A thud of consonants | an upholstery of tears

Roy R. Behrens © altered book collage (1992)

Above Roy R. Behrens, collage, mixed media, altered book. Private collection.

•••

Anatole Broyard, Aroused by Books [his dismissal of the poetry of Dylan Thomas]—

Such a fatigue of adjectives, a drone of alliterations, a huffing of hyphenated words hurdling the meter like tired horses. Such a faded upholstery of tears, stars, bells, bones, flood and blood…a thud of consonants in tongue, night, dark, see, wound and wind.

Oh, the farmer and the cowman must be friends

Dude (2019)

Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma! (1943)—

The farmer and the cowman should be friends,
Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends.
The cowman ropes a cow with ease, the farmer steals her
butter and cheese,
But that's no reason why they cain't be friends—
Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends.

•••

The American poet Robert Penn Warren (whose voice I love to listen to) came from Southern roots, and some of his ancestors had served on the Confederate side during the American Civil War. In Warren's wonderful memoir (which I have just finished reading), Portrait of a Father (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), he recalls a misunderstanding he had when, as a boy, he was visiting his maternal grandfather's home. Here's the story—

There was another remark among the daughters which seemed related to the notion that the old man [his grandfather] was a visionary. They had said, more than once in their protracted and loving diagnosis of their father, that he was a "Confederate reader." Or so it seemed. I would wonder what a "Confederate reader" might be. But as my vocabulary widened, it suddenly dawned on me that the old man was an "inveterate reader." In fact, he was. As long as eyes held out.

Game, Stamps and Cash | Jake Manternach

Game parody © Jake Manternach (2016)

Above Hypothetical redesign of Mastermind code-breaking game, with the addition of a narrative theme, by Jake Manternach (2016), graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa.

•••

Roland Penrose (British artist and Picasso biographer), quoted in Elizabeth Cowling, Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006—

Autumn 1956
Don José [Picasso's father, artist and professor of art] became almost blind before he died. When shown a blank sheet of paper at art school he said to the pupil, "You should make your drawing stronger." He retired from post at school because of blindness. (p. 175)

12 May 1964
[While visiting Picasso in France] Before leaving we watched all-in wrestling on T.V. He makes a point of watching this program twice a week. J[acqueline, Picasso's wife] cannot stand it. So he usually watches alone. Affectionate goodbyes and inquiries about our next visit. (p. 264)

•••

Below Design for a block of postage stamps and the paper currency for an imagined country named Qualm (2016), by Jake Manternach.

Stamps and currency © Jake Manternach

Labels, Stamps, Currency | Blake Schlawin

Luggage labels © Blake Schlawin 2014

Above and below Proposals for luggage labels, postage stamps and currency for an imaginary country called Sequitur, designed by Blake Schlawin, graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa, in a course called Graphic Design I, as taught by Roy R. Behrens.

•••

William H. Gass, interviewed in Tom LeClair and Larry McGaffery, eds., Anything Can Happen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 158—

I think contemporary fiction is divided between those who are still writing performatively and those who are not. Writing for voice, in which you imagine a performance in the auditory sense going on, is traditional and dying. The new mode is not performative and  not auditory. It's destined for the printed page, and you are really supposed to read it the way they teach you to read in speed reading. You are supposed to crisscross the page with your eye, getting references and gists; you are supposed to see it flowing on the page, and not sound it in the head. If you do sound it, it is so bad you can hardly proceed… By the mouth for the ear: that's the way I like to write. I can still admire the other—the way I admire surgeons, broncobusters, and tight ends. As writing, it is that foreign to me.

Block of stamps © Blake Schlawin 2014

Currency © Blake Schlawin 2014

Collections and Recollections | Danielle Shearer

Exhibition poster (2013) © Danielle Shearer

Above Promotional poster for a hypothetical exhibition called Collections and Recollections: Arrangements of Related Forms, designed by Danielle Shearer, graphic design student, University of Northern Iowa. Copyright © 2013 by Danielle Shearer.

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Anne Brunson, quoted in Remar Sutton and Mary Abbott Waite, eds., The Common Ground Book: A Circle of Friends. Latham NY: British American Publishing, 1992, pp. 275-276—

My daddy never went shopping, but while my mother was sick, he had to take me to buy a bathing suit. I was four or five, and he bought me an adult size-fourteen bathing suit, a size which I have never worn in my whole life.

When he got us home, Mother asked, "Why did you get her that bathing suit?"

He said, "That's the one she wanted."

Evidently he had said, "Pick out a bathing suit," and I had—a white two-piece. I can still remember it because you can't return a bathing suit, and every year I would try it on thinking that it might be the right size. It never was.

