Great to see @deBlasioNYC w/his family in Park Slope minutes after being sworn as Mayor of NYC. New day, new year. pic.twitter.com/SYJZxgWzrC
— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) January 1, 2014
Happy New Year everybody. Peace, strength, and justice to all my friends and to people everywhere. pic.twitter.com/N6sKQ4akjY
— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) January 1, 2014
Delighted to have so much free time this week for this terrific collection of great recreational and work-related reading. Here’s a quick rundown on each book with the tweets I put out about them tonight.
—-
My fave books by suspense writer Michael Connelly are his Harry Bosch novels, but the ones involving defense attorney Mickey Haller are enjoyable too.
First of several #FridayReads (lots of reading time this past week&next: Michael @Connellybooks' The Gods of Guilt. pic.twitter.com/4HB3g3woYF
— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) December 28, 2013
Dave Bidini, longtime member of The Rheostatics, is a triple threat–stellar musician, compelling writer, and all-around good guy. I love oral histories like this one: the memorable voices of many musicians are soldered together in to an alternately hilarious and heartbreaking narrative of stalwarts traveling and playing music across one of the largest countries on the planet.
2nd #FridayReads–Dave Bidini's On a Cold Road: Tales of Adventure in Canadian Rock. Great oral history hockeyesque pic.twitter.com/QmjYr0SW4k
— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) December 28, 2013
I admire CUNY Graduate Center Professor William Helmreich’s civic enterprise–he walked on nearly street in the five boroughs, meeting and speaking with hundreds of New Yorkers to weave together a fascinating portrait of the 21st century city enriched by new immigrant groups.
3rd #fridayreads Sociologist Wm Helmreich's ambulatory The NY Nobody Knows, a modern flaneur hoofing in the 5 boros. pic.twitter.com/0bd50P6adD
— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) December 28, 2013
I’m hopeful that Chicago writer Haas’s suspense novels will merit rediscovery and publication. I was delighted to be asked to look at them by Shirley Haas and old Chicago friend Kevin Riordan.
4th #fridayreads Vendetta-a 70s thriller by the late J. Haas, whose widow hired me to read it&an unpublished novel. pic.twitter.com/f5fGdgLKYR
— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) December 28, 2013
Listening to seasonal music of fave English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, perfect for this cold Christmas Eve. pic.twitter.com/DKGHAF5IeE
— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) December 25, 2013
Going back to my days at Franconia College, when a professor there, Bill Congdon, introduced me to the work of English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) I’ve adored his music. And though I’m Jewish and don’t observe Christmas, I also enjoy RVW’s “seasonal” music. So, just like this day last year, I’m listening to some of my treasured LPs, one with songs he collected in the field with early recording equipment from nonprofessional musicians and singers. This was similar to the work of Alan Lomax in the U.S., in later decades. RVW was part of a worldwide interest on the part of symphonic composers who cultivated folk idioms, such as Smetana and Dvorak in Hungary and Czechoslovakia; Sibelius in Finland; and Aaron Copland in the States. It should be said, that Vaughan Williams didn’t just take folk themes and rework them–-he was also a bold, original composer with an edge, exhibited in such works as his modernist Fourth and Sixth symphonies. Having enjoyed the album of songs pictured in my tweet above, I’m now playing a gem of RVW’s called “Five Tudor Portraits.” If you’ve never had the pleasure of listening to RVW’s music, I urge you to discover his work. For starters, here’s his Wikipedia page.
Back in September, thanks to a referral by publishing friend David Wilk, I was hired to write a 1200-word article for the November/December issue of H Magazine, the publication of the cable channel known as History® (formerly History Channel®). On a rush basis, they asked me to do a piece about what would be History®’s December 8-9 broadcast of a new 4-hour miniseries on Bonnie & Clyde, airing simultaneously on History® and sister networks Lifetime® and A&E®. Materials I could review–for a sense of the production–were scant. Before accepting the job, I submitted a brief opener to what I might write, a kind of imagined interior monologue of Clyde Barrow sitting behind the wheel of a car waiting for Bonnie Parker. When I heard back that they liked that bit, I knew I had a path to successful completion of the article. When I handed it in five days later the editors liked it, and so it runs below pretty much as I turned it in, with them adding their own title (I had called it “A Bonnie & Clyde for Our Times,) pictures, captions, and their own headlines and sub-heads.
