(This is the first in a series of weblog entries about out-of-print books from the BookFinder.com Report that have come back into print.)
Many years ago, when I was a student in the UC Berkeley School of Library and Information Studies (now the mighty School of Information), I took a series of classes about the history of the book. One class focused on the early days of printing and included a “printing lab.” Small groups of class members spent an hour or so each week in the South Hall basement, minding their p’s and q’s (not to mention d’s and b’s), grappling with ink and paper, pieces of type, spacing slugs and the press itself, all under the watchful eye of a professional printer who guided us through the process like a drill sergeant might lead new recruits through basic training.
My printing group decided to print a collection of quotations, to which my contribution was from Moby Dick: “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.” Nothing like setting a phrase in movable type to cement it in one’s memory for twenty years.
Because we had an actual printer to tell us, in no uncertain terms, what to do and how to do it, the textbooks we used were not about how to print, but dealt rather with the history of printing. One I can recall was Steinberg’s Five Hundred Years of Printing.
Had we used a textbook to learn how to print, it would very likely have been Glen Cleeton’s General Printing. This book first came out in 1941 and since then has been one of the most popular printing textbooks. Over the past few years it’s also been one of the consistently most sought-after out-of-print titles on BookFinder.com, but no more: not because the book is no longer sought after, but because it is no longer out of print. Liber Apertus Press in Saratoga, California, has re-issued the 1963 edition of General Printing. It’s available new for around $24, while copies of the 1941 edition are listed on BookFinder.com for over $300.00.
Matt Kelsey at Liber Apertus Press tells us that the original publisher, McKnight & McKnight, went out of business, and the rights to General Printing became available. Having seen our most-sought-after lists, as well as being aware of references to General Printing on printers’ mailing lists and on reading lists for academic graphic design programs and for community arts centers such as the San Francisco Center for the Book, the people at Liber Apertus Press decided to bring General Printing back into print.
The look and feel of letterpress printing has never gone out of fashion, and indeed is currently enjoying a renaissance in popularity. For the past few decades, neophyte printers (at least those lacking our South Hall drill sergeant) have had to search for expensive out-of-print copies of General Printing, but now that Liber Apertus Press has brought the book back into print, it’s readily available at a reasonable price.
[Now reading Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays by Frederick Crews]
Posted by Wendy
