PATRICK WHITE IN DESIGN BINDING

Transcription

1 PATRICK WHITE IN DESIGN BINDING In an age of mass book production with millions of copies printed every year now joined by growing numbers of the paperless variety, there nevertheless remains a strong desire in most of us to hold and keep books. Design bookbinding is the way in which the enjoyment of the written word is enhanced by means of art and craft to create a unique volume to be collected and treasured. Jill Gurney and James Elwing are experts in document repair, book restoration and conservation. The challenges of design bookbinding are both intellectual and technical and here they describe the personal experience of creating bindings for Patrick White volumes for two recent exhibitions. Text and Texture was an exhibition of Australian contemporary designer bindings held in conjunction with The Life of Patrick White exhibition at the State Library of NSW in Displayed at the State Library shop, one book was sold and the remaining copies were acquired by the State Library. Anne Eagar, a devotee of Patrick White, had challenged bookbinders to respond to a Patrick White text and eleven binders participated with fifteen bindings. Elwing and Gurney created two volumes each, two for the Text and Texture exhibition and another two were later exhibited in the annual 2012 Australian Bookbinders Exhibition in the Research Library at the Art Gallery of NSW. With design binding it is important to understand the book, to read it and respond with a design that faithfully represents the text. While the rules for styles of binding practised over the last 1,000 years may be bent, the binding must be sound and the volume must work as a book. This involves a choice of structure, sometimes adapting the method of sewing, the covering material, endpapers and headbands, all showing how the book flows. This process is not simply one of choosing colourful papers for the boards and endpapers. THE BURNT ONES

2 Jill Gurney describes her approach to Patrick White s The Burnt Ones : The volume s size is 205 x 141 x 34 mm. Sewn on three linen tapes and two cords at the kettle stitch sewn through all but one of the original sewing holes. These were laced into the base board. Tight back, with soft blue goatskin on spin and foreedge. Papers, a mix of Japanese and Indian handmade, archive text and art papers worked with blueprint technique. Edges coloured with aniline dyes. Silk endbands and glass beads. This is a book of short stories with the subtitle Oi Kaymenoi (the poor unfortunates ). This did not forecast a happy read. The overall impression when skimming through the stories was of deep depression. I had read several novels by Patrick White in my late teens and early twenties and thought I had a reasonable idea of what to expect. But reading White again some forty years later was both hard work and affecting and had a profound effect on my mood. At the same time, James was reading The Twyborn Affair and he and I were united in a trial, regaling each other with particularly affecting passages. As I read each story, chosen by title, not sequentially, I noted down colour descriptions, the flowers mentioned and any turn of phrase that took my attention. Then I noticed my thumb on the fore-edge of the book obscuring some fox marks. Clearly the internal edges and frame for the words was not sacrosanct. This too is something I wanted to bring into the design concept. After taking down the book I reduced the textblock into individual section folds and began the process. Each story was again taken out of sequence and dyes were wicked into the edges, drawing with different combinations of colour leaf by leaf, story by story, while wearing mittens, scarf and coat. It was mid-winter and this part of our work area was unheated. There were 20 such sections and the physical discomfort of the process seemed in keeping with the project. The design elements for the volume came from Clay, a story of stark and echoing aloneness. These were: The decorative fretwork, a hobby of his now-dead father, festooning his childhood home. Clay kept breaking, nibbling away at it over time until there were piles of little wood pieces under the house. The wedding photograph Clay returned to time and again. The wasted ending and the significance of the white shoe. Before resewing, each section is supported in the centre fold with some fine Japanese tissue and starch paste. The outer fold receives a slightly heavier guard of Japanese paper. The endpapers have to be determined and, for me, these become extra visual non-verbal sections of the book and are sewn with the textblock. They seldom match each other. So the basic design of the endpapers with their various layers, the outside cover panels and the overlay of the covering leather revolves around elements of a fretwork pattern with its incompleteness and partial hiding of scenes. There is a presence of hidden, played out lives, ghosts that have melded with the substance of the boy. Blueprints or cyanotypes were made of a number of photographs, with cut paperwork designs over various papers intermingled with colouring and marbling. A book is a tactile object, the sanded goatskin leather reveals the sewn structure of the spine and fretwork elements placed under the leather on the front and back covers. The board panels lead into the multi-layered endpapers, which in turn lead to the coloured text edges. Worked endbands of coloured silk incorporating glass beads lend a muted richness. I find myself wondering if the book would have been easier to read had it looked like this to begin with. However, it had been a difficult book both to read and to bind. Much harder was my second volume, White s Many in One. Memoirs of Many in One, Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray, edited by Patrick White Size 206 x 134 x 23 mm. Full bound with leather onlays, overlapping leathers on spine and blind tooling on front and back boards. Sewn on five cords attached to split boards. Japanese endpapers of collaged chemically manipulated cyanotypes. Edges aniline dye wicked. White saw this volume as amusing. He said he was the editor for the mad woman Gray. It too, has layers of gloom interspersed with jagged colours of hate, despair, longing and mental instability. One face, one persona, shifts and fades into another, and another. The front and back cover have been blind blocked with some of Gray/White s musings, such as: Archives are only half the truth that s why I m writing my memoirs.... Archives have no soul.... They tell you to keep a notebook. That s where all such splinters and masturbatory devices are stored. Indispensable after death for the parasite students and academics who eat out your liver and lights - your heart.

