closerlook: Impressions in the Bowels of Adams

Wedged under a heavy corner of Adams House in the piped labyrinth of the basement there are two unmarked wooden doors. Behind them, three or four rooms wind inwards like the chambers of a shell. They are cluttered with odd implements--worn-wood museum pieces with too many handles and big, gripless screws. There are empty racks and cupboards full of metals. There is a smell of deepening rubber. And nested in the inner room, there is the press.

Hunched up to waist level, the Vandercook flatbed cylinder proofing press is massive and precise. It has the dull gleam of steel measured to minutiae. Its cylinders, slick with ink, curve and whirl like the combs of the brain.

The Bow and Arrow Press was founded 22 years ago by James Barondess, then a student in the house. At that time presses printing from handset type were being cast off by newspapers, and type foundries were closing. Barondess went around the country buying up type and collecting the materials needed to start a press. Since then, it has been running quietly--almost secretly--in this basement under the care of one of the Adams House tutors.

One of the few initiates of the press is Sarah Hulsey '01. Hulsey is a Linguistics concentrator, but she has always been attracted to the art of books. When she was a child, her mother used to entertain her by sewing pages together on a sewing machine. Hulsey's current projects, however, are much more advanced. She is collaborating this semester with poet Susannah Hollister '01 in creating a broadside of poems. In the spring, armed with a grant from the OFA, they will also print a book of ten to twelve of Hollister's poems in an edition of about fifty copies.

This kind of project is extremely time-consuming. Every letter is picked from innumerable drawers of type to be strung into a line on a 'composing stick'. Almost all the surfaces in the room are piled under with tiny spears of lead, each tipped with its own character. The tables look beset by a plague of silver locusts. When the letters have been collected they are laid flat on the bed of the press, where the text is meticulously spaced out and held together by flat strips of metal called 'furniture'. The arrangements of this spacing material form the almost invisible choices of margin and indentation--these are the most crucial work of the printer. As Hulsey puts it, in setting a line of a poem the difference between its looking right and looking wrong is sometimes less than half a point. A few assembled stanzas laid out this way glimmer like distant, crowded constellations. Then the cylinders, wheeled into action by the big arm-crank, roll across the runway of the text, inking the letters and catching up a page in the flight of its own making.

Hulsey is deadly serious about her work. She feels that, because the experience of reading is affected by what the page looks like, the process of printing a book is deeply collaborative. The poet's choices and the printer's choices run across a hazy boundary, each fundamentally changing the finished product. Hollister's choice of a stanza break is determined by Hulsey's choices of physical spacing.

Because of the complex and painstaking nature of printing, student work takes the form of a sort of one-on-one apprenticeship with the Adams House tutor in charge of the press. Hulsey is working now under the mentorship of Katherine McCanless, a non-resident tutor in Adams House. McCanless is unabashedly passionate about the literature she loves to print and insists on working "from the text out." Her own recent projects include the printing of eleven lines from a new translation of 'Beowulf' by Seamus Heaney. McCanless has been delighted with the enthusiasm of her students, but laments that restrictions on time and funding limit the number of people that can work in the press.

Despite these limitations, McCanless' guidance has certainly made its impact. Hulsey is finding herself more and more wrapped up in the art of book-making, and printing slips into the track of her higher ambitions. Though she speaks cautiously of the future, she is considering pursuing an education in print-making. At any rate, her passion for "art on paper," is becoming at the Bow and Arrow Press much more than a hobby or an extra-curricular.

The world of book-making and the book as art is a hidden one--a world of lights in basement windows and the quiet arc of a page over a bed of text. But it is immensely rich and beautiful. In the age of online literature and the overpowering flux of screened words, the work of the Bow and Arrow press takes on a new importance. The handset type of the press upholds the integrity of literature-it upholds the ideals of poetry in which every letter, every word has its exact weight. In which the silence of a stanza break is lead-measured under the page and can be held in the hand. In which the stacked steel of the margin holds off time from the text, makes a mind-haven in the rush of language.