 Trans and Recalcitrance, a 20-year retrospective exhibition of Poultron Press, will run from April 1st through May 31st on the third floor of the main library. Dominic Riley and John Demerit from Pacific Centre for the Book Arts spoke with the founders of Poultron Press, Frances Butler and Alistair Johnston. Hello and welcome back to at the Public Library, John and Dominic's show and we're going to be talking today to two great friends and famous printers from Berkeley, but before we do, let me just remind you that it is St. Patrick's Day, we're both wearing our identical shades of non-green to celebrate the day and we're here in the, what could only be described really, is the labyrinthine bowels of the third floor of the public library. Actually we're 30 feet below the surface of the earth, Dominic. We are. So when I went up, I really went down. You were really going down. It's kind of scary down there. It is. It's, well, we're in, I think what you might call an environment, a sort of Vincent Price environment, wouldn't you say, John? Yeah, I would. Did you know Vincent Price could sneeze with his eyes open? Could he? Yeah. I had no idea. Yeah. Anyway, without further ado, let us move on. Today's show that we're going to be looking at is a show called Trends and Recalcitrants, 20 years of fine printing at the Poultron Press in Berkeley and we're going to be talking to the proprietors of the press, Francis Butler and Alistair Johnson. We should start out by saying that you are a small press and you do letterpress printing. Maybe we should begin by giving us a short description of exactly what is a small press. How does letterpress printing differ from other kinds of printing? And I don't know if you can see it, but this is a small press right here. How do you turn it into a small press? Being so large? Well we've expanded over the years, I guess you could say. But you have artifacts, right? Artifacts, yeah. You're going to show us what letterpress printing is essentially printing from pieces of small metal called movable type, which you compose. What's that device in your hand that you're... This is a composing stick and you compose these. That's not the kind of thing that Sir Henry Wood used to use. No, that was a conducting battle. Oh, right. So you're setting a line of type there. You set a line of type and you put in little blank spaces for the spaces. And then it's a very time consuming and laborious process as you can see. You look tired. But when you get to the end of the line... You don't want to eat your sandwich after doing that, do you? Oh, that's right. That's poisonous. That's good for the complexion I hear. When you get to the end of the line, you put in blank spaces to fill out the line and then you add one of these things, which is called a lead or a slug. And you have your line there, which says, pence plume tross. Oh, which is an anagram of my favorite press in Berkeley, Poulter's. Poulter's. Isn't that wonderful? And this then is... This type is then locked up in a chase, which is then put into a... But you could also set multiple lines of type in the same way that you've just done. Oh, look at that, yeah. You lock it up like this. Now that's wood type, yeah, there. This is wood type. You lock it up and then this metal frame locks into a bed of a printing press and then you smash pieces of paper against it after inking it. After inking it. And you end up with multiple copies. Great. So... This is very close to the mode that Gutenberg devised in 1450, some odd. So we're saying not a lot has changed then in terms of the work that you're doing. Well, up to letterpress not a lot has changed. Right. Printing technique for 400 years. Since then, I mean, it's gone into various other technologies. Are you exploring any other kinds of printing technologies or are you still primarily a letterpress? Well, we used a broken Xerox machine for a while to cover Xerox machine, which was interesting. And we've used other forms of printing. One of the great innovations was the introduction of line of type 100 years ago. Oh, yes, right. Where you set your type and you ended up with a whole line, a line O type. And it makes it a lot easier to deal with. You don't have the problem of your type all pying. This is just a solid block. You're just keying in that... You type it, essentially. Yeah. Excuse me. Right. And you end up with your page of metal. It's a lot easier to handle. But you had to throw this away once the job's done, right? Right. Unlike this, which goes back into the tray. You melt it back down and use it. Yeah. You melt line of type down. And if you make a mistake, you have to reset the line. Sure. These machines are very big. The line of type machines, right? You wouldn't have one at home in your class. Well, we do. You do? Do you have a line of type machine? They're humongous. Wow. And they're very kind of Rube Goldberg-ish with 30,000 moving parts. Wow. Gosh. And you have magazines of different fonts that you can use. Right. And each size of each typeface requires a different set of matrices. So you need a lot of brass and metal. But it really is a great time saver. Not really. It's a great time working on the machine that would be quicker to handset it. OK. So how do you use it? Usually if I'm doing longer works, prose works, or longer books of poetry, we use it for that. Right. Now, can you talk briefly about how you both got into