourself.”
”We should jettison the idea that `you can`t tell a book by its cover,`
” said Evers, whose sales route starts at her own Califia Books in San Francisco and runs to such high-level collecting institutions as the Newberry. ”You do tell a fine-press book by its cover-and by its binding, its paper, its design and its printing,” she said. ”The artifact itself brings joy to the eye and hand surely, to the ear and nose and, just possibly, thereby to the soul.”
It is, book artists say, a busy, interesting, elegant little world. Calligraphers, binders, designers, scholars, printers, typographers, papermakers and watermarkers keep in touch through newsletters, journals and magazines. One of the best, Fine Print: The Review for the Arts of the Book
(P.O. Box 3394, San Francisco, Calif. 94119), was founded 13 years ago by Sandra Kirshenbaum, a librarian and rare-book cataloguer who believed people like herself needed a forum and who borrowed $1,800 from her mother to start one.
The quarterly has 3,200 subscribers at $48 a year. Its articles are wide- ranging. ”Pulp in Space” described an experiment by NASA astronaut Steve Hawley in which he fashioned paper on an Apollo flight 200 miles above the Earth. Freelance conservator Guy Pethbridge wrote about treating books damaged by fire during the conflict between Britain and Argentina in the Falkland Islands. In an article ”Man Beats Own Son to Pulp,” Thomas Leech described his adventures in home papermaking. Another contributor warned of bookworms and insects. One bookworm, when disturbed, jumps several inches in the air.
As befits a large star in a small world, Barry Moser is often mentioned in Fine Print. Best known for detailed, daring engravings in his new editions of such classics as ”Moby Dick,” ”Alice`s Adventures in Wonderland” and
”The Scarlet Letter,” his works have appeared in 60 exhibitions. They are held in private and public collections, including the Library of Congress and the British Museum. Most are expensive. An edition of Anne Frank`s ”Diary of a Young Girl” sold for $1,500 a copy. His version of L. Frank Baum`s ”The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” cost $1,000. His ”Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus,” by Mary Shelley, was praised for its ”splendidly legible text” with ”well-knit word spacing” and ”vigorous display letters.” It weighed 5 pounds.
Nor is Moser all shop and no play. Several years ago, he set up tables among the printing equipment and threw a formal black-tie party. Thirteen friends enjoyed roast pig, sterling silver, opera music and two dancing ladies. ”It got to be, you know, a pretty wild time,” Moser said, recalling the evening`s fallout, one divorce and two broken relationships.
Yet, in ways that many in less-engrossing professions might envy, Barry Moser`s life is his art. ”This is the way I want to live,” he said in an interview, settling into a comfy chair, sipping a glass of white wine. ”I couldn`t make a living selling anything. I have no interest in money. My partner gives me a computer printout every month, but I don`t even know how much I made last year. If you`re good at something and there is a demand, you can write your own ticket,” he said, adding, ”We don`t live hand-to-mouth around here.”
In the late 1970s, Moser was commissioned by the University of California Press to design and illustrate a new edition of Dante`s ”Divine Comedy.”
That led to a commission from San Francisco`s Arion Press to illustrate a limited edition of ”Moby Dick,” then to speeches, lecture tours and seminars. His projects range from small, such as a treatment of Eudora Welty`s ”The Robber Bridegroom,” to huge, a new edition of Shakespeare, now in the works. A recent catalogue of his books, posters and broadsides ran 60 pages.
Once Moser starts a book project, he devours the text. ”I`ll just keep reading the whole bloody thing over and over again to make sure there`s no mention of some physical characteristic that I missed,” he said. ”After a while, I can quote these books at length by heart.” He works out the design of the book. ”I know what my margins are going to be, what type-face, the density of the texture, the color of the page,” he said. ”I`ve got that all figured out before I ever do an illustration.”
Images should come neither too frequently nor too seldom. Balance in style also is important. In Moser`s ”Huckleberry Finn,” for example, several portraits showed characters looking stiff-backed and formal, as if posing for a 19th Century photographer. Other subjects seemed off-guard, discovered at play by someone quicker than they were. The visual contrast, one critic noted, reflects Twain`s interest in unmasking society`s false fronts.
”In principle, block carvings are no more sophisticated than rubber stamps,” Moser said, ”but they are incredibly sophisticated in presence and execution.” He uses very sharp tools to cut from surfaces that are absolutely flat ”like glass.” The blocks are made of boxwood, a slow-growing evergreen shrub with a dense grain that won`t crack under the stress of a printing press.
Boxwood is so hard, Moser said, ”it makes maple seem like balsa.” Many artists employ technicians to carve engravings from their illustrations. Not Moser. ”Wood engraving is a refined, difficult printmaking technique, and it has an unforgiving nature,” he said. ”If you make a mistake, you have to incorporate it into the plan or start over.”
He has had his share of slips, some on nearly finished blocks. Tools can dance across the surface of the block, leaving a long, unsightly white line. On portraits, slips across a shadow under an eye create difficulties. ”You can`t fill them in.” But most problems are with the wood. ”Wood is a living thing,” Moser noted. Blocks are made up of small pieces and have their own peculiarities. Like humans, they can come unglued. Once he settles on an idea, he can do a woodblock in two days.
