The Making of a Book

The Kentucky Review Volume 3 | Number 1 Article 4 1981 The Making of a Book Fredric Brewer Indiana University-Bloomington Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review Part of the Publishing Commons Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Brewer, Fredric (1981) "The Making of a Book," The Kentucky Review: Vol. 3 : No. 1 , Article 4. Available at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review/vol3/iss1/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Kentucky Libraries at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Kentucky Review by an authorized editor of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact . The Making of a Book Fredric Brewer rn, d. he is The ledger I keep for my private press shows that on 15 January 1975 I spent sixty-eight cents for a package of envelopes. Thus was The Raintree Press born, named for the mythical Indiana county memorialized more than three decades ago by Ross Lockridge, Jr., in his novel, Raintree County. Several months passed before enough money was saved for Raintree's first press, a small and hefty hand-operated six-by-ten-irich Kelsey Excelsior which I no longer have, and six trays of type. In October 1975, Raintree's maiden book was completed, a collection of poems, Moving into the Light, by the Hoosier poet Richard Pflum. Pflum's book is a slim volume, twenty-four pages long, printed for the most part on stark white watercolor paper and sewn into covers of buff-colored construction paper, the kind children draw on for art class projects. Eight pages of the book consist of a toothy, light tan Ingres paper intended for charcoal sketching, and the reason for this is simply that I ran out of the watercolor paper. The book is either over- or under-inked depending upon which page one chooses to examine. Each page had to be wiped with a slightly dampened sponge before it would accept ink. The volume also is a curious mixture of type faces: American Garamond, Monotype Garamont, Twentieth Century medium, and Hadriano Stonecut. One hundred ten copies of Moving into the Light were printed; I have but one copy left, No. 88. What happened to copy No. 1 puzzles me. In fact, an accounting can be made for only a handful of the chapbooks, and beyond that their dispersal is a mystery. Two were dispatched to the United States Copyright Office and one was airmailed to a purchaser in Switzerland who must have heard about the book through mental telepathy. Fifteen copies, at two dollars each, were sold by Indiana book dealers who kept 40 percent of the selling price. Pflum was given five. Where did the rest go? I have no idea. What I do know is that the paper cost $40.28 and the copyright registration $6.00. How much was doled out for glue and thread to patch the chapbook together, or how 41 much money ticked off for ink and type wear, heaven only knows. After this maiden venture into publishing, I decided the advice of an accountant was essential if The Raintree Press was to have a future . My wife knew a fellow who had an accountant friend and a meeting was set up. The financial side of my press was put into what seems to be reasonable order and except for my first year, a financial disaster by any economic consideration, Raintree has operated at a modest profit. In 1980, receipts came to $7,355.10 of which approximately $1,000.00 were mine, before taxes, to keep . Raintree publishes books, most in soft cover, broadsides, and ephemera such as "A Tea-Party Ephemeron," distributed at the 1980 conference of the American Printing Historical Association, and "Factotums," mailed to the 150 letterpress buffs who make up the Amalgamated Printers' Association. Now and then, Raintree tackles special assignments . In 1980, for example, a large portfolio and memorial certificate were printed for Indiana University's president and chancellor who carried the items to Africa and presented them to H. Kamuzu Banda, president of Malawi, on the occasion of his nation's sixteenth independence celebration. Raintree also prints business cards, stationery, posters, wedding invitations, and other what not, but none of these items extensively. My press has published more than twenty books, most of them small chapbooks, but there have been at least three of somewhat impressive physical nature: Norman Corwin's long epic ode, Jerusalem Printout, Willis Barnstone's complex and mystical Overheard which consists of fifty seven-line poems which Barnstone, a well-known academic poet, wrote in a twelve-hour period, and Willis Carl Jackson's The Log of the Carla Mia. Unlike the chapbooks, these three publications are case bound-Corwin's book is quarter-bound in black morocco with hand-marbled paper covered boards; Barnstone's book is done in a combination of black cloth and gray paper; and Jackson's book has sail cloth on the spine and a tough, dark blue parchmentlike paper, called Elephant Hide, on the boards. Each item that has been printed at Raintree has presented problems, each of which needed solving tefore going on. The Log of the Carla Mia , the most lengthy book I have done-ninety-three printed pages-taxed me with thorny problems nearly every day I spent on the project. Some problems were mechanical, some were financial, and a few were meteorological. In 1977, I printed for the Indiana University Libraries 5,000 42 s. of a f holiday greeting cards, at no charge, which the library staff sold to aid their special projects fund. During this project, I became acquainted with Carl Jackson, who was then dean of the library system. In the course of my several conversations with him, Jackson expressed his love for the sea and told me about his sailboat, a thirty-foot long auxiliary (with motor) ketch whose home port is Louisville, although the vessel at that time was moored at Norfolk, Virginia. I had no idea that Jackson was secretly planning to sail solo across the Atlantic, and not until late June 1978 did I learn of it. That month, Jackson moved his boat from Norfolk to a boatyard on the Patuxent River, Chesapeake Bay, and was readying it for the crossing. In September, Jackson returned to the campus. By now he was considerably lighter in weight, his body burned to the color of brown shoe leather, and he was sporting a bristly beard that would have been the envy of Herman Melville's Captain Ahab. Behind him was a storm-tossed Atlantic crossing of about two months in length. I was soon on the phone, asking him if he had kept a log and, if he had, could Raintree publish it. All the ship logs I had examined previously were rather sketchy accounts made up mostly of star and sun sightings and such laconic notes as "Second mate fell overboard." Jackson, however, had crammed into each page of a small, thick notebook not only the astronomical mathematics of his sail but also extensive descriptive observations and commen (...truncated)