The Bookman's Wake (3 page)

F
or an hour after Slater left I browsed through the Grayson
bibliography, trying to get the lay of the land. I had
owned the book for about a year and had never had a reason
to look at it. This is not unusual in the book
business—probably 90 percent of the books you buy for
your reference section are like that. Years pass and you
never need it: then one day a big-money book comes your way
and you really need it. There’s a point involved and
you can’t guess, you’ve got to be sure, and the
only way to be really sure is to have a bibliography on the
book in question. In that shining moment the bibliography
pays for itself five times over. Bibliographies are not for
casual browsing or for bathroom reading. They are filled
with all the technical jargon, symbols, and shorthand of
the trade. The good ones are written by people with demons
on their backs. Accuracy and detail are the twin gods, and
the bibliographer is the slave. A bibliography will tell
you if a book is supposed to contain maps or illustrations,
and on what pages these may be found. It will describe the
binding, will often contain photographs of the book and its
title page, will even on occasion— when this is a
telling point—give a page count in each gathering as
the book was sewn together. If a printer makes an
infinitesimal mistake—say the type is battered on a
d
on page 212, say the stem is fractured ever so slightly,
like a hairline crack in a skier’s fibula—it
becomes the bibliographer’s duty to point this out.
It matters little unless the printer stopped the run and
fixed it: then you have what is called in the trade a
point. The bibliographer researches relentlessly: he gets
into the printer’s records if possible, trying to
determine how many of these flawed copies were published
and shipped before the flaw was discovered. Those copies
then become true firsts, hotly sought (in the case of hot
books) by collectors everywhere.

Bibliographies are among the most expensive books in the
business. A struggling book dealer on East Colfax Avenue in
Denver, Colorado, can’t possibly buy them all when
the asking price is often in three figures, so you pick and
choose. I remembered when the Grayson book was published:
it was announced with a half-page spread in the
AB
, an ad that promised everything you ever wanted to know
about the Grayson Press. I had torn out the ad and stuck it
in the book when it arrived. The title was
The Grayson Press, 1947-1969: A Comprehensive
Bibliography
, by Allan Huggins. The blurb on Huggins identified him as
the world’s top Grayson scholar and a collector of
Grayson material for more than twenty years. The book
looked substantial, one for the ages. It was thick, almost
eight hundred pages, and it contained descriptions of every
known book, paper, pamphlet, or poem ever issued by the
Graysons. It had come in a signed limited edition at $195
and a trade edition at $85. To me it was a working book. I
took the trade edition, and now, as was so often the case,
I was damn glad I had it.

It was divided into four main sections. First there was
a narrative biography of Darryl and Richard Grayson. This,
combined with a history of their Grayson Press, took sixty
pages. The second section was by far the biggest. It
attempted the impossible, the author conceded, to catalog
and annotate every scrap of Grayson ephemera, all the
broadsides that the brothers had printed over a
twenty-two-year career. This consumed more than four
hundred pages of incredibly dense copy. The third section
was called “Grayson Miscellany”: this contained
the oddball stuff—personal scraps, Christmas cards
(the Gray-sons had for years printed their own cards,
charming pieces that, today, are eagerly sought), special
announcements, trivia. Even the commercial jobs they had
taken on—posters, menus for restaurants, brochures
for the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Department —all the
unexciting ventures done purely for cash flow, are now
avidly collected by Grayson people. There would never be a
complete accounting: a fire had destroyed the printshop and
all its records in 1969, and it’s probably safe to
say that previously unknown Grayson fragments will be
turning up for a hundred years.

