By Michael Richards
(A talk given to the BCSA via Zoom on Saturday 6 March 2021)
I began collecting the Brindabella Press in 1987 soon after returning to Australia after six years in England. My training as a librarian there included bibliography, and I had been able to audit an excellent course on physical bibliography when I got my first library job at St Anne’s College, Oxford. I had also worked as a bookseller at Waterfield’s, a large antiquarian and secondhand bookshop, where I had bought my first private press books. So I had a grounding in the history and technique of printing in the handpress era, and I was intrigued to find that there was a private press operating in Canberra.
I joined the National Library of Australia at the beginning of 1986. I now know that 1986 was an eventful year for Alec Bolton as well, because his longstanding ambition to retire early from the Library was realised. Incidentally, 1986 was also the year Alec first published under the imprint of Officina Brindabella, but I will refer to his press simply as Brindabella. He had registered the name ‘Brindabella Press’ (with which he began printing in Canberra in 1973) in New South Wales in 1984, but then discovered he could not follow suit in the Australian Capital Territory because he had been pre-empted by a commercial printer. In 1992 he was able to reclaim Brindabella Press. So my first acquisition as a standing order subscriber to the press, Elizabeth Riddell’s Occasions of Birds (1987), was from Officina Brindabella and was the first fruit of his departure from the Library. Alec later told me it was ‘one of the books I’m happiest with’.
A little later I was given the opportunity to be curator of the Library’s Bicentennial exhibition and visited Alec to talk to him about what historical Australian private press printers I should include. He was particularly enthusiastic about Mary Quick’s Juniper Press, and even though he was not himself a systematic collector, he had sought out copies of her books. I have Geoffrey Farmer’s copy of her Green Crowns (1955): it’s a nice coincidence that Farmer was a friend of Alec’s and a keen supporter of his press. Later I got to know Alec better, when I wrote the appreciation of his work that was published by the Friends of the National Library as A Licence to Print (1993). As well as subscribing I started collecting retrospectively. Barbara Hanrahan’s lovely edition of Some Poems of Shaw Neilson (1984) came from the University Coop Bookshop. The Drifting Continent (1979), with poems by Alec Hope and drawings by Arthur Boyd, was for a long time my most expensive purchase: $200 for a copy that had once belonged to that great book collector, Laurie Fitzhardinge, from Miriam Brown’s bookshop in Fyshwick. Bob Brissenden’s Elegies (1974) came from the Lifeline Bookfair and Michael Treloar sold me James McAuley, Time Given (1976). My friend Bill Huff-Johnston, the illustrator of David Campbell’s Starting from Central Station (1973), generously gave me one of his copies of that scarce work.
Some time ago I added the hardbound version of Iris in Her Garden (1991), one of 30 out of an edition of 250 with an extra etching. I had bought the paperbound version at the time of publication, but I became particularly keen to own it when I discovered that this etching, also entitled ‘Iris in Her Garden’, was originally intended to be the frontispiece to the entire edition and thus is central to the rich profusion of illustrations in this work. Alec himself gave me an artist’s proof of ‘Five Bells’, one of Mike Hudson’s marvellous engravings for The Sea Poems of Kenneth Slessor (1990), and thanks to the generosity of the Bolton family I now have copies of the three Christmas cards Alec printed.
I am now writing a full length bio-bibliography of Alec Bolton, and I have had the privilege of working through his papers at the National Library of Australia. Originally, I was a simple completist: I just wanted to own everything published by the press. In those terms there are still gaps in my collection. I don’t have his wife Rosemary Dobson’s poem ‘Knossos’ (1971), printed in London in an edition of 24 copies on Alec’s first tiny press, an Adana 8 x 5. Nor do I own the magnificent Hanrahan edition of Twelve Linocuts (1990). But as I have been working on this book, for rather more than five years now, my collecting priorities have changed, and I am now pursuing material which aids in understanding the origins and ambitions of the press. If you are prepared to spend a bit of money you can put together a pretty complete collection of Brindabella Press books quite easily today, thanks to the internet – sticking to the highway, if you like. But my current collection is more research oriented.