3 With these books for the first time I introduced images of family into the mix. For The Burnt Ones, an uncle 22 years older than my father whom I never met and his white shoe clad bride, already old in memory. Memoirs saw my mother and her brother being manipulated, young and fresh-faced, in juxtaposition with White s face in age. Again using cyanotypes printed on different coloured Japanese papers, I also used my own face, now ageing, dementedly staring out of the back endpaper. James face can be seen peeping out of the bookbox which carries the design elements as well. We never managed to create boxes for The Burnt Ones and The Twyborn Affair, traditionally the finishing touch to a design binding. MEMOIRS OF MANY IN ONE James Elwing describes the binding for The Twyborn Affair, two copies of which he completed, one for the Text and Texture exhibition and another for the 2012 Australian Bookbinders Exhibition. As a White virgin and definitely not a literary critic, I found this a difficult book to read. It seemed curiously old-fashioned, with untranslated passages in Greek, with humour and dramatic shock apparently based on amorphous gender, the reason for which seemed obscure to me. I was, however, committed to the task and gradually warmed to it without really knowing why. The amorphousness of gender now seems unremarkable to me. Having bound these books, I now find from the internet that the Affair is largely autobiographical. God, what? It also tells me it is based on the life of a famous cross dresser, an Australian spy and Antarctic explorer, one Herbert Dyce Murphy. God, what, again! Apparently Scott rejected Dyce Murphy for his Antarctic expedition as he thought him too effeminate. As a consequence the fortunate man went south with Mawson, was the life of the party, lived to a great age and died in bed.

4 THE TWYBORN AFFAIR Eddie Twyborn, however, is variously a Greek princess, a war hero from the trenches, a London brothel keeper and his mother s daughter. In seeking some symbolic representation of the main character and his lives, I happened upon contact printed photogram images of a now lost bobbin lace eye mask that I had created as a conservation student over thirty years ago. Twyborn s transformations made me think of lace as both delicate and robust. I used various images of the bobbin lace mask to make cyanotype (or blueprint) endpapers. Creating a sewing model, I then sewed book sections onto many cords, enough to allow me to use exposed bobbin lace and plaiting under tension to secure the cords, in the manner of bobbin lace production, over the top of other cyanotype lace images, as an exposed design element. In the bindings, I saw lace with its working applications and associations, as rope, fishing nets, barbed wire, together with the erosion caused by white ants.

5 Technically, each book is a full leather binding in Niger goatskin. Sections are sewn onto 14 visible flax cords (7 sets of 2), with sewn headbands. Made endpapers each have a double stiff leaf of cyanotype and are hidden sewn. Each board is in three layers. The first layer is for lacing onto the text, the centre to create cord channels, and the outer for leather binding. A cyanotype image of lace on marbled paper lines the exposed parts of lower layers. All structural cords are visible plaited, twisted and in bobbin lace pattern. The Text and Texture exhibition book is in dark blue goatskin. Text and endpapers are sewn onto plain linen cords, visible as described. Boards have edge projections at the cord securing points. Headbands are two colour, red and yellow, and text edges are mottled with watercolour pigment, waxed. Size: 205 x 135 x 40 mm. The Australian Bookbinders Exhibition book is in green goatskin. Text and endpapers are sewn onto bright red linen cords, visible as described. Boards are conventionally straight. Headbands are two colour, blue and orange, and text edges are mottled with watercolour pigment, waxed. Size: 205 x 135 x 40 mm. THE TWYBORN AFFAIR JILL GURNEY studied book binding at the Camberwell School of Art and Crafts in London, aided by a Crafts Australia grant. She has a Graduate Diploma in Information Management/Librarianship from the University of NSW. Since 1981 she has worked in the book restoration and conservation field, including at the State Library of NSW and since 2003 has worked for the Australian National Maritime Museum Conservation Department and with State Archives. JAMES ELWING trained at the National Art School in the 1960s and under painter John Olsen and exhibited until the late 1970s. He studied museum conservation and book restoration at the Lincolnshire College of Art in the UK and gained a Certificate in Conservation and Restoration Studies from the City and Guilds of London. He expanded his book skills at Sydney Technical College, completing the advanced course in James has been a working conservator since 1981 completing 17 years as Archives Conservator for the Powerhouse Museum in late Elwing & Gurney Archival has operated as a partnership in Lawson since 1993, specialising in the conservation and repair of books and documents.