The life which others pay let us bestow,
And give to fame what we to nature owe.
—Homer, The Iliad, Book XII, Line 393,
trans. by Alexander Pope
Publishers are a lot like book collectors. The difference between them is that collectors gather items that already exist whereas publishers dream their books into existence. What they have in common are their motivations: love and necessity.
Collectors might become publishers but less common is the other way around—only a handful of publishers become collectors. Those that do are defined by a passion for design, typography, and, in general, the book as an object of adoration. James Laughlin (1914-1997), the legendary founder of the independent American publishing house New Directions, who was instrumental in pushing Modernist literature into the American mainstream, was one of them. He always said that to succeed at publishing, you had to be a fool. My esteem for him propelled me, in part, to embark on the hair-rising idea of launching my own publishing house, Restless Books. It is from him, perhaps, that I took to book collecting.
“Literchoor is my beat,” he wrote in one of his letters. The line became the title of a biography of Laughlin written by Ian S. MacNiven, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2014. Laughlin was a child of wealth. His great grandfather and namesake, James H. Laughlin, was the founder of J&L Steel, officially known as Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation, an American steel and iron manufacturer that operated, south of Pittsburgh, from 1852 until 1968. An aspiring poet, Laughlin resisted the obligation of entering the family business. He wanted to be a poet.
At the age of 20, Laughlin, dissatisfied with life in Pittsburgh and in the United States overall, traveled to Europe to meet Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, leading Modernist voices. Later on, he spent time in Italy with Ezra Pound, an avant-gardist and provocateur with deep resentment toward minorities, particularly Jews, who was eventually diagnosed with paranoia and secluded for thirteen years at Saint Elizabeths asylum overlooking the Anacostia River in southeast Washington, D.C. Laughlin dreamed of becoming a poet and, along the way, writing the great American novel. After corresponding with T. S. Eliot and other American expats and sharing his work with Pound, who and even enlisted him in a private tutorial of sorts they mutually called “Ezuniversity,” Pound engaged in a tirade of disparagement, encouraging him instead to return “and DO SOMETHING USEFUL about the cultural situation at home.”
Laughlin interpreted the advice as going into publishing, which he had begun doing by pitching ideas to editors and publishing reviews and essays in journals. A couple of years later, while an undergraduate student at Harvard, Laughlin started New Directions in his dorm using his family money. Eventually, he set up an office in a barn in his aunt’s estate in Norfolk, Connecticut. New Directions began with anthologies of new writing. Their titles were acronyms, NDPP, for New Directions in Poetry and Prose, and they were numbered, the last, no. 19, dated in 1966. There were also single-author collections of poetry sold to subscribers, thematic series like New Directions “Poet of the Month,” and a journal with each of its issues dedicated to a work in prose or a prose poet. What best characterized Laughlin was his taste and his courageous, discerning eye. Over the decades, he released books by, among other titans, Djuna Barnes, Vladimir Nabokov, and William Carlos Williams, along with Pound himself.
Almost a century later, the legacy of New Directions is uncontested: it helped elevate the modern paperback, which had come into the market in the thirties as an affordable, democratic, and popular alternative to hardcovers, into an artistic form that was conveniently spreading aesthetic ideas that had traditionally stayed in the outskirts of culture. Laughlin fostered a curiosity for translation. Although such an intellectual endeavor was already present in America at the end of the 19th century, he devoted himself to it in a way that made literature less parochial. Eventually, his investment resulted in the publication of a dozen Nobel Prize winners, from Hermann Hesse, Andre Gide, and Boris Pasternak to Yasunari Kawabata, Eugenio Montale, and Elias Canetti.
The New Directions books were handsome, with a specific “look” that included, among other things, uniform covers, which made it impossible to ignore them. An example of the enthusiasm the look fostered is a trip Laughlin made to Italy, a favorite destination, in 1947. Aside from skiing with his family, he visited printers in order to get quotes (from Mondadori, for instance), hoping that the production of New Directions’ books in Europe would keep the high quality but come down in price. On that trip, he made visits to Italian publishers like Bompiani, Einaudi, and Mondadori itself. In Laughlin’s biography, MacNiven gathers assessments. “Each publisher,” he writes, “told him that the ND list was the best in America, ‘the one which had the most appeal for literate Europeans’.”
It was during that Italian trip that Laughlin met Giovanni Mardersteig, the exquisite, influential Weimar-born printer and typographer who had worked at the German publishing house Kurt Wolf and was the founder of Verona’s mechanized press Stamperia Valdonega and, even better known, Officina Bodoni, a small private press founded in 1922 known for its extraordinarily high-quality crafted print books, which Laughlin thoroughly admired. Mardersteig designed several typefaces, including Dante, Griffo, and Zeno. The Dante typeface, one of the most ubiquitous for Officina Bodoni, has that name because it was used in an edition of Boccaccio’s Trattatelo in Laude di Dante, which w ould come out in 1955. (1955 is at times given as an alternative date.) In Laughlin’s eyes, Mardersteig’s books were examples of “elegant simplicity” in which “nothing gets in the way of the text.”