So what, apart from the major publications of the press itself, does one need to have at hand when thinking and writing about it? To begin with, there is the early Brindabella ephemera. Apart from ‘Knossos’, this begins in Canberra with Rosemary’s Three Poems on Water Springs (1973). A single sheet folded into three, nearly every copy went to friends (from ‘Knossos’ on, Alec was punctilious about recording the distribution of everything he printed.) So, too, did the three Christmas cards he printed. The first was Venite, Angeli sancti (1972), which was the first item to carry the imprint of the Brindabella Press. There followed Five Days Old (1973) by Francis Webb, and Brindabella (1974), a poem by Douglas Stewart with a drawing by (Stewart’s wife) Margaret Coen. To better understand the early years of the press, it helps to attend to people like Francis Webb, who was both a friend and godfather to Alec and Rosemary’s son Ian; and ‘Fitz’, Robert D Fitzgerald, a sometimes cranky correspondent, whose ‘Heemskerck Shoals’ Alec long wanted to publish as a reduced facsimile of John Kirtley’s edition. I have also found it useful to acquire such books as Margaret Coen’s biography, her daughter Meg Stewart’s Autobiography of my Mother (1985), a surprisingly hard book to find, because of its description of life in Sydney in the years when the Stewarts got to know Rosemary, and later Alec. Two photos in this are by Alec, who was an excellent photographer, and I recently bought the copy of Rosemary’s Untold Lives (1992) she and Alec gave to them.
David Campbell’s Starting from Central Station was the first book of the press. Campbell, too, was a friend of both Alec and Rosemary, with whom she cowrote two books of translations from Russian poetry. This was a step up from Christmas cards, and Alec later said, ‘It was an alarming prospect, but I enjoyed the work and still look at the result with affection. You really get to know a poem when you set it, proof it, correct it and print it: it’s a real test of any poem.’1 He used a hard paper sized for offset printing and found it hard to print on, especially since he also disliked printing with heavy impression. His search for good letterpress paper became a constant theme thereafter.
His breakthrough book, in many ways, was Time Given. This was a response to the publication of much the same set of poems in pamphlet format by Angus & Robertson with the title of Music Late at Night (1976). Both Alec and McAuley thought the printing of this was dreadful. Alec’s version won a design and production award from the Australian Book Publishing Association in 1978. He later acknowledged that its design was conservative but thought it was the best bit of printing he had done to that time. Time Given is harder to find than its edition size of 240 would suggest, as some 40 or so copies were abandoned because Alec was unhappy with the binding. Ironically, Music Late at Night is just as rare these days because of its fragility, but both belong in an extended Brindabella collection.
Alec’s next book was Greek Coins (1977), a ‘miniature sort of book’ in an oblong format that reflects the shape of the four-line poems. This is printing which allows poetry room to breathe. Or, as the author put it, ‘my thoughts take fire from the printed page’. It was the first of Rosemary Dobson’s books to be printed by her husband. Most copies were given to friends and only 44 out of the edition of 240 went onto the retail market, so it, too, is quite scarce. Greek Coins was also the first Brindabella book promoted with a prospectus. From then on Alec put considerable effort into producing prospectuses, which are always elegant. They also say why he thought something merited publication. ‘Each coin-sized poem shines with wit and creates a world of meaning and suggestion’, Alec wrote in this one. ‘It is a characteristic achievement of the poet that so brief a text should evoke so much.’ Usually illustrated although not always handset, a complete set of prospectuses would be an interesting entry point to collecting the work of the press, and a recent acquisition of the Greek Coins prospectus completes my own run.
A smaller project is an example of one of the major ambitions of the Press, which was to publish the work of older poets whom, Alec felt, often found it hard to find publishers. It’s a slim pamphlet which nonetheless consumed an inordinate amount of energy: Harold Stewart’s The Exiled Immortal (1981), and at one point Alec came close to abandoning it. This was partly because it took forever to get a final text from Stewart, and also because of long and difficult negotiations over illustrations. Even after the final manuscript was received from Japan, Stewart discovered a word he wanted to change from his typescript and to Alec’s horror started asking early recipients to hand-correct the earliest batch of copies, which he had already despatched to his friends after signing them. In the end he agreed to paste a slip headed ‘Manuscript Mistyping’ to the title-page verso. I have copies of both versions: the word at issue is ‘jewels’ in line 15 on page 21, for which one should substitute ‘fruits’.