letterpress? What first exposed you to that? Well, actually, Alastair was working for a printer who did university press books in Santa Barbara. And meanwhile, in Berkeley, I had taken some classes in letterpress. And I was invited to teach a class in the Bancroft Library. And so I had, it had been a year or two since I'd done any work, and I went down to refurbish my skills at a local letterpress. And Alastair was an apprentice there. And he and I started working together. Right. What was the name of that press? That was Wesley Tanner's Press. A Reef Press. A Reef Press. Oh, yes, right. And I had a letterpress. I had bought an old Vanderkrupp 219. And it was in this large fabric printing company that I owned and operated at the time. And so, through various misadventures, Wesley threw Alastair out onto the street. And he came and worked at my press. No, that's... We started it that way. We started it once again. Well, I think we should have a little melodrama in the public... Well, come on. We don't want to fight on public television, do we? Although it is cake. I believe that kind of thing does happen quite a lot. Only I can strangle Francis right now. You can do. So, she's answered your question, really, about how you got into it. Or is there more to that story? I have nothing more to add. OK, that's good. Right. And it's all history of the... And the Berkeley in the Bay Area does have a pretty rich tradition of letterpress printing. Oh, yes. That's why I came here. Because when I was in Santa Barbara, I knew Graham McIntosh, who'd been in San Francisco in the 50s, running white rabbit press. And I was just getting interested in small press publishing through the poetry. So, you came here for exposure to that? Well, I knew that this was kind of the hotbed of where it was going on. It was cranium press, zebras image, five-trees press. Yeah. We're all... Who were some of the people that influenced or helped you to learn the craft of letterpress? Well, Francis primarily. And Wesley. But... Wesley Tanner. Two years working in the trade letterpress shop. This is where I picked up all the sort of mechanical part. And then the typographic stuff you just learn by looking at books. Right. So after you two guys met, you founded the press April 1st, 1975, right? Talk a bit about the very early days of the press and the kind of stuff that you were printing. The first few things we did were our own projects, little poetry books. And Francis started working on our first big book, Confracti Mundi Rudera. This was our first large-scale project in which we worked out one of the two streams of activity in the press. One of the... Part of the press is purely literary press. The other half of the press is exploring the way in which people now use visual imagery for sophisticated communication. And most of the books that I have worked on and the projects after that have been oriented towards exploring the ways that people use image and space to get parallel information to that that they learn through reading, that they can gather in through the institutional culture, which is language and its transmission through universities and so on and so on. And so this book has a lot of visual jokes that have to do with turning the page, looking in and out of images. For example, here's a poem about Fogg, Alcatraz, gray this morning, barely cuts the rim of the bay. And you can't see the text very easily because it's printed inside. But it's there. But it's... If you press it down, you can see... Yeah. And it's about Fogg. This is Confracti Mundi Rudera, right, which might... Yes. It's a phrase from Thomas Love Peacock, which means fragments of a ruined world. And it's a series of poems. And then this one about... There's a little section about water. And then there's another poem about water for certain Viking leader, first off the boat. We swim out with gifts. And then there's a double-page spread wherein they are swimming out with gifts. And one of them is saying, Sutton who? So this book is indeed fragments tied together by visual puns and jokes. And then at the end of this book, I started on another book that uses the text by Tom Rayworth. And Alistair will talk about our connection with Tom Rayworth later. But the Rayworth book is a much more elaborate version of this page-turning joke sequence because the Rayworth text itself, log book, is about a series of pages that were found after a wreck. And Alistair very carefully set them all so they were justified and ended at the end of a page regardless, which is a very exotic thing to have managed. Tremendous accomplishment. Color letterpress, each plate, each color is a separate plate, but it also has some postoir, which is a French stencil process that I will discuss in a moment. And there are sequences within the book wherein you read one page, the illustration wraps around to the next page. But the information that is on the next page actually refers back to the page before so that the notion of sequence and spacing as a way of learning things is played out. Here's one where the text is about overflowing the river, something, something, and using the word overflown, which is not, in fact, the past participle of to overflow, but Rayworth suggests the past participle of the possibility of overflying. So after you have the discussion of overflown on this page, there is someone who's overflying. But at this point, you would have to go