Laughlin was to such a degree in awe of Mardersteig that he acquired several of his titles for his own private collection. The Ursus Books Limited catalogue of Laughlin’s acquisitions lists 243 items. Almost half are from Officina Bodoni, among them Leon Battista Alberti’s Rime amorose e morali, Gabrielle Annunzio’s Titte le Opera di Gabriel d”Annunzio, The Holy Gospel According to Matthew, Matthew, Mark and John, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, Reiner Maria Rilke’s Lettres à une Amie Vénitienne, Italo Svevo’s Senilità, and Terence’s A Comedy of Terence called Andria. Mardersteig would do collaborations with a variety of friends and other international industry publishers, like Edizioni della Chimera, Harcourt, Brace & World, Yale University Library, Rudolf Freiherr, Arnoldo Mondadori, Centro Amici del Libro, and The Limited Editions Club in New York. Laughlin contracted Mardersteig to work for him individually, as in the folio edition of 150 copies of Dylan Thomas’ Twenty-six Poems.
Laughlin’s personal collection, it seems to me, was the byproduct of his business interactions for New Directions. Most of the items in the Ursus Books Limited seem to have come to Laughlin’s possession after an encounter in which he sought advice about design, typesetting, printing, and distribution for New Directions. In the conversations I have had with his acquaintances, he doesn’t appear to have gone on specifically conceived book-collecting trips. Instead, he frequently came back from a trip to Italy, Germany, England, and occasionally to non-European places with items he would show his staff as individual artists or typographers to be pursued or printing examples to be emulated.
That high standard Laughlin learned from Officina Bodoni is a New Directions signature, even when the printings were targeting a general audience. He hoped to find an audience but was aware that important books might not sell well at first, which in no way deterred him from bringing them out to as solid an audience as possible. At a conference on “The Publishing of Poetry and Fiction,” at the Library of Congress in 1975, Laughlin said that “in the life of a book of poetry the first ten years are glum—they are just disastrous.” Not only was the content of Laughlin’s volumes groundbreaking, so was the design, including their typography.
One of the great 20th century designers, Alvin Lustig, was responsible for that new look. Born in Denver, Colorado, Lustig studied under Frank Lloyd Wright and worked with French painter and Mexico enthusiast Jean Charlot, whose work brought to global attention the Mexican lithographer and lampooner José Guadalupe Posada. Laughlin met Charlot in Los Angeles in the early forties. According to MacNiven, Laughlin described Lustig as “a very sweet, gentle person, Jewish, couldn’t have been nicer.” Lusting’s collaboration with Laughlin and New Directions, which lasted more than a decade and had a lasting impact, generated about seventy-five dust jackets in the Makers and New Classics.
When a publisher establishes a long-term relationship with a designer, it gives the latter permission to develop an aesthetic over time. That permission is invaluable. After all, cover art, for the most part, is applauded not in totto but as a unit. Thanks to the publisher’s trust, the designer naturally sees the collaboration as a sustained narrative. The first commission Laughlin gave to Lustig was Henry Miller’s Wisdom of the Heart. Expressionist in style, the elegant has a red arrow aiming at a heart. Lusting’s other covers include Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, with a cartoon-like feel invoking Hamlet and Hanna-Barbera in a single stroke. As MacNiven suggests, “his dust wrappers in bold primary colors laced with abstractions or swaths of solid blue and tan became the characteristic New Directions cover: a strong, uncluttered appearance that was credited with doing much to establish a new look in American jacket design.”
Lustig was wholeheartedly grateful to Laughlin for the opportunity, frequently commenting on the luck to have a commercial publisher, especially one seen as highbrow, support the artistic designer without compromise. New Directions found a middle ground between sophistication and accessibility that became a benchmark in the American publishing industry.
I knew nothing of Laughlin before I immigrated from Mexico City to New York City in the mid-eighties. His name didn’t exist—it still doesn’t—in the Spanish-speaking world. The reason is idiosyncratic: publishers are heroes within the parameters of a specific culture, nurturing its home-grown talent. Only after I switched cultures, so to speak, did I come to appreciate his influence. The process was sluggish to the degree of being impalpable. I would come across countless New Directions books in my frequent forays to local bookstores in the Columbia University neighborhood where I lived.
While New Directions was Eurocentric, it is, among American publishing houses of the second half of the 20th century, one of the most influential in its efforts to diversify its catalogue. Some of the Latin American authors I venerated were published by New Directions, among them Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Nicanor Parra, and Octavio Paz. As an avid reader, these books appeared to me audacious and ground-breaking. In time, I came to believe there was a unique curatorial sensibility behind them. But, it would take a while to discover Laughlin in all his splendor and to turn him into my hero. After all, I was just a broke Mexican immigrant from a humble middle-class background, who, when he landed in Manhattan, had less than $200 dollars in his pocket.
One of my favorite books by Laughlin himself is called The Way It Wasn’t: From the Files of James Laughlin. It is an alphabetically-organized album of “stuff” (photographs, letters, poems, quotes, etc.) that, cumulatively, served as Laughlin’s autobiography, except that, from the outset, it included a cautionary entry built of the play on words he was fond of: “What I’m writing now is my auto-bug-offery. Wild stuff. Mostly fictional. What I wished had happened. ‘The Way It Wasn’t’ would be a good title.”
That is also the title of a poem in the front matter of The Way It Wasn’t. “Do not squawk,” Laughlin states in it. “Do not yatter. It is a great joy, after one is dead, to have given voice to others. But even more important is to set in action your own head’s collection.” He did both.
Lots of things separate me from Laughlin. I don’t come from wealth. I didn’t go to Harvard. I am, first and foremost, an immigrant writer who came of age when literature—and books themselves—had lost its gravitas. People get their storytelling today from movies, TV, and the internet, even games. Plus, English isn’t my first language. Still, I love and need books as much as he did, mine and those of others. Literchoor is my beat, too.
The way it was and the way it wasn’t: Laughlin not only collected superb books but he dreamed hundreds more into existence. He did so out of love and necessity.
