Johnston’s talk will explore the conjunction of poets and printers from Gelett Burgess and Wallace Irwin to contemporary practitioners of book arts like Mark Head, and how their work has impacted the appearance of the book on a statewide as well as international level. The reputation of California as a center of printing rests on the names of John Henry Nash and the Grabhorns who  were backward-looking if not downright reactionary: something Johnston seeks to rectify in his ongoing historical writing about the typographical legacy of the Golden State. Unfortunately the Arts & Crafts movement stuck around far too long (in fact it’s still here!) in the mainstream of California printing. But even before the women’s movement and the artists’ book movement of the 1970s there had been a century of creativity and innovation by little-recognized printers and artists working and playing in the margins of the enduring book.

Alastair Johnston began his career as a letterpress printer in California in 1970. In 1975, he formed Poltroon Press with the artist Frances Butler. Their first collaboration Confracti Mundi Rudera was later seen as a key work in the emerging artists' book movement. Since 1979, he has taught university-level courses in typography and graphic design. He wrote bibliographies of three Bay Area literary small presses, Auerhahn (1976), White Rabbit (1985) and Zephyrus Image (2003). His study of the literature of 19th-century typefounders’ specimens, Alphabets to Order, was published by the British Library in 2000. He co-edited William E. Loy's Nineteenth-Century American Designers & Engravers of Type with Stephen O. Saxe (Oak Knoll, 2009) and most recently published Typographical Tourists: Tales of the Tramping Printer (Poltroon, 2012). He has just completed a biography and bibliography of Richard Austin, the type cutter, and his son Richard T. Austin, the wood engraver.

This lecture is made possible by the generous support of Dr. Stephen A. Kanter.

The Clark Library

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The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library is one of UCLA's major libraries for rare books and manuscripts.