In 1982 Alec and Rosemary took a month’s holiday in the USA. This was an opportunity to visit a few of the printers he admired, including Lewis Allen, whose Printing with the Handpress he had read. He also visited the Arion Press in San Francisco but was not so sure about some of its more experimental work. ‘Hoyem is into some rather eccentric poetry productions. The latest is a circular printing of a poem by John Ashberry, the lines like the spokes of a wheel. It is to be on handmade paper from a circular mould. I think this is as far as he can go, and hope he gets back to books,’ he commented to Michael McCurdy, an East Coast printer and wood engraver, with whom he had struck up an epistolary friendship and who provided a frontispiece for Something to Someone (1983).2 Alec’s definition of the private press was firmly based on books, as Jadwiga Jarvis and Mike Hudson also later found when they showed him one of the Wayzgoose broadsides. Not that he disliked it, on the contrary, but to him it was art and not private press work. So another collecting dimension for me is to find copies of the books he found particularly useful as printing manuals. The first manual he read is one that Rosemary gave him very early in their relationship, Simon and Carter’s Printing Explained (1931), almost certainly a book she first came across at school. It’s a useful book, often overlooked now.
This brings me back to Rosemary Dobson, who printed her first volume of poetry on an Adana 8 x 5, in an edition of 200, at Frensham School in 1937 while a student. When she studied English at Sydney University, her major essay was on ‘Typographical Design in the Twentieth Century’. In 1973 she spoke about that essay:
It was a curious work into which I pasted all sorts of ephemera like bus tickets. Architecture may be said to be the custodian of the arts, but typography is the custodian of all arts and of all knowledge. Picasso is probably the greatest innovator of our time, but the man whose innovations have been most pervasive is surely Stanley Morison who, as begetter of that great typeface, Times Roman, and as reviver of such notable types as Baskerville and Garamond, has revolutionized the appearance of the printed word in our time . . . Typography, which in a peculiar way brings together literature and art; which demands restraint but which can also allow for extravagance and eccentricity, is a subject of compelling interest to me now, as it was then.
This lecture, published as ‘A World of Difference: Australian Poetry and Painting in the 1940s’ (1974), is therefore a useful part of a Dobson collection formed in relation to the Brindabella Press, of which she was such a vital part. There is also a link to Brindabella in her Poems to Hold or Let Go (2008), dedicated to Alec and published in a limited edition of 200 copies by Caren Florance under her imprint of Ampersand Duck. Alec influenced Caren at a crucial moment in what was to become the career of one of Australia’s leading exponents of the book arts. The project which brought them together was the Academy Editions of Australian Literature, published by the Australian Academy of the Humanities. At the suggestion of John Mulvaney, Alec designed the pages for the first two of these and Caren realised them in Pagemaker. Alec then asked Caren to teach him how to do computer typesetting, as he planned to move into photopolymer, which she did. These editions of The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (1996) and The Journal of Annie Baxter Dawbin (1998) are also thus ancillary to a Bolton collection, and I now own Mulvaney’s own copies. Paul Eggert, editor of the Academy Editions, pointed out to me what a complex task it was to marry a letterpress sensibility to a modern scholarly text with full critical apparatus. Only ten days before Alec’s death and much to his delight, in November 1996, the Academy elected him as an Honorary Fellow.
Before moving on from the books about printing Alec owned, another writer he admired was Adrian Wilson, whose magnificent account of The Press in Tuscany Alley, The Work & Play of Adrian Wilson (1983), he read in the National Library. He also owned Wilson’s The Design of Books (1967), and other similar titles in a substantial collection which his family presented to the ANU School of Art after his death. Such texts are clues to the books he was responsible for at the National Library as well. As John Thompson commented in his Canberra Times obituary for Alec, in the 1970s ‘there was a fineness and sensitivity about those early books . . . that indicated a special sensibility at work.’