Book Review | Design Before Designers

Ad for Chromatic Jobber printing press (c1886)

Graphic Design Before Graphic Designers:
The Printer as Designer and Craftsman 1700-1914
by David Jury
Thames and Hudson, London and New York, 2012
312 pp., illus. 219 b&w/560 col. Trade, $60.00
ISBN: 978-0-500-51646-1.

This is a richly illustrated book on the history of printing—or, more accurately, on one area of printing. It is not a history of “book printing,” but of a less exalted branch called “job printing.” Historically, book printers (or so it has long been widely assumed) are prestigious purveyors of culture, while job printers are those who produce “ephemera,” the everyday stuff that is rarely preserved—handbills, posters, tickets, advertisements, trade cards, stationery, labels, receipts, passports, charts, certificates, postage stamps, banknotes and so on.

When Samuel Johnson wrote his Dictionary (1755), he made no distinction between designing and printing—a typographer, by his definition, was “a printer.” Continuing well into the twentieth century, arranging elements on a page was part and parcel of printing, so there was no additional cost for “graphic design,” a phrase that is commonly said (erroneously, I think) to have been used for the first time by book designer W.A. Dwiggins in 1921. Today, as designers and their clients know, graphic design is its own thriving category, and the work of a graphic designer is billed in addition to printing.

This well-written and beautiful book, titled Graphic Design Before Graphic Designers: The Printer as Designer and Craftsman 1700-1914, is a history of what printers did, as clandestine designers, in advance of the formal establishment of graphic design as a career field. It also provides an account of how the design services of craft-based printers were deliberately discredited by graphic and advertising designers in order to justify charging for a service that had once been gratis. Surely, it must have been argued, the author writes, “the modern businessman’s media requirements could only be addressed by a new profession made up of university-trained communication strategists.”

The book is organized in chronological, alternating chapters (there are six in all, plus other parts), each of which offers two components: First, a persuasively-written historical text, detailing what took place, in what order and why, including the names and achievements of individuals who were major players. These narratives are illustrated by well-chosen informative images from the history of printing. Second, each chapter also features about 30 pages of the most wonderful full-color images of examples of job printing, from every category imaginable. more…

Les Coleman Meets Jessica Helfand

© Les Coleman, Imperfect Sense vovelle

Above A few years ago (2005 to be precise), British artist and aphorist Les Coleman sent me this adaptation of an "information wheel" or "wheel chart" (produced by Colin Sackett for In House Publishing), in which each turn of the wheel produces a Coleman aphorism. I was reminded of one of my favorite books, published a few years earlier, by Winterhouse graphic designer Jessica Helfand, titled Reinventing the Wheel (NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003) (see cover below). It is an immensely rich collection of the widest variety of vintage information wheels (more formally known as volvelles), pertaining to all sorts of subjects, among them Enemy Airplane and Yank Spotters, Color Blindness Chart, and Handy Nail Calculator. There must be at least several hundred, reproduced in color and in fine detail. As it turns out, Les Coleman's "dial an aphorism" is a take-off on a British Translation Wheel that came out c1960 (see p. 136). When I saw the Helfand book, I immediately challenged my graphic design students to design and build their own vovelles, using unexpected subject matter. One student built a pizza wheel, in which the wheel was part of a circular pizza cutter.

Cover, Jessica Helfand, Reinventing the Wheel (2003)

•••

That said, here is more from Les Coleman—

Model wears clothes at nudist camp life drawing class.

A wig so convincing it had its own dandruff.

The life of a mouse is a rat race.

 Terror struck at the very heart of his epiglottis.

The vacation was certainly no holiday.

The temerity to be audacious.

Please refrain from prohibiting.

The cowboy put on his dark glasses and rode off into the sunset.

The sundial had stopped.

Little Miss Muffet sat on a whoopee cushion.

Propaganda helps us make up our minds.

To make guinea pigs of guinea pigs.

If I could be a fly on the wall I would not be sitting in this chair.

Apache Child

Design copyright © Roy R. Behrens, from Edward Curtis photograph.

Shane Connaughton
Jesus must have been an Irishman. After all, he was unmarried, thirty-two years old, lived at home, and his mother thought he was God.

Randall Jarrell
She was so thin you could have recognized her skeleton.

Woody Allen
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Jack Handey
I hope if dogs ever take over the world, and they choose a king, they don’t just go by size, because I bet there are some chihuahuas with some good ideas.

John Berger
Every city has a sex and age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine…London is a teenager and urchin, and, in this, hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

A.J. Ayer
[William] James was being teased by a theological colleague who said to him: “A philosopher is like a blind man in a dark cellar, looking for a black cat that isn’t there.” “Yes,” said William James, “and the difference between philosophy and theology is that theology finds the cat.”

The Wonderful Woman I Live With

Mary Snyder Behrens on Etsy

Cynical Girl

Roy R. Behrens, logo for an online business shop called Cynical Girl (2011).