The Book of Ende

Becoming a female illuminator in the late 20th to early 21st century has been arduous, odd, and ultimately, my raison d'etre thus far. Unlike, say, Impressionism or the Renaissance period, any examples I found of exceptional illuminating were extremely rare, and a female's excellent works rarer still. But, they were there. Back in my apprenticeship, St. Martin's Press had annual editorial buying trips to England, in a reverse production process that had us recalibrating equipment to accommodate film flats done the exact opposite of our photographic process used for plate-making on American presses, but I digress.

Murder mysteries were (and still are) an export with an easy audience here in the States, as any real publishing professional will tell you. Just look at the numbers for Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie, and the "Dial __ for Murder" series. My mother is particularly enamored with a British show currently airing on PBS about two older women who plan estate gardens and solve murders, in the exact same format every single week, which is the core demographic for any murder mystery audience.

Edward Gorey famously illustrated an opening spot for the introduction to the PBS "Masterpiece Theater" murder mystery series, in a gothic pen-and-ink style that had the 90s graduating classes of RISD's Illustration department completely under his spell: a cool, hermetic character who left New York City after his own career in publishing for Provincetown, to create work reminiscent of the the 1900-1930s Art Nouveau revival, but I digress again. 

At work, we produced a series of murder mysteries by British authors that I still have on my bookshelves, with one stand-out selection: "The Apothecary Rose". Here, we find a female herbalist working in a medieval abbey garden attached to a cloister, who also solves murders most foul. Back then, the weapon of choice was often poison secreted from the abbey garden or her own apothecary shelves, for death-dealing instead of healing. 

The same fictional construct used in murder mysteries was the actual historical context for female illuminators working in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: artists who were either raised in the family business of making books attached to a prestigious monastery, or the nuns working in the scriptorium of their own monasteries. It was uncommonly educated and rare for anyone to read, write, and paint with such skill, but for a woman? Well, that's another story entirely. 

Happy Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, to my illuminated readers of 2016.

Grammar Nazi

The "Judas" Bible in St Mary's Church, Totnes, Devon, UK. This is a copy of the second folio edition of the Authorized Version, printed by Robert Barker, Printer to King James I, in 1613, and given to the church for the use of the Mayor of Totnes. This edition is known as the "Judas" Bible because in Matthew c26 v36 "Judas" appears instead of "Jesus". In this copy the mistake (in red circle) is corrected with a slip of paper pasted over the misprint.[1]"Judas Bible2" by Etan J. Tal - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.

It takes all kinds of people to publish the books that we cherish and pass on to our loved ones, including the good, bad, ugly, and indifferent. I've cataloged all the types I could into my brain as I went about my career, full as it is with the facts needed to produce the most complex yet beautifully simple objects humans make. I was there slugging it out in other people's offices, over other people's problems, because I loved it, which was greeted with the necessary amount of derision intended by someone who just realized that they fucked up by assuming all the real book people of the world were gone. Not so.

In recognition of actual genius, even when it was undetected by the unwashed mousy messes I was often forced to work alongside of (and in the process, often giving them a free education that's priceless just to do my job), I amassed quite an impressive head count. At the end of my tenure working under the guise of various "bosses", and when it became blatantly obvious to an entire industry worldwide that I could outwork even the clever rich white "dons" of Oxford U. in an unbeatable quick time (creating a new record, too: took me only a few scant weeks to supposedly upset the "board" and other "shareholders" who were "in charge of covers", which I found out by sweeping right over the head of their favored pet du jour, a pathetic sell-out of a "Creative Director" who allowed herself to be shipped overseas at their back-and-call whenever they felt like it, by pandering to their lily-white asses through her social media to reflect exactly what they wanted to hear, which isn't exactly like setting the world on fire with originality, but I digress), my fellow co-workers took a devilish glee in recording my "head counts" of those fallen comrades who had unfortunately tried to sell their souls to a bunch of real intellectuals who didn't need them, plush as we were (are) with actual credentials and experience.

Actual know-how is a frightening thing when you have no fucking idea about what you're actually doing, much less caring about it, because as every really dedicated teacher has already found out, it takes a hell of a lot more than a pittance of a salary to become your devoted servant. The gap where your overblown salary sits is filled with our genuine heart, and that's not something you can fake on a mere teacher's salary. Just ask any faithful publishing professional. It's enough to make you blanch white, and what rough sport it is, too.

