Wood, Ink and Paper

Portraits of Flowers

An Artist's Garden

  Wesley Bates.
  Photo by Richard Bachmann

The Point of the Graver

  George Walker.
  Photo by Dylan Walker

The Inverted Line

  Tim Inkster, publisher.
  Photo by Richard Bachmann

Wayzgoose

Wayzgoose. It slips off the tongue about as full of silliness and grace as might any nonsense word cobbled by Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear. If the word ever meant anything, the exact origins are lost. A Wayzgoose was a popular, festive day for those who practised the black arts of printing during earlier centuries. It was often a roaring, prankish and sotted day for those then at the cutting edge of communications, oh say in 1801; it can be a shock for Canadians to learn that a Wayzgoose has been going on in this land for the last twenty-three years. Every year. In the unassuming Ontario town of Grimsby.

Grimsby is tucked carefully into the base of the Niagara Escarpment, now spilling out and threatening to meet up with nearby Beamsville in an awkward, sad sprawl of `wine country' housing developments.

In the basement gallery of the Grimsby Public Art Gallery, dodging the unusually bright and warm day in late April, were an amazing collection of artisans - all bound by common cause with the beauty and craft of the hand-printed word and image. Paper makers, tiny press owners still coaxing delights from antique machines, wood engravers with brilliant skill, paper marbellers, book binders, booksellers, and representatives of another half dozen or so arts and crafts were there, at dozens of booths around the room.

By chance the first booth I stopped to look at was manned by Alan Stein, proprietor of The Church Street Press in Parry Sound, Ontario. The gentle, bearded wood engraver and printer was displaying, amid an array of small pamphlets and broadsides, a magnificent edition titled Home Country, a large book of just a hundred and fifty handprinted copies that combines the late poet Al Purdy's poems with Mr Stein's images. The two had worked together before, notably on an edition about Mexico. Home Country was still being completed when Mr Purdy died last year, but he had already signed the unbound pages. Mr Purdy's was not the only ghost ... let's say spirit ... at this Wayzgoose.

Bill Poole was a teacher and professional designer who died just a few weeks before this year's Wayzgoose, in an accidental fall at 77 years of age.

`I think he was a really important figure in just creating this whole atmosphere that we have now of people who are interested in the book arts' said Mr Stein. `It was just his love of hand-printed books. It was infectious in a way.'

With Mr Poole, those who wonder if one person can make a difference in the world have an answer - yes. The little Grimsby Public Art Gallery was cajoled and energetically encouraged into existence by Mr Poole; he became its first director. As director, in his search for programming for the gallery, Mr Poole decided to get all the book artisans he knew together, and began the annual Wayzgoose.

`It's interesting to see the room filled with all sorts of young people - younger than me' says Mr Stein. And it is. There are the grizzled veterans of letterpress arts at the booths - legends, actually - such as Stan Bevington of Coach House Press in Toronto, and typographer Rod McDonald. But they seem almost the minority amid the legion of younger faces, most of them female. The feeling is definitely not that of an artform on life support, safely encased in glass boxes in a barren, unvisited display room. It's more like a Middle Eastern bazaar. And the annual Wayzgoose is influencing others to take up the cause, and fill the ranks with new recruits to letterpress and ink, paper and hand binding.

The most striking example is found in the proliferation of wood engravers.

Between Al Stein's table, and the one set up by Margaret Lock of Kingston, whose own wood cuts and press works are marvellous, powerful, and twinkle with grace and humour, is one manned by a lanky, bespeckled Gerard Brender à Brandis. Beautiful prints and small run books are in front of him; about ten feet away, at The Porcupine's Quill table, are books with the same artist's work.

`I started coming to the Wayzgoose in Grimsby maybe twenty years ago' says Porcupine's Quill proprietor Tim Inkster. `One of the first artists that caught my eye was Gerard Brender à Brandis. He was doing letterpress editions of wood engravings that he was carving himself. I admired these things, but I noticed the artist prints he was selling: they weren't pricey, but they had a certain price attached to them.'

Mr Inkster proposed doing a less expensive offset edition of the prints, but was rebuffed. `Gerard, at that time particularly, was something of a purist, and the idea of a letterpressman like himself having anything to do with an inexpensive offset reproduction ... the idea was just abhorrent.' It took six or seven years, but Mr Inkster eventually persuaded the artist to publish Wood, Ink and Paper in 1980. It has sold about 5,000 copies over the last twenty-one years.

`There was another young artist - Wesley Bates - who started coming to the festival a few years later' continues Mr Inkster. `He looked at the engravings that Gerard Brender à Brandis was doing, and thought ``I could do that too''. Wesley Bates, in turn, inspired this guy standing right beside us - George Walker.'

Mr Walker, like Messrs Brender à Brandis and Bates, has also published a more affordable offset edition of work with The Porcupine's Quill, happily seeing it as compatible with the much more expensive hand made editions, prints, and broadsides printed on his own home press.

It is the annual Anthology that's the tangible legacy of each Wayzgoose. Two or three dozen small presses from around Canada supply hand printed pamphlets or works, which are then bound up and sold in a very limited edition. The varieties of styles, paper textures, images and the press work can be intoxicating. It's also expensive - about $80. Fittingly, the 2001 Anthology is dedicated to Bill Poole.

The last spirit hovering around this Wayzgoose was Carl Dair, the famed Canadian typographer and designer. In Wrongfount Six, sort of an ancestral Wayzgoose Anthology published by the Guild of Hand printers way back in 1968 and dedicated to Mr Dair (who had died suddenly some months before) is the following Dair quote:

`The decline in printing as an art had its parallel in all branches of the industrial world, and the only revolt against increasing cheapness as an end in itself came from a few unregenerate hand craftsmen who still lovingly shaped wood and metal and fabrics - and found a market among those of taste who could enjoy a fine piece of workmanship and could afford to pay for it.'

A peculiar little market that continues to flourish.

Geoff Heinricks, The National Post
reprinted with the permission of the author