Tally is Complete!

2010-02-21T13:15:00.010-05:00

Tally is a full-length creative non-fiction book. It tells the story of an aging Bohemian artist and thinker and a young woman who is influenced by his ideas. To read about some of the philosophical concepts in this book, go to Gatewood Journal and the article "Living Alive."

Paul Johnston: American Philosopher, Writer and Artist

2009-09-24T20:58:00.010-04:00

PJ was born Paul Johnston in Augusta, Georgia on July 17, 1899. His father was a salesman who worked for a number of companies, including selling Singer sewing machines to American Indians in the Southwest and motorcycles to the people of Denver. He remembered living in the Southwest when Teddy Roosevelt was President.

The family moved back to Georgia and PJ spent his teenage years there. PJ felt the sexual and intellectual repression of the Old South and began to read the literary magazines he found in the public library. He fell in love with an illustration of a woman in Bruno’s Weekly, a publication from Greenwich Village. This and the reputation the Village was beginning to have in the 1910s as a place of artistic, sexual, political and intellectual freedom lured him there. He arrived in 1919 at the age of twenty, and initially was shocked by the women’s short dresses and men’s long hair, and the Bohemian lifestyle.

He met Egmont Arens, a fine press printer and publisher of Playboy [not today's Playboy, but named for Playboy of the Western World], from whom he learned the art of printing. Playboy was dedicated to a new wave of writers, among them Lola Ridge, Max Weber, Ben Hecht, and D.H. Lawrence.

The Village of Alfred Kreymborg, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Floyd Dell had already passed. He heard and could still relate the story of Robert Claremont, the poet who inherited a fortune and held a party to celebrate it. The party went on for days, and then weeks, in his apartment and Claremont had to move out, renting a room at the Algonquin.

PJ came to know Guido Bruno, Maxwell Bodenheim and Bobby Edwards, the publisher of Quill and a ukulele maker and player, and told stories of each one, and many others. “Max Bodenheim was always telling someone, loudly, his oral history of the world.”

Although PJ came to the Village to study painting, he became increasingly involved with fine printing, working for Egmont Arens after the demise of Playboy and the establishment of Arens’ Flying Stag Press.

He met his future wife, Virginia, before she was of age to marry, and several years later they eloped. “The engineer of the elopement was Egmont Arens,” he told me. “He was an old friend of Rockwell Kent, who was living in Vermont, had a big house up there. So Egmont got in touch with him. Because we could marry at age 16 without her parent’ s consent. The only crime I could be committing was crossing state lines. We were married by the town clerk. And the town drunk was our guest of honor. Carl Ruggles played the wedding. And instead of her father, Rockwell Kent gave her away.”

After his marriage, he worked for a short time for the Alfred Knopf Publishing Company. After this, he moved back and forth between the Village and the small town of Woodstock. Woodstock was flourishing as an artistic community, and there, he became the editor and advertising manager of Hue And Cry, the weekly artistic newspaper.

In the Village, while still working for Arens, he set up his own press and meant at first to publish a magazine of new literature, like Transition in Paris and Broom in Italy. Then, having a different idea, he published the material in six pamphlets called The Latterday Pamphlets.

Arens taught PJ the art of fine press printing and hired him when Playboy folded and he started the Flying Stag Press.

“Egmont’s heyday as a leader among the bohemians had already passed. He and Jo Bell split, so I think this caused him to lose his attachment to poetry and so on, because Jo Bell was a poet. It was because of her interest in poetry that Playboy was published. I wrote to him from Provincetown where I was. I had bought a copy of Playboy and was very impressed. Come and see me when you come to town. That’s how I started working for him.”

During the next fifteen years, PJ published and printed broadsides, magazines and newsletters. He sent Bennett Cerf his proposal for two fine press books: Poetry Quartos and Prose Quartos. Random House gave him the names of the poets and writers and PJ contacted them and gathered the writing for these publications. PJ printed each poem in a separate booklet, featuring his drawings on the covers, and enclosed all in a wraparound cover.

Poetry Quartos (475 copies) was published in 1929 and contained poems by Robert Frost, Elinor Wylie, Theodore Dreiser, William Rose Benét, H.D., Genevieve Taggard, Vachel Lindsay, Louis Untermeyer, and 4 others. Prose Quartos (circa 500 copies) appeared in 1930 and included the work of Stephen Vincent Benét, Sherwood Anderson, Conrad Aiken, Alfred Kreymborg, among others.

It was during this time or thereabouts that Arens had a new protégé and PJ quarreled with this man and became estranged from Arens. PJ moved his press to Silvermine, Connecticut and then to Woodstock, New York.

