There is something for everyone! This is from Ken Sanders Rare Books in Utah.
Speaking of toreros, this week my abuelo turned 90! (This was a bad segue. My abuelo was not a torero, but we did visit a bunch of plazas de toros when I was a kid, which was fun.) On our birthday call to him, I exercised my appallingly stilted book-related Spanish vocabulary to explain the story of la duquesa, the duchess who printed an item my boss bought from a German bookseller. I spent an afternoon or two stumbling through a lot of French websites to find out that:
La Duquesa was Guyonne-Elisabeth-Josephe de Montmorency-Laval (GEJ MAL), the French Duchesse de Luynes. In 1795, she opened a private press at her and her husband’s chateau at Dampierre, where she published 17 titles over the ensuring 8 years, including a dual-language English-French translation of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The printing itself was quite tricky: an interlinear style where each line of English is followed by the word-for-word translation in French, with occasional notes from the GEJ MAL (who translated the text herself!) indicating where the English order could not be preserved. GEJ MAL was a meticulous printer and life-long educator—she printed this edition of Crusoe as a language-learning tool for her son—and she oversaw all the aspects of the labor-intensive printing. Descriptions of her in other’s correspondence and accounts describe compositors’ and printers’ surprise when she first stepped up to the compositor table, organized type into the lock-up, then printed off a sheet herself, expressing no qualms with the mess or the hard labor.
Perhaps the most notable part of the Duchesse’s printing endeavors is that she slipped them between two, how might we say, tumultuous periods in French history. She served as a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette from 1774 to 1789, ducking out of the palace just a few short years before she might have otherwise lost her head (a side note: while researching GEJ MAL, I learned of another one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies-in-waiting, Madeleine-Angelique-Charlotte de Brehan, who was arrested and set for execution during the Revolution. As her head was laid on the bloc and her name read out, she cried out, protesting a mistake—a clerical error had mixed up her surnames. Her execution was delayed, and two days later, Robespierre was executed. She was released. Never say the French bureaucracy hasn’t served…someone). Anyways, while her old colleagues were getting beheaded, GEJ MAL was plowing away on her private press, the likes of which the French monarchy had turned a blind eye for years because prosecuting them would’ve been a headache (though a rather minor one given what they’d later face) (the guillotine was outlawed in France in 1981, people!!) (abolish the death penalty).
Unsurprisingly, Napoleon did not look fondly on unregulated printing and outlawed such ventures when he accumulated/centralized/seized power. Such was the end of GEJ MAL’s beloved enterprise at Dampierre. Yet despite this imperial edict that curtailed her ability to print her own projects, correspondence indicates that GEJ MAL spent decades trying to commission a French translation of The Spectator at a nephew’s public Parisian press. She was a lover of languages and the press to her end.
GEJ MAL recalls to me another tenacious woman who ran her own press, though in Paris: the American ex-pat Caresse Crosby, who is casually credited with inventing the modern bra and produced early printings of some of the heavy-hitting modernist writers (Ernest Hemingway, DH Lawrence, Ezra Pound, William Faulkner, TS Eliot…Caresse was an excellent recruiter). She ran the Black Sun Press basically by herself, and various accounts depict her, like GEJ MAL, hunched over the press, fingers covered in ink, painstakingly designing these fine editions for her extraordinarily famous contemporaries. Later in life, Caresse founded “Citizens of the World,” which was an organization dedicated to fostering world peace. It never really got off the ground (non-profits, amiright?), and in the last decades of her life she subsequently founded a relatively stable artist’s colony in Rome that lasted until her death in 1970.
Caresse was also married to walking disaster of a human being Harry Crosby, who cheated on her constantly and never pulled his weight at the press that they opened up “together.” He also muddied her relationships with her two children, a fracture she never really recovered from, and he wrote embarrassingly terrible poetry, which Caresse printed under the Black Sun imprint because she was a generous person, one must assume, who loved her husband.
I first met Caresse while cataloguing dozens of her Black Sun Press works in undergrad, and she’s always haunted me a bit, cropping up unexpectedly in the last four years. Black Sun Press editions are plain and lovely, printed in black and red ink and wrapped in glassine jackets (that thin, translucent paper that cracks and breaks if handled slightly too roughly). There also aren’t a ton of them: Caresse did relatively small runs of 50 to 250ish, but you can usually find copies on the market for various suffocating sums. GEJ MAL’s works are far less common: the one we bought is from a run of 25, of which seven are located at institutions. Such is the way of things!
If nothing else, I look at Caresse and GEJ MAL and see two fiercely engaged, motivated women who did a lot of hard work to pursue their intellectual interests. It helped that they were pretty stinking rich and not under duress (though Caresse fell on hard times…but that’s another story that involves wayward literary agents and that world peace organization). Pretty cool things can come out of gads of leisure time and a willingness to get your fingers inky! Now I get why people look forward to retirement. Or summer break.
Housekeeping and birdseeding
house
What I am currently reading: Still on Japan in Print for my Bookish Book Club!
bird
I have been informed that it is spelled “mourning” dove.
More later.