back to find out that this person is about to be shot down. So we went on with this kind of maneuver for a while, but Alistair then proceeded to move off into more examinations of pure literature. Right, now tell us a little bit, Alistair, about the sort of, you talked about the press tradition, talk about the literary tradition of the area, and how that ties in with the work that you, or the poultry and press, have been doing. Well, California didn't really have much of a literary tradition, of course, until the gold rush. I mean, there were writings about it, but there was a press tradition here, starting after the gold rush with a huge influx of people, and in fact, probably the most commonly printed thing in San Francisco in the 19th century was salmon tin labels, or lithographed. So there was huge lithographic presses, and by the 20th century, you had a literary tradition sort of springing up Steinbeck. Robert Louis Stevenson was here for a while, and he had a little press. His stepson had a little tabletop press, and he and Robert Louis Stevenson printed a magazine together up in, I think, St. Helena, when they were living there. But for me, in terms of my interest, the literature that starts after the Second World War is sort of crucial, the Beat era, the famous people associated with city lights, but also the anti-beat movement of the Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan. Yeah, and this leads perhaps into this book, The Aarhan Press. Right, well, when I moved to San Francisco, I was sort of looking for this literary tradition, and Aarhan Press had only ceased publishing about 10 years before we started Poetron Press, but there really wasn't much information about them, so I decided to research them and write a bibliography, and so I found the press archive. What was your initial exposure to this press? A Jack Spicer book called Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, which was one of my favorite books, a very strange and quirky book with lithographs by Fran Herndon, and a wonderful series of poems by Spicer, one of the great San Francisco authors. So I found the press archive over at the Bancroft Library, and started working on putting it together, putting together the history of the press. So there are letters from Ginsburg, Brian Geissen. Oh, this is a Brian Geissen illustration. Yeah, which he sent Dave Hazlewood and was in a box at the Bancroft, so. How did you reproduce this for the book? We, well, this is a very kind of backward way to go about it, but we photographed the original art, which is in three colors, and then we made three photo stats of it, and carefully painted out each of the colors we didn't want, so we ended up with three plates. It was kind of a subtractive process. David Lance Quartz works that way. Oh, he does. Oh, he does. And then here's a letter from William Burroughs explaining how to do a cut-up, and there's a page of type, and you could actually rip the page out and punch it into four. What do you do there? Do you want to show us how you do it? Well, it's this tough paper. Oh, yeah. It's mylar, isn't it? We could take a photocopy later, perhaps to do the cheap work. We'll tear it up, yeah. And then there were little drawings by Michael McClure. Can you show us the newspaper article that you actually set in letterpress type, the movable type we saw earlier, to look like a newspaper? Yeah, it's from the San Francisco Chronicle, a very funny article called The Poets Cry Out, Zen Nuts, Hippies, and Squares, and I set it to look like, exactly like a bad newspaper type setting. I just followed the original and to give the flavor of the era, I thought it would be good to have this, you know, actual account. There's a wonderful, it's, I won't read you the whole thing, but there's a wonderful thing that says something about a few of the blonde girls wearing black stockings chewed gum and slouched against the wall in the back, obviously missing the nuances, but the rest were appreciative enough. A little bit of early sexism in the first two years. Oh, I'm glad I wasn't there, and then aren't you? Well, I was around, actually. You were? Oh, yeah. You talked a little bit in the catalog about the way that this type was set in the stick and then the wobbliness of it, I think. Yeah, I felt that in order to preserve the spirit of the beat era, I should have some sort of spontaneity involved. So I improvised the text as I was setting it, and then I put it on the bed of the press and proofed it, and then after mature consideration, took out all the slanderous and libelous things that were in there. That's a good idea. Apparently still. You don't always do that, do you? Well, there was a section back here where there was a big fight that they had with Robert Duncan over a book of his called A Book of Resemblances, which they ended up not printing, although they'd set the type and so on. And after setting all this stuff, I thought, oh, oh, I can't really, really get into all this mud slinging. So I'd already printed the backup. So I had a whole bunch of zinx made, and so all these illustrations were to fill up the space which had the quasi-libelous material. That must have been very slanderous. We moved pages of the slander. Pages of the slander, yes. Well, thanks for showing that, and we're gonna talk now about practical ECAs. EACs, extracurricular activities. I mean, Alistair, obviously you were involved