His first book Biblio-Typographica: A Survey of Contemporary Fine Printing Style, illustrated with examples, 1050 copies printed at the Southworth Press, was published by Covici Friede in 1930. In Woodstock he wrote and published in 1932 The Book Collector’s Packet. About the same time, in March 1932, he published 250 copies of The Crow’s Nest Funerealities by the poet Peggy Bacon.

His fine press work is still being sold by Antiquarian Booksellers.

In the Village he worked as a book designer for Van Rees Press. He worked on Casanova’s Memoirs, the Aventuros Edition, 12 volumes, with Rockwell Kent prints, and Albert and Charles Boni, NY, 2 volumes, with eight of Kent’s illustrations.

When PJ was about 79 years of age, Richard Spiegel, a young man who befriended him, approached the New York Public Library and arranged to have PJ’s printing collection added to their archives. His fine press work was scattered throughout his apartment in a pile of clutter that rose three to four feet high. It took several friends months to collect and select PJ’s work for the Rare Books division.

PJ’s Biblio-Typographica was already in the library's possession. For this book, PJ had studied the history and study of typefaces and their evolution from European to modern forms.

In his collection were examples of Joseph Low’s printing work, as well as many broadsides and pamphlets by himself and other fine printers. There were letters to and from Frances Meynell, founder of Nonesuch Books, Bennet Cerf of Random House, Ward Ritchie, B. B. Updike, Bruce Rogers, Stanley Morrison and others.

“Bruce Rogers,” PJ said, “in 1899 or so was working for Houghton Mifflin. Updike was a very careful and thoughtful printer. Both Updike and Bruce Rogers had nobody to lead them in their styles, but themselves. They had only the history of good printing to look back on, and they were making their contributions to a movement that started in the 1400s, well, I would say, 1500, it began to take on a very distinctive style. See, I researched all this in the New York Public Library. The library was my alma mater. I used to go in there all the time, spend days in there looking up old specimen books and old printing work. I found an unknown New York printer who had, like Updike, a style of neat printing, and they were printing dissertations of students and politicians and poetry. In the 1790s, to put some style in their work they were publishing dissertations. . . T & J Swords. So I researched and did a story on them. When Updike began in Boston in early 1900s, he had nothing to guide him but his own good taste in printing. He was not imitating because there was no style in printing. Rogers was up against the same thing.”

Biblio-Typographica is still considered to be an important source book for the study of typography. In 1979, PJ’s book layouts, designs and finished books, cards, pamphlets, and broadsides were acquired by the New York Public Library for their permanent collection. Most of the books he designed were done for Van Rees Press in New York, a printer of books for the major and university presses. PJ belonged to the Typophiles, an association of fine printers that still exists today.

Lawrence Parke Murphy, then of the Rare Books Division, said, “Someday PJ will be known as one of the great American printers.”

In his middle age PJ created and sold textile designs, but gave this up when he began to write prodigiously. His philosophy of life, of "consciously living, and living for the value of experience" captivated several young writers and artists. Tally is the story of the relationship between these young people and the aging Bohemian.

Paul Johnston died at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City on February 18, 1987.

Tally - Chapter 7 excerpt

2009-09-16T14:24:00.031-04:00

I received a letter from Tally:

The old man gave the kids their freedom after dinner and came to his squalor, was lonely, far too, went out into a light drizzle. Sixth Avenue had become a street theater. Couple guitarists, amplified, and a wailing sounding instrument were blasting country music; seated in a shelter, a large circle had gathered for audience and the guitar case was full of coins and bills. Good for the old man. He could hear every note, feel the rhythm. A young woman in street clothes danced, her feet, body and arms punctuating the sound. The old man felt an anguish of pleasure, stayed and watched for an hour. The dancer was a cripple, at last she took an abandoned cane and shopping bag and limped away. So, we’re the existent dead. Moments of diversion, sound in the rain, then back to our evasion (however) of life. The old man returned to his lonely bed, after pills, with a wish for sleep/death.

“I don’t think you’re one of the existent dead.”

“No,” he said, but at times he experienced it. “Existent death is a phase of variable lengths of time. The existent dead live without consciousness and completely through rationalization, a thought process by which we evade evaluating what is happening in our lives. Everyone goes through periods of existent death, and of being renewed, into times when we are more conscious of what we are doing and pursuing what is valuable to us.”

He wrote what I thought was succinct, with a provocative ending:

Existent death is a state of being in a functioning body, by one’s self and in relation to others, but evading consciousness of experience, especially the memory of eternity in the present instant.

Erin Yes

Tally is Complete!

Paul Johnston: American Philosopher, Writer and Artist

Tally - Chapter 7 excerpt