It was the final section, “Grayson Press
Books.” that was the highlight of the bibliography.
Grayson had made his reputation as a publisher of fine
books, producing twenty-three titles in his twenty-two
years. The books were what made collecting the scraps
worthwhile and fun: without the books, the Grayson Press
might have been just another obscure printshop. But Darryl
Grayson was a genius, early in life choosing the limited
edition as his most effective means of self-expression.
When Grayson began, a limited edition usually meant
something. It meant that the writer had done a work to be
proud of, or that a printing wizard like Darryl Grayson had
produced something aesthetically exquisite. Scribners gave
Ernest Hemingway a limited of
A Farewell to Arms
, 510 copies, signed by Hemingway in 1929 and issued in a
slipcase. But in those days publishers were prudent, and it
was Hemingway’s only limited. Covici-Friede published
The Red Pony
in a small, signed edition in 1937, with the tiny Steinbeck
signature on the back page. Perhaps the nearest thing to
what Grayson would be doing two decades later was published
by a noted printer and book designer, Bruce Rogers, in
1932: a limited edition of Homer’s
Odyssey
, the translation by T. E. Lawrence. People can never get
enough of a good thing, and around that time the Limited
Editions Club was getting into high gear, producing some
classy books and a few that would become masterpieces. The
Henri Matisse
Ulysses
, published in the midthirties, would sell for eight or ten
grand today, signed by Matisse and Joyce. Slater would find
that interesting, but I didn’t tell him. It would be
too painful to watch him scratch his head and say,
Joyce who?…What did she do
?

Like almost everything else that was once fine and
elegant, the limited edition has fallen on hard times. Too
often now it’s a tool, like a burglar’s jimmy,
used by commercial writers who are already zillionaires to
pry another $200 out of the wallets of their faithful.
There are usually five hundred or so numbered copies and a
tiny lettered series that costs half again to twice as
much. The books are slapped together as if on an assembly
line, with synthetic leather the key ingredient. As often
as not, the author signs loose sheets, which are later
bound into the book: you can sometimes catch these literary
icons sitting in airports between flights, filling the dead
time signing their sheets. Two hundred, four hundred, six
hundred…the rich get richer and God knows what the
poor get. The whole process has a dank and ugly smell that
would’ve horrified the likes of Bruce Rogers,
Frederic Goudy, and Darryl Grayson. According to Huggins,
Grayson was the last of the old-time print men, the printer
who was also an artist, designer, and personal baby-sitter
for everything that came off his press. Look for him no
more, for his art has finally been snuffed by the goddamned
computer. Grayson was the last giant: each of his books was
a unique effort, a burst of creativity and tender loving
care that real book people have always found so precious.
The Thomas Hart Benton
Christmas Carol
had been Grayson’s turning point: he had worked for a
year on a new typeface that combined the most intriguing
Gothic and modern touches and had engaged Benton to
illustrate it. The book was sensational: old Charles
Dickens was covered with new glory, said a
New York Times
critic (quoted in Huggins), the day the first copy was
inspected by the master and found fit to ship. The
Times
piece was a moot point: the book was sold-out, even at
$700, before the article appeared, and it mainly served to
make the growing Grayson mystique known to a wider
audience. People now scrambled to get on Grayson’s
subscription list, but few dropped off and Grayson refused
to increase the size of his printings. The
Christmas Carol
was limited to five hundred, each signed in pencil by
Benton and in that pale ink that would later become his
trademark by Grayson. There were no lettered copies and the
plates were destroyed after the run.

I skimmed through the history and learned that Darryl
and Richard Grayson were brothers who had come to Seattle
from Atlanta in 1936. Their first trip had been on vacation
with their father. The old man had their lives well
planned, but even then Darryl Grayson knew that someday he
would live there. He had fallen in love with it—the
mountains, the sea, the lush rain forests—for him the
Northwest had everything. After the war they came again.
They were the last of their family, two boys then in their
twenties, full of hell and ready for life. From the
beginning Darryl Grayson had dabbled in art: he was a
prodigy who could paint, by the age of eight, realistic,
anatomically correct portraits of his friends. It was in
Atlanta, in high school, that he began dabbling in print as
well. He drew sketches and set type for the school
newspaper, and for an off-campus magazine that later
failed. He came to believe that what he did was ultimately
the most important part of the process. A simple alphabet,
in her infinite variety, could be the loveliest thing, and
the deadliest. Set a newspaper in a classic typeface and no
one would read it: use a common newspaper type for a fine
book and even its author would not take it seriously. The
printer, he discovered, had the final say on how a piece of
writing would be perceived. Those cold letters, forged in
heat, sway the reading public in ways that even the most
astute among them will never understand. Grayson
understood, and he knew something else: that a printer need
not be bound to the types offered by a foundry. A letter
Q
could be drawn a million ways, and he could create his own.
The possibilities in those twenty-six letters were
unlimited, as long as there were men of talent and vision
coming along to draw them.