English engraver Eric Gill once observed that mistakes are caused by two things: dull tools and disturbed minds. Noting that, Moser, who is divorced, has gone to considerable lengths to make life orderly for himself. He works every day of the year. ”I don`t know where ideas come from,” he has said.
”One moment you have none, the next moment you do. Deadline pressure seems to make them flow more readily.”
One assignment, for which he had ”all kinds of ideas,” was Lewis Carroll`s ”Alice`s Adventures in Wonderland,” a hand-printed edition of 350 copies bound in violet leather that Newsweek critic John Ashberry hailed as better than that of Carroll`s original illustrator, the quaintly realistic Sir John Tenniel. Calling Moser`s work ”a world view where innocence and malignancy are inextricably intertwined,” Ashberry liked his White Rabbit, with the hauteur of a French maitre d`; his cross-eyed and crazed Queen of Hearts; and his Cheshire Cat, a creature shown as shockingly ugly because, in Moser`s words, ”sanity is sometimes ugly, in a world where beauty is presented as insane.”
His own life is one of thought-out routine. Most days the routine is like this: Wakes up 4:40 to 5 a.m. Tends the livestock: three cats, dog, handful of gerbils, rabbit. Grinds coffee from frozen Swiss decaffeinated beans. Drives youngest daughter, one of three daughters still living at home, to school. Returns. Eats fruit, bagel. Works at drawing, drafting, design, engraving or watercolor. At 11:30, goes for sandwich ”to get out of the house and rest my eyes.”
Shops every day. Plans dinner. ”I`m not snotty in the kitchen, but I know my way around.” At 5 p.m., breaks for martini. Often goes into the hills, riding a fat-tired mountain bicycle along logging roads, as much as 100 miles a week. Five or six times a day, falls, always on what he calls ”his nonworking arm,” in other words, not the one that holds his tools.
An important focus of the Moser day is the evening meal. With his daughters and friends, he said, ”we sit down together, laugh, have a good time and get into arguments. I like being with my family. It`s my whole reason for working.” At night, he goes to movies, rents something for his VCR or watches cable TV. By 10 o`clock, he is asleep.
It took him a long time to put these habits in place. He was born in Chattanooga on Oct. 15, 1940. His father, who died when Moser was 10 months old, ”kept my mother very well, with furs, cars and a maid,” he recounted.
”Dad would make a few bucks. He`d come home and say to her, `Billie, let`s go and make some money.` My mother used to tell about going to Chicago to gamble in casinos where people stood around with machine guns. In the late
`20s, when he was 31, he got a brain tumor. The money was eaten up by hospital bills. He left mother the cars and a mortage-free house but not much else.”
His mother remarried. Moser spent six years in military school, starting in 7th grade. ”We wore West Point uniforms, gray with black stripes. I still know close-order drill like the back of my hand,” he said. ”We played ball, went hunting. I could identify every car made between 1940 and 1958. I got busted from corporal to private for drawing naked women on the pages of my Spanish textbook.
”I come from a long line of bigots, true Faulknerian Southerners. To be an artist in a Southern, male-oriented family like mine was not the thing to do. But they did let me major in industrial design. That was masculine.”
In 1962, after a brief excursion into the ministry, Moser became a teacher in Chattanooga. He hated it. Five years later, ”uncomfortable with the attitudes around me about artists, black people and women,” he moved his family north. He accepted a position teaching art at Williston Academy, a private school in Easthampton, Mass.
Four months later a friend in Northampton took him to look over a small plant operated by Harold McGrath, a legend in American printing circles. As Moser once wrote in an autobiographical sketch: ”I saw a printing press-operated by a master. I smelled the viscera of printing-oil, ink and solvents. I saw books the likes of which I had never seen before. That day I touched the pulse of both form and direction. Even though I`ve never been a great and voracious reader, I`ve always loved letters, pages of books, books and book-filled rooms. I sensed in this place, and with this work, a potential for my own artistic activity.”
Nor does he feel rivalry with such peers as Leonard Baskin, Jacob Landau or Rico Lebrun. ”We should be aiming for collegiality, not competition,”
Moser has said, noting that each year he rereads one major source of inspiration for American draftsmen and printmakers, ”The Shape of Content”
by the late Ben Shahn.
In 1970, with McGrath and others, Moser formed Pennyroyal Press, named for ”a plant grown by all self-respecting witches.” The operation, according to a four-page newsletter sent ”to Pennyroyal friends” last month, ”is alive and well.” So is Moser. He quit teaching in 1982 because he was making six times more money making books. He now designs five books a year. He illustrates five others and undertakes commissions for everyone from Nestle`s to Newsweek.
Now, after a series of successes with classics, he`d like to do more with the neighbors. ”Writers and poets are thick as peas around here,” he said, pointing to a stack of books, including poems by Richard Wilbur, who lives nearby. ”But there are not a large number of people like me.”