As well as maintaining the best traditions of book design, Alec worked hard to find appropriate artists. Indeed, one of the major themes of my book will be the relationship between writers and artists, and how he learned to manage this. Thus, he sent Victoria Clutterbuck to visit Philip Hodgins in Maryborough, Victoria, resulting in The End of the Season (1993), a lovely collection of pastoral poems. Similarly, he sent Rosalind Atkins off to Bunyah to spend time with Les Murray, resulting in The Idyll Wheel (1989). Rosalind Atkins illustrated other Brindabella works, including both the broadsides, Judith Wright’s ‘Rainforest’ (1987) and Les Murray’s ‘The Sleepout’ (1994). While the latter was a more commercial proposition, the first was primarily a gift by the printer to the Friends of the ANU Library. A lovely vignette by Atkins, ‘Leaf Spring’, which appeared in The Idyll Wheel and which was also the basis of the design by Adrian Young for the only Brindabella patterned paper in Untold Lives (1992), was used again in the orders of service for both Alec’s and Rosemary’s funerals.
There were two other artists involved in multiple Brindabella works, apart from Rosemary. One was Mike Hudson of the Wayzgoose Press. His wood engravings feature in The Palace with Several Sides (1986), in The Sea Poems of Kenneth Slessor (1990) and in Untold Lives. There were also separate editions of the images of the last two printed by Alec in small runs, and on paper better suited to wood engraving. I surely don’t need to belabour the point of the significance of Wayzgoose, but it’s worth saying that, even though they came from different planets typographically, the two had a mutual respect and the correspondence between them is highly significant for my purposes. Alec loved wood engraving: he saw it as the natural accompaniment to letterpress, even though he experimented with other forms of relief printing.
The other artist commissioned for three projects was Barbara Hanrahan. She illustrated Some Poems of Shaw Neilson and Iris in Her Garden, but I will look first at her Twelve Linocuts. This was the largest Brindabella project. The linocuts took Alec nearly half a year to print, but printing was only part of the story. Selling the portfolio took him into a new market, where he found he needed to visit galleries with the prints in hand. This was primarily because Twelve Linocuts changed from its original conception as a book, and also because it was more expensive than any other publication, retailing for $950 rather than the $240 first thought of.
There were also changes with Iris in Her Garden as it evolved. To begin with, Hanrahan had contemplated doing full-page illustrations, but Alec suggested she add more illustrations in vignette form. He sent her a photocopy of a page from the Folio Society edition of Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone, as a possible model. To my mind there is an exuberance of illustration in the book, a playfulness, which exceeds that of any other Brindabella book. And yet, by the time she sent the final draft of the stories and proofs of many of the relief etchings to Alec, she was gravely ill with cancer although, as her biographer records, few of her friends knew.
Hanrahan finished signing the 250 colophon pages of Iris in Her Garden and the separate prints for the specials in August, while Alec was still printing etchings. He was amazed by the speed with which she did this, but she was racing against death. He sent her the first bound copy on 8 November, by which time half of the paper edition had been sold in advance and the 30 specials copies sold out. Her partner Jo Steele wrote with her thanks. She was thrilled with it, he said. Her eyesight had mostly gone by then, but the last thing she ever wrote was a barely legible note of thanks beginning with the words ‘Dear Alec’ which he had rewritten for her.
At the time of his own death, only four years later, Alec was engaged with three major projects, but the press died with him. He had begun designing Lyn Hard’s Australia Suite, was planning a collection of short stories by David Malouf, and had agreed to publish a collection of memoirs and wood engravings by Rosalind Atkins. The first two subsequently appeared in different forms, although not without drama in one case. This was Australia Suite (1998), illustrated by Garry Shead and bound by Robin Tait. Rosemary was unhappy with the author’s suggestion that it could be seen as the last book of the Brindabella Press and made this known publicly, so I class it as one of the many later manifestations of a Brindabella text. The Malouf short stories were published by the Paper Bark Press as Untold Tales (1999). Happily, I also collect David Malouf, and he confirmed when he signed my copy that these were the stories originally meant for Brindabella.
Collecting Alec Bolton’s Brindabella Press has been a great joy to me. I am grateful that, when so many other books I should have bought became missed opportunities instead, I had the good sense and the opportunity to start collecting him when I did.
Notes
1. Michael Richards, A Licence to Print: Alex Bolton and the Brindabella Press, (Friends of the National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1993, p. 21).
2. Alec Bolton to Michael McCurdy, 19 June 1982, Box 4, Folder 30, NLA MS 7426.