Grand designs

Tara Bryan's book Jack! features a single eight-metre folded ream of paper illustrated with woodcut prints. (Walking Bird Press)

In the Canadian publishing scene, centred mostly in Toronto, there are enough examples of “large” and “small” to give you a sore neck from looking up and down. There are large publicity budgets for front-list titles versus small ones for mid-list titles and large trade books versus smaller, mass-market paperbacks. But perhaps the size difference that most often captures the literary imagination is the battle for respect — and dollars — between the large international conglomerate publishers and small local presses.

It’s a David-and-Goliath situation, with established international publishing houses such as Random House and Penguin competing against homegrown favourites like House of Anansi and Cormorant Books. Any victory for the small press is seen as a triumph for the arts in general; this fall, the literary world was abuzz over the number of small-press titles represented on the short lists for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Awards.

Yet there is common ground here. All these presses, large and small, are concerned with the same thing: selling books. They are all, to varying degrees, commercial ventures that hope to put books in the hands of as many readers as possible. This means keeping costs low and sales high.

So where can you turn when the desire to make and acquire books has less to do with profit and more with artistic impulse?

It turns out the perfect place is St. John’s, a city that acts as a living metaphor for the line between the values and esthetics of the old and new. In the midst of a long-running renaissance, Newfoundland’s capital has become hyper-cool and overflowing with personality and art. It is home to many refugees from the mainstream, not the least of whom is Tara Bryan and her Walking Bird Press.

In her studio on the edge of the city, the painter and printer is hard at work creating a handmade box in which to deliver a $5,000 art book titled To Stretch the Night. Not a book about art, or even one of those books filled with glossy plates and commonly found holding down coffee tables, but rather a book that is physically a work of art. Weighing in at about 4.5 kilograms, with jet-black covers and a large, tarnished bronze sculpture mounted solidly on the front, there’s no mistaking this piece for a commercial product.

The cover of Bryan's book Down the Rabbit Hole. (Walking Bird Press)

In 1999, Bryan took time from her many other printing projects to begin a two-year collaboration with two internationally renowned artists, painter Elena Popova and sculptor Luben Boykov, on a series of 18 one-of-a-kind books. (Both emigrated from Bulgaria in the early 1990s and live in Newfoundland.) Famous love poems by women like Sappho and Anna Akhmatova are printed in and around original monotypes by Popova and between heavy-set covers, each emblazoned with a unique bronze figure by Boykov. The project was an ideal confluence of factors for Bryan, an opportunity to create a book with materials she covets with the help of artists she admires.

While Bryan does make more affordable works — from little matchbox books to small book boxes to regular chapbooks priced from $10 and up — she never produces many of any one thing. “I’m not interested in making 10,000 of something,” she says, sitting placidly amid the chaos of her cluttered print shop. “I’m interested in the process.”

Bryan’s attachment to the freedom of working on such a small scale is part of what sets this cottage industry apart. In her operation, the form of a book is often as important as the text. To illustrate, she holds up what appears to be a small, pleasantly wrapped package. When she jerks a ribbon on the top, the package opens and a long, colourful accordion of paper and boards drops out, each level cut through with a square slightly smaller than — and tilted off-centre of — the one before. When you look in, you experience vertigo, a sense of falling. Only then do you notice that around each square space is a bit of text from Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The effect is magical.

A moment later, Bryan reveals a small cubic box called Jack! When the lid is opened, paper springs out in a single eight-metre folded ream. Woodcut prints illustrate a variety of nursery rhymes incorporating the word “Jack.” Virtually none of the items in her studio could be replicated en masse by a mainstream publisher. It would just be too expensive and labour-intensive.

A native of Texas, Bryan came to painting and printing in the 1980s through a master’s of fine arts at the University of Wisconsin. Later, a friend who kept sending Bryan postcards of the breathtaking Newfoundland coastline finally convinced her to visit. She was hooked. Next thing Bryan knew, she was living and working in St. John’s and married to a Canadian. (She still maintains some ties to the U.S., including representation through galleries and rare-book dealers in cities like Washington, D.C., and Newhaven, Conn.)

An interior view of Down the Rabbit Hole. (Walking Bird Press)

After emigrating to Newfoundland in the early 1990s, Bryan took up residence in Torbay, a town north of St. John’s. She opened her studio on the edge of the larger city to the south and became something of a nexus in the printing and art communities of her adopted country and province. She not only collaborates with local artists and artisans but also teaches workshops on printing and book making.

Bryan retains an assistant, commonly referred to as a “printer’s devil.” “I always have more ideas than I can do myself,” she says, motioning to the back of the studio, where her devil, Duncan Major, works efficiently setting type. A quiet, deft and bespectacled 20-year-old student, Major joined the studio at the age of 14. Once a year, Major and Bryan exchange “Best Boss” and “Best Devil” awards, handmade from scraps around the studio. It seems almost pre-industrially idyllic.

Though the mess of equipment, paper and paintings is reminiscent of the state of operations at larger small presses like the venerable Coach House in Toronto, the output of Bryan’s studio remains relatively tiny. There are several reasons for this, not least the cost and equipment needed to run a big operation.

While Bryan’s studio is equipped with a variety of machinery and scads and scads of type, it is unlikely that she would put herself in a situation where the demands of others dictated the work of the day. “I could probably make a lot more money if I started printing wedding invitations,” Bryan quips. “But then I wouldn’t be doing what I want to do.”

This is the advantage of working on such a level: not only the freedom to move back and forth between mediums, but also the creative synergy such cross-medium work creates. “Sometimes when you paint for too long, you get snow-blind,” she says. Switching to printing gives her a break, a chance to step back and get perspective without wasting time.

“Printing is analytical,” Bryan says. “It’s ‘figure-out-able.’ It uses a different part of my brain than painting.” Unlike painting, if there’s a problem while setting type, it’s only a matter of retracing your steps and figuring out what went wrong. Yet, despite this very left-brained approach to working these hulking machines, there is still some mystical element to the process.

“We occasionally do burn incense for the press gods,” she says, jokingly. “And sometimes we reach an impasse and have to say, ‘This isn’t going to get printed today,’ and shut things down. But then we come back and try again the next day.”

“I don’t consider myself a publisher,” Bryan notes. “But rather an artist with some work appearing in book form.”

George Murray is a writer based in St. John’s.

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