Birth of a Book

Hand printing, binding, composition — it’s all a labor of love for Hopewell resident David Sellers.

By: Susan Van Dongen

TimeOFF/Frank Wojciechowski

David Sellers, a banker by day, hand prints books the old-fashioned way in his Hopewell basement.

   The first thing you want to ask David Sellers — a Manhattan banker by day but old-fashioned hand printer in his spare time — is how he gets those vintage cast-iron printing presses into his basement in the first place. It’s not like you just tote one down from the kitchen, like a load of laundry.
   There are about half a dozen of these letterpresses, as well as "guillotines" — deadly looking devices used for cutting the reams of paper — smaller presses for proofing pages and even a stone lithographer’s press. But each machine must weigh a ton, and the basement is down a flight of rickety wooden steps.
   The Hopewell resident says when you become a hand printer and begin to collect these items, you also become a master mover, rigger and repairman. Mr. Sellers describes taking the basement’s latest addition apart — a hand-press made around 1860 by A.B. Taylor and Co. — securing the pieces and lowering them down the basement steps. Then he put it all back together.
   "It’s at least 1,500 to 2,000 pounds," Mr. Sellers says. "I use a winch hoist attached to the back of my station wagon. If you have an interest like this, you have to know how to move heavy equipment. Otherwise you’re spending a fortune hiring riggers — that is, if you can find one. They sometimes don’t like to touch what they think is old or irreplaceable. These things are heavy but brittle."
   As unwieldy as they are, these leviathans can produce exquisite art, especially literary works. But the birth of the book doesn’t happen quickly and requires the patient skills of the printer.
   After two years of painstaking work, Mr. Sellers’ Pied Oxen Printers has just published Unapproved Road, a limited edition of two poems by Irish poet and Princeton University professor Paul Muldoon, with original intaglio prints by Irish artist Diarmuid Delargy. The hand-bound books are available through Pied Oxen Printers, or through Micawber Books in Princeton.
   "It’s a pretty specialized market," Mr. Sellers says. "One doesn’t do this for profit, but because one enjoys the craft, the handwork, the design aspect and the collaboration with the artists. Then, ideally, one can sell enough books to be able to make the next one."
   The basement is also home to numerous chest-high wooden cabinets labeled "Garamond" and "Palatino." Their wide, shallow drawers are filled with the actual letters from the different fonts as well as "slugs" and "leads" — slender pieces used for spacing. Tiny cubicles inside of the drawers separate the letters, and Mr. Sellers has a diagram indicating where everything is. Since he’s been doing this for about 20 years, however, he can open up a compartment, reach in and instantly pull out a tiny six-point "n" in Palatino italic.
   Mr. Sellers says he taught himself much of the technique through old printing trade-school books, which instructed him in how to ink, set type and operate the various presses.
   More structured study came from a series of classes at the Center for Book Arts in New York. He also sought the wisdom of the late Carol Stoddard, a writer, painter and printmaker from Stockton.
   The title poem in the new book is an especially poignant and layered reflection on the significance of borders, particularly in the context of the border between British-occupied Northern Ireland and the democratic Republic of Ireland. Mr. Muldoon wrote "Unapproved Road" in response to an invitation from Ireland’s Program for Peace and Reconciliation, to contribute to an anthology titled The Border: Personal Reflections from Ireland, North and South.
   "It was a real pleasure working with Paul Muldoon and this is just a great poem," Mr. Sellers says.
   In Mr. Muldoon’s note at the back of the book, he writes that "Unapproved Road" finds him musing on "images drawn from my childhood in Ireland, when we smuggled butter and cigarettes when we crossed over from my home in Northern Ireland to visit relatives in the Republic."

TimeOFF/Frank Wojciechowski

Above, a copy of Mr. Sellers’ Unapproved Road, a limited edition of two poems by Irish poet and Princeton University professor Paul Muldoon, with original intaglio prints by Irish artist Diarmuid Delargy.