A few days after the mini-series aired last Sunday and Monday, I got some print copies of the magazine in the mail. I’ve scanned the relevant parts of the issue and am sharing them all below. I later found it’s also online [link since taken down], but I think it’s more interesting to read the actual glossy pages, so here they are. You may read them in full by pausing the blog’s slide show at the top right corner. As readers of my blogs will know, I write a lot of personal, reportorial, expository, and essay-type prose, which made it a special treat to channel my imagination in to the fictional exercise that makes up the first half of the article. This is a sort of writing I have not done for a long time, and I’m glad I had the chance to do it here. Hoping to do more like it in 2014. Thank you David Wilk, History® and the editors of H Magazine.
On December 5 New York Times reporter David Dunlap published a fascinating article about the forthcoming sale at Christie’s auction house of the illustrious printing press that under William Morris’s cultivated hand and eye printed the Kelmscott Chaucer, with illustrations by pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones. Completed between 1894-96, it is among the most important modern fine press books ever printed and published. I’ve always enjoyed Dunlap’s reporting, in which he usually covers architecture. He brought the right sensibility to this article, which I loved for it being stuffed with factual nuggets like these:
“The instrument on which this artwork [the Kelmscott Chaucer] was composed was the Improved Albion Press No. 6551, a hand press almost seven feet high, weighing 2,000 to 3,000 pounds, that was made in 1891 by Hopkinson & Cope in England. It is to be auctioned on Friday by Christie’s [in New York]. The estimate is $100,000 to $150,000.”
I’ve been waiting to blog about Dunlap’s article, because I wanted to report the auction result, if I could. And from a report I just found today, I’ve got that now, and also great detail on the provenance of the press. For instance, I’d been wondering:
Turns out, in 1924, noted type designer Frederick Goudy shipped the Albion across the Atlantic to his print shop in Marlborough, NY. I’m glad it wasn’t wartime, when the ship could’ve been the target of a U-Boat crew. In a real sense, the precious Albion carried the legacy of Morris’s elevated enterprise, so devoted–all-in, as we say now– to cultivating the art of the book. In 1960 the press was acquired by J. Ben and Elizabeth Lieberman of White Plains, NY. Under their ownership it was moved on three occasions, the last time when they moved house to Ardsley, NY. Though the family had long been active in fine printing circles, they came to find day-to-day operation and maintenance of the press beyond their capacities. Current owners, Jethro K. Lieberman and his wife Jo Shiffrin, told Dunlap, “It’s time for someone who will put it back into service.”
Dunlap reports that over two years in the last decade of the 19th century, 438 copies of the Kelmscott Chaucer were printed by Morris and his pressmen on the Albion, and that every copy is accounted for, whether in institutions, libraries or private hands. He writes,
“Four belong to the Morgan Library & Museum. John Bidwell, its curator of printed books and bindings, permitted this reporter to examine a volume bound in white pigskin.The sheer amount of ink on paper is breathtaking. The decorated pages are blacker than they are white. Yet the printing is so exact that there is not so much as a stray smudge in this jungle of leaves, vines, berries and flowers.”