And so, when I met those adoring fans of mine (sometimes unwashed, because a lack of soap doesn't discriminate between good or bad either) in your office spaces who followed my every move over the company's Ethernet network, or cheered aloud when I pushed through another great cover that was in danger of rejection out of spite, sabotage, or corruption, I felt it, even when I knew my crew of production editors who dared to sail with me on one of my last voyages asea* while awash in ill-gotten money, were doomed to repeat themselves because such is the nature of their gifts: harnessing their fretful compulsiveness in the typo-free artwork you all appreciate.

I couldn't do it, but you sure can. Thanks for that. I realize it takes a lot of nerve to man my chair by forcing turf wars over layouts most people will never see, know about, or give two fucks about how long you sweated over it bro, but you made me look good, even when there was no one around who cared enough to know quality work when they see it. I do. Thanks, D'avi. You're a beautifully crazy kid, man, and I could do with a little less stalking, okay? Now get to work! You have a lot of it to do, you petty-ass motherfucker. Just keep your little turf wars off my fucking margins....ya fuck. I'll see you in "Merry Olde Englande"**. You'll be the so-and-so holding the white gloves.

 

For the production staff at OUP/USA: it was a hell of a ride, wasn't it?

http://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780195393040/book/preface/ 

* Davey's world:   http://www.word-detective.com/2011/08/asea-at-sea/ 

** White gloves:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindisfarne_Gospels 

Everything Became Illuminated

I can't remember a time when I couldn't read, write, and draw. As a little girl, stories and pictures poured out of me, anytime I wanted them to. I said to my 4th grade teacher that I was writing a book that I would publish someday, and she huffed at me, "Yeah, sure you will." I also knew from an early age that I wasn't a cynic, working a teaching gig for summers off and a chance to crush childhood dreams. That summer, I taught myself to use the old manual typewriter my parents kept downstairs. What a beast. To this day, I hate typing, and lo and behold, I am nobody's secretary. Last year, I sent around some of my illustrations with a revised version of those rhymes I'd written as a child, that my mother saved from a sketchbook of mine. A literary agent told me it was the best submission she'd read in a long time.

My parents said I begged them to go to school so I could read. I went to a pre-school before kindergarten, and after-school programs at the local library. I loved the cool quiet of libraries, searching for books in card catalogs. I learned to research expertly, skills that amaze people today—the quickness with which I can find information, process it, coalesce it, design it, and publish it. But growing up, I had no idea what it was. I wasn't a "painter" in the traditional sense: still lives and portraits grew tiresome. There are so many out there already. What was I really adding to the world, that any of the Dutch painters hadn't said definitively centuries ago? It was a closed conversation for me. I wasn't strictly a "writer" either. I could care less about the finer points of grammar and punctuation. Those were items for teachers to find and correct, as they scribbled over sheets of loose leaf paper with big red pens. As far as I was concerned, it was a lesser talents attempt to have sway over artistic output. I sure as heck wasn't a journalist or an editor, so...what was this?

I left home for college at 17. I took a job at the campus library around the same time I started to wrap my mind around the world of professional art. As I poured over issues of Step-by-Step Graphics and Communication Arts in the periodical section where I worked, I had no idea how to get those jobs, but I knew I could do the work in the magazines. I started taking my first college-level studio classes, and I did really well. The trade journals identified most of the work I saw as "illustrations", so I made the firm decision to apply to those programs at elite schools. At the same time, I was busy fulfilling liberal arts requirements, especially English Lit and Art History. I actually liked written tests, essays, and papers, because I could fully express myself, providing reasoned arguments with footnoted scholarly references. How freeing!

One afternoon, in a large, darkened lecture hall packed with freshmen, I saw a slide of an illuminated manuscript, and every synapse in brain lit up at the sight of it. "Ohhhh...", I breathed to myself and sat up straight, moving my hands across the desk, gripping the top edge and tilting forward my seat. The ground shook for me, intellectually. A conversion of elements combined together. The class went on, oblivious to my newfound awareness: the Bible, Johann Gutenberg, the advent of the printing press, the wide dispersion of information, William Blake, Benjamin Franklin...Yeah!! This made sense to me. When I did a Google search for this piece, I found a link to the Oneonta Art History class I took that is still taught today, with the same great, classical curriculum: http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth109/arth109_sl17.html.

I find The Book of Kells to be the most beautiful piece of art I have ever seen. It just does it for me, in a way that no other art form does. I knew I had to see it in person. And like so many things in my vocational life, a trip landed itself at my feet. My college boyfriends' brother started working as a baggage handler at Aer Lingus. We got really cheap tickets to Europe, and we were off one summer to Amsterdam first, then Dublin, then Galway. It was the last of the pre-Euro days, in the early 90s, when travel was a lot less frequent. Typically, I am a nervous flier, but as I found myself sipping champagne in my seat, I felt a calm wash over me that was beyond the alcohol. We flew overseas with a gaggle of young priests and nuns, and the actor Brian Dennehy, who had supposedly acquired a pub in Dublin. 

