The hobbyist
The “arts” of printing and typography, of paper-making, and inks, and book-binding, have been delighting and distracting me since my father first slipped into my hands an edition of Pookie, some time ago. The page was abnormally large for a two-or-three-year-old (though now, measuring it, I find it was only ten inches high); so I paid it abnormal attention; especially I attended the letter “g,” which resembled my grandma’s eye-glasses, turned sideways. Within less than a year, I had learnt all the other letters. (Perhaps I am prideful.) Within two, I had written my first book, in manuscript.
John Ryder’s very tasteful (illustrated) manual for amateur printers (only seven inches high) came out in the same era. After seventy years, I do not think I can do it much good by reviewing it, but I would like to mention a point made in the introduction. Mr Ryder recommends that the amateur not take up printing as a money-making sideline. This, like most money-making, is drudgery, and a distraction from the pure pleasure of type arrangement. Indeed, he recommends the production only of ephemera, because setting line after line for hundreds of pages can get boring. Instead, have the ambition to make each item very beautiful.
To be practical, could two or more poets share the cost of some type-setting and printing machinery, and set their respective texts from it? No, definitely not! They would never get along.
The idea of doing things, which count as labour, and not charging for them, which counts as business, has been lost on the contemporary world. (In this respect alone, we are too masculine.) At least nine in ten advertisements I see on the Internet, for instance, are for “products” that should never have been made, let alone advertised. There is a great noise about things that are “free,” and are not, or are available too cheaply.
We should try to annihilate all the producers of such goods.