in the poetry and literary scene, as well as being a printer, and I think recently you've become very involved, especially after a trip to Africa and African music, film, literature, and you now have a radio program on KUSF, which is Tuesday nights. Which actually, we've already plugged on this program, haven't we? So now I think you'll have to plug our program on your program. I will do that. And if you have a program, please plug all our programs. I'm wondering, usually he gives away free tickets to things this lures in the audience. If it was going to plug you, you'll have to have free tickets for something. Well, we're not live lures. You just give them to all your friends anyway, don't you? Yeah, free tickets here. And your work also, we're very interested in what I like to call, or I guess you call also poetry gardens. Yes. Can you talk about that? After doing some books for the first 10 years of the press, I really moved off to do a lot of text in gardens and in larger sculptural installations. I started off with just small pieces, like a 16 foot long wire piece that had hands on it. And if you walked past it to read the letters on each hand, the hands waved. And the text was from a Stevie Smith poem that Alistair pointed out. I'm not waving, she said. I'm not, I'm too far out, she said, and not waving, but drowning. And then I moved on to do large scale installations, one called space printing that was about, indeed, the ways that you use space to learn. And then I did a series of shows about shadow in the visual arts. And I did a shadow garden for myself, which still exists, it's called a shadow, dictionary of shadow effects. And the latest book that I've done is about gardens that are about shadow and things of that sort. And I did some gardens for a hospital in Seattle that involves shadow, it's very difficult because it's hardly any- These were public installations that you did. That's right. Howdy, howdy, what, so what? There's hardly any sun in Seattle. There's sun in Seattle, so shadow was difficult to achieve, but it was lit, so that at night there would be. That's great. And we are going to have in our exhibition some of the smaller- And these gardens have worked their way into some of your printed pieces. Oh, yes, my particular favorite is in your garden on a sort of cuboid-shaped planter. In Mosaic, you have the large word excess, right? And this became part of the title of a book called Lesson Excess, right? Yes. Which is your other book done in Poshwa, which I think you're not going to show us, right? Yes, about 10 years ago I did a Poshwa portfolio called New Dryads or Waiting for Your Call, which was about fashion plates or ordinary fashion. And I have now done another portfolio that is colored by Poshwa, which is a stencil process. And this one is about excessive gardens. And I used, for its title page, a drawing of my own shadow garden in Berkeley. This one, as you see, is a planter with a lot of extra babies called excess. And the way you do the plates for a portfolio like this is first draw the image. And these are done with the repitograph pens and take forever and ever. And Francis Poshwa? It's a word meaning stencil in French. Another French word. And I will show you how to do that very briefly in a moment. Now, is this transferred to Mylar? No, then you get the drawing photographed on a large camera and get a negative. That is used to make a metal plate. This is actually magnesium. And this is 18 by 24. And from this plate, you put it down on the press. So when you take the negative to an engraver and they'll make the plate for you? I do a lot of the work myself, but I get the etching done by someone who has a large etching machine. And then this is a printed image from that plate. And at this point, I mount this. I punch the image and mount it so that it's in registration. Those are your registration marks. And I put on waxed stencil paper, which is called EZ cut, and cut out. So that's held on these little pens? With the little pens. And I cut out these squares, which are going to be a blue color. Actually, I only cut out half of them. The other blue squares are cut on a second plate because they have to register so closely that it would be too frail. And at this point, I then have your paints here. I then use a paint, which is usually very, very dry and a little soft, clear, extra paint. Yes, but you can use many different kinds of paint. I've used watercolor and acrylic. And I stencil in, through this wax paper stencil, all the holes in this one color. Right. And eventually, I haven't done it all here, but eventually, it looks like this. And if I just hold this up, we can see the small area of blue that Francis has just colored in there, which is kind of corresponds to that part there. Now, this is an addition you're working on. Yes. And what's the addition size? Well, there are 45 plates that are involved in this book. And there are going to be 30 copies, which will take me for, it already has taken me for everybody, it will take me quite a bit longer. So you think there's an idea of the labor involved. How many stencils safe for a thing like this? This one has about 20 stencils and about 45 different color placements. I don't have to use a complete sheet for every single one. And sometimes, as mottled colors like this, you actually put the color through in small stencil areas and then wash it out so it all blends. Is