   "It would have a special resonance with someone from Northern Ireland, that’s one of the reasons I thought it was important to have an artist from that part of the world to make the prints," Mr. Sellers says. "There’s more likely to be an affinity with the poem that an artist over here might not have."
   The artist, Mr. Delargy, was born in Belfast in 1958 and has exhibited extensively, both in the United States and internationally. Mr. Delargy’s prints, which involved etching and aquatint, were crafted by the artist in July 2002 from steel-faced copper plates at Belfast Print Workshop in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
   The edition consists of 125 copies, of which copies numbered 2-100 are for sale and 101-125 are reserved. The printer himself owns copy number one.
   Design, composition, letterpress printing and binding are all by Mr. Sellers. The poetry and text were hand-set in Palatino foundry types and the title set in Sistina — both designed by Hermann Zapf and cast by Stempel AG, Frankfurt, Germany.
   The thick, coarse book paper is Somerset Book Woven Soft White, hand-sewn onto linen tapes and hand-bound in jewel-green fabric-covered boards. Each copy is signed by the poet and the printer, and the artist has signed and numbered each of the two intaglio prints. All of this information is spelled out in the colophon, an inscription at the very end of the book.
   "Part of a handmade book is the colophon," he says. "It’s my opportunity to spell out the details of production — who and what was involved, what the materials were. This one, for ‘Unapproved Road,’ is formed into a perfect square. Considering these are all pieces of rigid type, it was a trick to wind up with a perfect square. This may be fairly easy to do with computer programs, but when you’re using physical pieces of lead type, it takes a lot of calculation, trial and error. It’s subtle, but this is one of my conceits — it’s an opportunity for a printer to fool around with the design a little bit."
   Mr. Sellers’ Pied Oxen Printers, named in part for a reference in Don Quixote, has published hand-printed and bound editions of poetry and translations with original artwork since 1981. (The imprint was previously named Eleutherian Printers.) In addition to the Unapproved Road, publications include Nightwatch, with works by exiled Chinese poet Bei Dao, Sixteen T’ang Poems, translated by Beat-generation icon Gary Snyder, Fuera del Mundo by Jorge Guillen, Melancholia, etc. by Susan Hahn and This Morning by Reginald Gibbons.
   Mr. Sellers hopes to collaborate with Mr. Snyder on the next project — more translations of Asian works — done like a hand-scroll. Mr. Sellers celebrated his last collaboration with Mr. Snyder in New York, where the late poet and Beat guru Allen Ginsburg joined the dinner.
   Pied Oxen’s books are in the special collections of the British Library, the National Library of Ireland and university libraries including Harvard, Princeton and the University of Virginia.
   The letterpresses themselves are becoming museum items. In fact, the Smithsonian in Washington has a reconstructed 19th-century press room with a twin of Mr. Sellers’ A.B. Taylor press.
   "They have this exact press, but they don’t have these," he says, indicating the brass pineals that grace the top of the machine. "I’ve read that there might only be about 12 surviving examples in the country of this particular machine. Presses are very scarce. They do exist, though, belonging to small printers as well as institutions where they might be part of a graphic arts or printed history collection."
   Moreso than the preciousness of the machines, Mr. Sellers is interested in letterpress printing because it is so multi-faceted.
   "It’s the history of technology as well as intellectual history, because printing relates to the dissemination of books and ideas," he says. "Then there’s the design aspect to it, which I particularly like because I do the books from the design stage to the binding of the book. It’s also a collaboration between myself with the artists and poets — three people ideally coming out with a book that’s totally harmonious. At its best, if it’s done in the right way, this kind of printing could be viewed as an art form."
Unapproved Road, poetry by Paul Muldoon, printed by Pied Oxen Printers, costs $400, plus $20 priority shipping and handling. For information, write Pied Oxen Printers, P.O. Box 444, Hopewell, NJ 08525. E-mail: [email protected]. Some volumes are also available at Micawber Books, 110-114 Nassau St., Princeton. For information, call (609) 921-8454. On the Web: www.micawber.com