Looking Back on 50 Years of Making Beautiful Books

Godine, who speaks rapidly, with traces of a Boston accent, can get carried away when the topic is books, and talks about printers the best way different individuals speak about film stars. He additionally loves to say typefaces — Bembo, Baskerville, Garamond, Caslon and Janson come up so much — and the names of gorgeous papers: Amalfi, Fabriano, Nideggen.

“It’s an obsession,” he mentioned, and defined that it started again when he was in school, at Dartmouth within the ’60s, and took a course with a professor named Ray Nash, who taught graphic arts and the historical past of printing. That was additionally when he fell in love with letterpress — the old school artwork of urgent paper so firmly down on inked metallic kind that the letters depart little dents.

Godine started his profession, the truth is, as a printer, not a writer. After school he apprenticed with the sculptor and engraver Leonard Baskin, who additionally ran a print store in Northampton, Mass. In 1970, along with two companions, Godine opened a store of his personal in an deserted cow barn in Brookline. The corporate did letterpress, setting its personal kind by hand and printing wedding ceremony invites, beginning bulletins, the diplomas for Harvard and Wellesley.

Regularly, his firm branched out into pamphlets and broadsides — reprints of Andrew Marvell’s “The Backyard,” for instance, and Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” — and from there into books. To guage from the descriptions in “Godine at Fifty,” a few of these early efforts verged on the foppish — advantageous printing for the sake of advantageous printing. There was an version of Thomas Boreman’s “Ethical Reflections on the Quick Lifetime of the Ephemeron,” for instance, that featured meticulous, hand-tinted etchings of mayflies.

“I suppose you might say a few of these books have been ‘privished,’ relatively than ‘revealed,’” Godine mentioned, laughing. “But it surely was by no means my intention simply to be a flowery printer or a hobbyist. I assumed we needs to be a enterprise. Not that I knew the very first thing about enterprise.” He shook his head and advised a narrative that’s additionally in “Godine at Fifty”: At one level, Godine’s father, studying that his son’s firm had by no means filed a tax return, despatched his personal accountant over to examine on issues. The accountant requested if he might have a look at the books, and Godine mentioned in fact, pointing to the printed ones on the cabinets. All he had by the use of monetary data have been a few checkbooks that hadn’t been balanced in years.

In these days, Godine had a belief fund that he might draw on in emergencies — till it ran out. And his timing was lucky. “This was proper after Sputnik,” he defined, “and for some motive the federal government thought the best way to tug us even with the Russians was to provide the libraries some huge cash. So we might publish something, even the worst poetry on the planet, and nonetheless promote 500 copies.”