Letterpress Printing

The type for La Prose was originally printed by letterpress with metal type at Imprimerie Crété in Corbeil, France, about 115 miles from Paris. Blaise Cendrars already had a relationship with this important printing company where he had his second book, Séquences, printed in early 1913. Crété was an enormous firm taking up an entire city block in Corbeil. (1)

Aerial view of the entire city block inhabited by Imprimerie Crété in Corbeil, France

 Not only did they have the latest printing equipment and hundreds of type cases, they also had a bindery and a large room for pochoir.

Crété had many large rooms full of printing equipment, including photogravure

One of the type composing rooms at Crété

There are at least nine pocheurs in this photo of the pochoir room at Crété; it’s possible that La Prose was colored here

Blaise would travel frequently from Paris to Crété to work with the typesetters, but Créte also had an office in Paris. As with all large printing firms, they had a catalog of all the typefaces they had in-house. Surely Blaise chose the 38 different typefaces for La Prose from this catalog.

One of the typefaces used in La Prose identified by Michael Caine from the Crété catalog

 He would have received galley proofs of the newly-set type and made corrections during the entire process. Proofs of the poem were set on long galleys; this may have given Blaise and Sonia the idea to orient the book vertically when they received the first proofs. These later proofs in the photo are closer to the actual printing date since they already are in layout position.

These proofs were reproduced by Edition Pierre Seghers in 1966 in his facsimile of the type in La Prose

These proofs were reproduced by Edition Pierre Seghers in 1966 in his facsimile of the type in La Prose

All of the facsimiles of La Prose published to date have been photographic copies of an original copy in a museum or university and were printed by the offset process. For my re-creation of La Prose, I wanted to use the original techniques of pochoir and letterpress. My plan was to find digital equivalents of the original typefaces in order to print the type by letterpress with photo-polymer plates. I didn’t imagine that I could find the original typefaces in metal. I met type expert Steven Coles at the Letterform Archive in San Francisco on December 19, 2016, just as I started to look through French type catalogs like Deberny et Peignot to identify the main typefaces used. He expressed interest in helping me with the project, and so he embarked on the quest to find digital equivalents of the many typefaces. 

During the Codex book fair in early February, I met Jamie Murphy from Ireland who told me about Michael Caine, a collector of early 20^th century metal type, who might help me with locating the original typefaces. Michael became quite excited about the possibility of finding the fonts and printing the book in Paris at his studio. I asked Stephen Coles to stop his searching when Michael assured me that he could find the necessary typefaces. I asked Michael to research the actual names of the typefaces used and to look for the Crété catalog of their faces. Happily, he found the catalog and eventually sent me the names of the many faces used. I will post the list when it is in final order. Unfortunately, by the beginning of April, it was clear that he could not find the metal type in Paris, though he did find one major typeface in Switzerland that could be newly cast for 5000 Euros. I finally had to acknowledge that the project could not be done in metal in my time frame at a reasonable cost and sadly asked Michael to stop work on April 3. 

When I visited the Legion of Honor’s copy of La Prose again on March 28, I noticed that the printing of the type was quite beautiful and sharp and realized suddenly that the copy was on Japon paper. Conservator Debbie Evans double-checked this for me with a microscope. The copy is unnumbered, so I had assumed earlier that it was on simili Japon like all the other unnumbered copies. This is the only copy on Japon in the US in a public institution. Steve Woodall had told me that they had made high-resolution digital scans of La Prose, so when I was at a crossroads on April 3, I remembered those digital scans. I sent a request to Steve to license the scans and I had a license from the Legion of Honor in hand in two days. What a lifesaver! In the video below, Steve talks about the relationship between their copy and the facsimile project:

I immediately contacted Richard Siebert in Berkeley who agreed to manage the scans and prepare the sixteen photo-polymer plates needed and print the book by letterpress on his beautiful Heidelberg press.

Richard Siebert with his magnificent Heidelberg press

My plan was to have the printed pages ready for my trip to France in June for Atelier Coloris to do the pochoir over the next several months. I was hoping that I could be their assistant and help them. Unfortunately, Nathalie Couderc had brain surgery and was unable to work on the project. I made a decision to ask my assistant Chris Yuengling-Niles to join me in France for seven weeks. Chris had been working on my facsimile projects and learning pochoir at my studio since February. Christine Menguy agreed to supervise the two of us at Atelier Coloris. I decided to take to France only 200 of the 1000 printed sheets; that means I took 50 printed sheets for each of the four pages. That would limit any disaster in transporting the unfinished and then finished pages to and from Ploubazlanec, France.

Over the next several months, Richard Siebert worked on the scans. Some of the lines of type were damaged because of the folds, and most of the type needed fine-tuning. There are 445 lines in the poem (447 on the actual printed La Prose version). Nearly every letterform needed cleaning up. Richard called it “turning buckshot into type.”

Partial scan from first of four pages

 
Richard eventually separated the scans into the four colors for each page and sent me digital proofs by email. He was actually done with the printing only two days before I left for France on June 25. Here's Richard with La Prose running through his press:

Luggage on September 6 return, five suitcases and four carry-ons

I placed my left side pochoir facsimiles on two of the completed pages and took photos of the final printing.

Page 2 freshly printed, with just completed left side pochoir laid on top

Page 4 freshly printed, with just completed left side pochoir laid on top

I then drove down to Los Angeles with 1000 pages and proceeded to pack 200 sheets, 16 by 23 inches, (40 lbs.) in a big suitcase. The other big suitcase held the 92 pochoir metal plates and extra uncut plates (42 lbs.). Jars and tubes of gouache, tools and clothes were in another suitcase, and Chris even packed some leftovers in her suitcase. I returned on September 6 (having taken three more weeks to travel around Europe with my husband Gary Lindgren) with five suitcases and four carry-ons. (11) Seventy-five percent of all the pochoir was finished on those 200 printed pages, and five books were completed but not glued. All the paper, plates, jars and brushes returned intact and undamaged, thank goodness. 

Keep a lookout for the announcement of our pre-publication party, coming soon!