Abstract
I will begin this paper with a brief and partial history of American printing, detecting a shared predilection for a noticeably maverick relation to the printed page in the works (printed and otherwise) of Samuel Keimer and Benjamin Franklin during the colonial period, and the works of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain in the nineteenth-century. I term the interrupted, dialectical printing that connects all of these writer/printers ‘not-printing’, and offer some explanation of his term and a description of some of its manifestations. I will then move on to consider how the idea of ‘not-printing’ might be helpful for the consideration of some contemporary British and American poets and printers before concluding with a description of some of the ways that the productive constraints of such a practice have influenced my own work as editor and printer at the Crater Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_2-1_2
Highlights
Resumo Começarei este ensaio com uma história breve e parcial da tipografia norte-americana, assinalando uma predileção partilhada por uma relação marcadamente dissidente com a página impressa nas obras de Samuel Keimer e Benjamin Franklin durante o período colonial, e nas obras de Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson e Mark Twain no século XIX
Young Franklin, finds himself assisting the supposed-Jew Keimer in the reproduction of tawdry provincial material, associated with the colonial ruling apparatus. Even the type he uses is identified as ‘English’; which denotes a size above a ‘pica’, and would not of use for newspaper or pamphlet printing
The American maverick printer is restrained like the madman, the not-printer’s limbs tied down and sawn off like the hospital patient
Summary
Iwill begin this paper with a short history of some different kinds of errant, creative printing in America, before moving to discuss how some of these insights colour my own printing practice. The American maverick printer is restrained like the madman, the not-printer’s limbs tied down and sawn off like the hospital patient (without the hope of reconnection of Franklin’s ‘Join, Or Die’ snake) It is an essentially broken printing practice that he is interested in; Whitman set lines too long for any compositing stick, offering a product as unprintable as it was radical—his project calling a blurry halt to print and to the American poetic tradition at the same moment—just as it seemed that they were beginning a new and generous collaboration. The example of Keimer, less canonical than those late not-printers, quasi-Jew and dissenting Protestant, stalks the history of print’s bloodless bourgeois coup—a critical affront to the great writer-printers’ restricted practices; offering negative iterations of the utopian potential that lies embedded within the method and media of cold-metal printing
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