 

We stayed in an upscale bed and breakfast in the Ballsbridge section of Dublin, that had a hole in the bathroom floor, next to the toilet, which served as a shower drain. The proprietress knocked on our door early afternoon, asking us to draw back the curtains to our room, because she didn't want the neighbors to gossip. She asked us if we were married, and we told her we were engaged. Thankfully I always wore my Claddagh ring in the correct way, because she didn't turn us out. She did, however, give us the times for mass services on Sunday at the church on the corner. She was relieved we were Catholic. We asked her about visiting Trinity College. She discouraged us from going, saying it was a tourist trap, not worth the time.

There was no internet page to consult, or cell phones to call ahead, so early Monday morning, we arrived at the college to see the most famous Illuminated Manuscript on the planet, The Book of Kells. And the library was closed. I had travelled all this way to see it, and the next day we were scheduled to fly to Galway. I steeled myself, and gave my boyfriend the bad news. He ranted, raved, sulked, pouted, argued, but to no avail. There was nothing else I could do but stay on another day. Back then, there was no fancy exhibit. You simply paid a small fee, then climbed the stairs to the long room, where the oldest books are kept. I found it to be the most beautiful library I have ever seen. The shelves stretched up and down, punctuated with staircases, ladders, annotations, all manner of arcane reading material. 

As we made our way down the hall, towards the end of the room where it is kept, I remember craning over the velvet ropes that blocked tourist access to the shelves, just to get a look at the cracked leather bindings. After a quick scan back and forth, I leaned over to graze my hand over the tallest and oldest bound Bible I had seen, next to the Gutenbergs. I knew I would remember this moment for the rest of my life: the light that poured through the windows, and the window that opened in my heart. I felt less alone than I had ever felt in my life. Sure enough, when we got to The Book of Kells, it was opened to a rather plain text page, but I didn't care. I saw with my eyes that it was possible to make a book worthy of veneration and importance. 

My then-boyfriend spent the days' bus ride grumbling that I had ruined his trip, but I didn't care. I did it for me, and I knew it was the right thing to do. He stopped pouting about 3 hours in, as we giggled about the country people who got on the bus with geese and chickens. Ireland was not a frequently travelled place at that time. It was the most fun we had. When we got to Galway, the owner of the bed and breakfast we booked came to get us in her car, after we called her from the tourist center, soaking wet from a downpour. Within half an hour, we had our feet by a cheerful, roaring fire in her house, with delicious tea and gorgeous, handmade scones. Thank you, Berna Kelly :) http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g186609-d254120-r50012494-Devondell-Galway_County_Galway.html.

After transferring to art school, I still had tons of exploring. I didn't like calligraphy; that's for cards. It wasn't graphic design either. I didn't want to just set the type and lay out other peoples' work. I wanted to write and make pictures. The closest courses I could find were for children's book illustration, but most illustrators are content to have someone else write the books they create images for. Nah, it's not that. I had a voice. I took a class in Artists Books, but it was a fine art class about creative expression. I did learn about bookbinding, acquiring a bone folder and the thread used to sew signatures. I worked and took classes and graduated without bonding to any single creative vision offered at the school. I had no idea what the modern equivalent of an illuminator was.

What to do? I had the beginnings of an illustration portfolio and a solid photography portfolio. My first two interviews were as darkroom technicians for two very famous female photographers. I didn't get those, because, you know, I had my own style. A good friend from high school and I were chatting on the phone about our job searches as recent grads, and I told him I had applied to publishing positions, too. One of our classmates worked PR for a house, so when I got the call for the interview, he introduced me to my new boss and gave her my resumé. So it began in earnest. I saw book design for the first time in my life and that made sense to me. I always wondered where artisans and scribes worked in these times, and here was the answer: Publishing.

I became the first artist to work in their Manufacturing department, so
I set about learning the ropes. Not much time into my apprenticeship,
I moved upstairs to the Art Department to learn about the craft of book cover design. It's taken me awhile to accept that I am not some relic from the past, nor a creative anachronism, but the real life version of an artist who is derived from those ancient traditions. It can be challenging finding the right niche, but when I do, everything clicks into place. It's a rare life that's often hard to explain to outsiders, but I wouldn't have it any other way. And I owe it all to The Book of Kells.

In memoriam Bernard (Barney) Corbett.

Me on the steps of the Trinity College Library, Monday morning.

Céad míle fáilte.