Event :: Book Talk :: Dreaming on the Edge, Poets & Book Artists in California
Date :: Sunday, September 4, 2016
Time :: 3:00 PM panel discussion, 4:00 PM reception
R.S.V.P. :: Click here to R.S.V.P.
Location :; San Francisco Center for the Book, 375 Rhode Island Street, San Francisco
Join us to celebrate the release of Alastair Johnston's new book "Dreaming on the Edge: Poets & Book Artists in California", newly published by Oak Knoll Press. This sweeping 232-page book is the first overview of the book arts in the Golden State; it starts at the Gold Rush & comes down to today. There are photographs on every page, of poets and artists and their books.
Starting at 3:00 PM there will be a panel discussion on the book arts with author Alastair Johnston along with artist and critic Jaime Robles, artist and teacher Dorothy Yule, and bookdealer Thomas Goldwasser. Or skip the panel and come at 4:00 PM for the the reception and book signing. Copies will be available for purchase.
About the Author
Alastair Johnston’s interest in typography led him to translate an essay on the punchcutter Jacob Sabon by Jan Tschichold, and the only full-length study of Robert Granjon, the sixteenth-century French punchcutter, written by Hendrik D.L. Vervliet. Johnston has also compiled and annotated three bibliographies of important San Francisco Bay Area literary small presses: Auerhahn, White Rabbit, and Zephyrus Image. His book Aphabets to Order: The Literature of Nineteenth-century Typefounders’ Specimens was published by The British Library in association with Oak Knoll books. In 2009 Oak Knoll published a new edition of William Loy’s Nineteenth-Century American Designers & Engravers of Type. This book, which has an introduction & design by Johnston, was the result of a long collaboration with type historian Stephen O. Saxe who provided samples of every type mentioned by Loy (and many more) to illustrate the book in the way Loy had intended when he wrote it a century ago. In 2010 Johnston assembled Typographical Tourists: Tales of Tramping Printers, an anthology of writing about the itinerant erudite printers of the end of the Nineteenth century. Johnston’s decade of research into the lives and work of Richard Austin, the English type-cutter, and his sons, led to the publication of Trasitional Faces in 2013.