there text with this book? Yes. It has about 15 pages of text. Some of it is incorporated into picture images. Others is just, it's a very odd book because it's this size, 17 by 22. And it'll be produced in loose folios that will come in a box that has a tile cover saying, excess, naturally. That's great. Well, thanks for showing us that, Francis. Yes, you can all rush out and do it any moment now. Absolutely, yes. Well, now she's shared the secrets with us. And the book, Logbook, we looked at earlier, was also an example of some close work. Where is that? Can you just hand us the logbook? Because this leads us on very nicely to Alistar's new book. This is Logbook, which was a book I think you did in 77. Was that right? Which had those lovely illustrations also done in Poshwa, right? One or two. Turn it that way, done. Right, oh, sorry. Most of them were mechanically separated. These are an early book. Now, you did this with Tom Rayworth, and you've had a paltry and you've had a long association with many poets, artists, writers that you've enjoyed working with. And one of them is Tom Rayworth, who's an English poet, right? Yeah, and now there's Philip Whelan, who's a San Francisco poet. We've done several things. You'll have to publish several books of poets that you enjoy working with. Yeah, Darryl Gray, we published three or four of his books. So if there's a poet we get along with and like their work, you know, we might as well keep publishing them. Right, and we have right here... Yeah, this is our fourth book with Tom Rayworth. We did, other than the logbook, we did two other poetry books, The Mask in 1976 and Nishtvar Rosey, which was a book that he wrote in the 60s. And we had never appeared, and we published it in about 1979. This is Muted Hawks, the latest book from Poultry and Press, one of them. And this is also, I believe, Alistair, your first real adventure into addition art, right? Yeah, I've done a few one-off experimental projects, but this was one where I took some ideas that I've been working with experimental relief printing that are essentially monoprints, but then found a way to recreate them 40 times. So there are slight variations in all of them, but they were all done on the press in the style that's called hot printing. It was invented by Hendrik Workman in Holland in the 30s. And he basically found things in the print shop, such as here we've got some broken wood type, and the background is electrical tape, and you just mount them type high. I just took a piece of type high furniture and strapped the tape onto it and then ran the press over it. The furniture's the pieces of wood that fill up the spaces. And you just put tape over that. Yeah, and actually this is metal furniture here that I just, one of the great innovations in press design has been the adjustable bed so you can raise the bed of the press. So if I understand it, normally these things here would be lower than type high. They would be lower than the level of the type so they wouldn't print. They're invisible, they fill up the space. You have an adjustable bed that will raise that. I raise them up to print. And these pieces of furniture also print, yeah. Now it's a very delicate thing because you don't want to trash your rollers and also you don't want to put holes in the paper so you still have to get everything planer. It all has to be relatively flat. I mean, the texture of the wood has created a surface here. More impression would make this darker, less would make it lighter. So I was playing with the balance between the impression and the inking. And then there are other things happening in here. Like these lines are, this is cardboard that I mounted type high. This little strip is a piece of floor linoleum printed twice in two different colors, slightly out of register. It has a look of marble paper, don't you see it? And it's the most amazing collection of metaphorical imagery strung together. And it's a gorgeous- And Dominic's got a very nice concertina style binding. Yes, and it actually plays au prie de ma blonde. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. It is culture and second favorite book binder. I think so. And the first favorite book binder is you, I think. Yeah, we've pretty much covered all the bases, haven't we? Which is, which is very interesting. And we don't have to plug you in our Alistair's program since you just did it. We shamelessly promoted ourselves. Yes, well, yeah. So we're not being paid very much. And I always say, I'm not going to complain to the city of South Francisco. They have put us in the basement after all. Yes, but we're subterranean. But we're not being cut, are we? Not yet. And I would like to remind you that the whole reason that we are here today is to remind you and plug the show that Alistair and Francis will be having, Poultru and Press, Trance and Recalcitrance, the private voice in the public realm running. April 1st through May 31st, San Francisco Public Library, the South Wing, the third floor. We hope you can come and see it. It's a wonderful show. And from me, John de Merritt. And from me, Dominic Riley. And from Alistair Johnson. Francis Butler. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming and sharing with us your work, demonstrating your artifacts and your fine letterpress work from the last 20 years. And we'll see you, I think, what, next month? We'll see you next month. OK, bye-bye.