Personally, the Grayson brothers were the stuff of a
Tennessee Williams play. They had left a multitude of
broken hearts (and some said not a few bastard offspring)
scattered across the Southern landscape. Both were eager
and energetic womanizers: even today Atlanta remembers them
as in a misty dream, their exploits prized as local myth.
Darryl was rugged and sometimes fierce: Richard was fair
and good-looking, giving the opposite sex (to its
everlasting regret) a sense of fragile vulnerability. In
the North the personal carnage would continue: each would
marry twice, but the marriages were little more than the
love affairs—short, sweet, sad, stormy. The early
days in Seattle were something of a career shakedown.
Darryl got a job in a local printshop and considered the
possibilities; Richard was hired by a suburban newspaper to
write sports and cover social events— the latter an
ideal assignment for a young man bent on proving that
ladies of blue blood had the same hot passions as the
wide-eyed cotton-pickers he had left in Atlanta. Having
proved it, he lost the job. Huggins covered this thinly: an
academic will always find new ways to make the sex act seem
dull, but I could read between the lines, enough to know
that Richard Grayson had been a rake and a damned
interesting fellow.

A year of this was enough. They moved out of town and
settled in North Bend, a hamlet in the mountains
twenty-five miles east of Seattle. With family money they
bought twenty acres of land, a lovely site a few miles from
town with woods and a brook and a long sloping meadow that
butted a spectacular mountain. Thus was the Grayson Press
founded in the wilderness: they built a house and a
printshop, and Darryl Grayson opened for business on June
6, 1947.

From the beginning the Grayson Press was Darryl
Grayson’s baby. Richard was there because he was
Darryl’s brother and he had to do something. But it
was clear that Huggins considered Darryl the major figure:
his frequent references to “Grayson,” without
the qualifying first name, invariably meant Darryl, while
Richard was always cited by both names. Richard’s
talent lay in writing. His first book was published by
Grayson in late 1947. It was called
Gone to Glory
, an epic poem of the Civil War in Georgia. Energetic,
lovely, and intensely Southern, it told in nine hundred
fewer pages and without the romantic balderdash the same
tragedy that Margaret Mitchell had spun out a dozen years
earlier. Richard’s work was said to have some of the
qualities of a young Stephen Crane. Grayson had bound it in
a frail teakwoodlike leather and published it in a severely
limited edition, sixty-five copies. It had taken the book
four years to sell out its run at $25. Today it is
Grayson’s toughest piece: it is seldom seen and the
price is high (I thumbed through the auction records until
I found one—it had sold, in 1983, for $1,500, and
another copy that same year, hand-numbered as the first
book out of the Grayson Press, had gone for $3,500).
Huggins described it as a pretty book, crude by
Grayson’s later standards, but intriguing. Grayson
was clearly a designer with a future, and Richard might go
places in his own right. Richard’s problems were
obvious—he boozed and chased skirts and had sporadic,
lazy work habits. He produced two more poems, published by
Grayson in a single volume in 1949, then lapsed into a long
silence. During the years 1950-54, he did what amounted to
the donkey work at the Grayson Press: he shipped and helped
with binding, he ran errands, took what his brother paid
him, and rilled his spare time in the hunt for new women.
He freelanced an occasional article or short story, writing
for the male pulp market under the pseudonyms Louis
Ricketts, Paul Jacks, Phil Ricks, and half a dozen others.
In 1954 he settled down long enough to write a novel,
Salt of the Earth
, which he decided to market in New York. E. P. Dutton
brought it out in 1956. It failed to sell out its modest
run but was praised to the rafters by such august journals
as
Time
magazine and
The New Yorker
. Amazing they could find it in the sea of books when the
publisher had done what they usually did then with first
novels—nothing at all. The
New York Times
did a belated piece, two columns on page fifteen of the
book review, just about the time the remainders were
turning up on sale tables for forty-nine cents. But that
was a good year, 1956: Grayson’s
Christmas Carol
rolled off the press and Richard had found something to do.
He wrote a second novel,
On a Day Like This
, published by Dutton in 1957 to rave reviews and continued
apathy from the public. One critic was beside himself. A
major literary career was under way and America was out to
lunch. For shame, America! Both novels together had sold
fewer than four thousand copies.