The report on the auction, running at What They Think, a site devoted to news of the commercial printing industry, reports that the Albion N. 6551 will now be housed at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in upstate NY in the Cary Graphic Arts Collection. It was bought for RIT by the “Brooks Bower family. Bower, a 1974 graduate of the School of Print Media, is an RIT trustee and chairman and chief executive officer of Papercone Corp., an envelope-manufacturing firm in Louisville, KY.” The auction price was $233,000, well above the estimate. It will be put in to regular use by RIT students. I was pleased to read this thorough provenance of the press, which includes a lovely bit of history provided in part by Steven Galbraith, curator of the Cary Collection:
“’From 1932 to 1941, Albion No. 6551 was owned by the Cary Collection’s namesake, Melbert B. Cary Jr., director of Continental Type Founders Association and proprietor of the private Press of the Woolly Whale. . . .Cary bequeathed the press to his pressman George Van Vechten, and in 1960, J. Ben and Elizabeth Lieberman acquired Albion No. 6551 for their Herity Press. They topped the press with a Liberty Bell, a reminder of the vital role that private presses play in the freedom of the press.’ Albion No. 6551 will join the Cary Collection’s Arthur M Lowenthal Memorial Pressroom, a working collection of 15 historical printing presses and more than 1,500 fonts of metal and wood type. Supporting study of the press is a collection of Kelmscott Press publications and archives of material related to Frederic Goudy and Cary’s Press of the Woolly Whale. The Cary Graphic Arts Collection is located on the second floor of The Wallace Center at RIT. Hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. For information, call 585-475-3961 or go http://cary.rit.edu.”
It’s been a good week for the art of the book, as last Friday I saw gorgeous printed materials at the Center for Book Arts’ holiday open house, and now this news about the outcome of the Christie’s auction. I hope to see the Cary Collection and the Albion No. 6551 someday. The photo at the top of this informational post and those borrowed below for it I happily credit to Eddie Hausner and Marilynn K. Yee, photographers of The New York Times, and thank them for this fair use.
In early November I’d been to the launch party for the spy novel The Mole: The Cold War Memoir of Winston Bates, and am only now getting around to reading it. I’m really enjoying this heady thriller whose narrator and protagonist is a Canadian transplant to the U.S. that finds himself on the staff of the real-life senator from Georgia, Richard Russell. I tweeted about the book last Friday and neglected to share about it here until now. Highly recommended, the sort of book for which I’d like to put my work aside so I can burrow deeper in to the unfolding tale.
#FridayReads Peter Warner’s spy novel THE MOLE, the faux memoir of anti-hero Winston Bates. http://t.co/rxK77rizTC pic.twitter.com/ggZAhKDosF
— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) December 14, 2013
Note: This piece is cross-posted at my other blog, Honourary Canadian.
Had a great time at the Center for Book Arts holiday open house and sale last night. My wife Kyle, a visual artist, used to teach a course on printmaking at the Center and it was fun for both of us to revisit the big loft space in Chelsea on W. 27th Street and see the place full of people. We found the work of many, many talented book artists and paper artists on display, Kafana Mundial, a musical trio (clarinet, accordion, and percussion) playing Balkan music, and lots of nice food & drink. Everywhere my eye landed I saw printing presses, drawers of old metal type fonts, bookbinding materials, and beautiful examples of paper craft and book art. We enjoyed speaking with Alex Campos, director of the Center; Barbara Henry, master of letter press printing who’s done a stunning Walt Whitman book under her Harsimus Press; Roni Gross, book artist and publisher of Z’roah Press; and Esther K. Smith, artist, author and co-publisher of Purgatory Pie Press. Here are the best pictures Kyle and I took last night. Please click here to see all of them
Hallelujah! Kyle and I have just completed health insurance enrollment in NYS for my family with Emblem, formerly called Health Insurance Plan of NY (HIP). We will enjoy comprehensive coverage and a huge savings compared to the ridiculous premiums we’ve had to pay for the past 5 years, since I became self-employed. Kyle and I send a big thanks to Venus Emmanuel and Esther, skilled navigators at Harlem United, a fabulous social service organization! Also kudos to President Obama for spearheading this effort, despite the most absurd litany of opposition to it; to all the members of Congress who voted for the new law; and to Governor Andrew Cuomo who’s mandated facilitation and implementation of the ACA in NYS.