Artifex

Leonard Baskin’s approach to book design was in many ways itself an ode to figures in the history of the book. He called himself an “architect of the page,” and used typographic bricks and mortar to build his two-dimensional structures. Once Baskin reached a mature phase as a book designer in the 1960s, the Gehenna Press favored classic typefaces, particularly those designed and cut by Nicholas Jenson in Venice in the late fifteenth century, and revived in the early twentieth-century. The beauty of these balanced, time-honored letterforms appealed to Baskin’s sense of the history of book making as much as to his aesthetic preferences. Indeed, he crafted his own handwriting, evident in the many signatures and notations on display in this exhibition, as a modern adaptation of Italian Renaissance chancery hand. Baskin later began to appreciate more modern typefaces, including Spectrum (designed by Jan Van Krimpen) and Civilité (designed by Herman Zapf), both of which revived Renaissance letterforms.

The Centaur

The Centaur is a landmark imprint in the history of twentieth-century type design. In this seminal publication, Bruce Rogers first showcased his most famous typeface, which he designed and cut as a revival of Nicholas Jenson’s fifteenth-century typefaces. The font, Centaur, is named after the publication.

Tiresias

Gehenna Press's Tiresias had its roots in an earlier sculptural program. In 1963, Baskin created a series of mythological figures cast in bronze, notably including Tiresias, the blind soothsayer of Thebes. The artist was most interested in Dante's image of Tiresias as a backward-looking seer in the Inferno, but was equally fascinated by the story of Tiresias's transformation into a woman for seven years. In 1970, Gehenna Press printed Tennyson's version of the Tiresias story.

Using a bold typographic arrangement for the title page, Baskin made elegant letterforms the armature for this fine press edition. The typeface used for the book was Centaur, set and printed by Harold McGrath. The title page letters were printed from metal type, but carved from boxwood by John E. Benson, one of the most skilled and best known of American carvers.

MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish, doyen of American poetry and a Librarian of Congress among other careers, was another of Baskin's collaborators. Gehenna Press printed both An Evening's Journey to Conway, Massachusetts and A Voyage to the Moon. Conway, Massachusetts, not far from the home of the Gehenna Press in Northampton, was MacLeish's longtime home. A Voyage to the Moon commemorated the moon landing in 1969.

Together, the two imprints use Centaur type to convey two very different feelings. For the script, An Evening's Journey to Conway, Massachusetts, Baskin's design is muted and serves as an underpinning to the gracefully-presented text. For A Voyage to the Moon, Baskin's broadside is far bolder, matching the dramatic poem with its large type and unusual spacing.

Typefaces

Gehenna Press's Zapf's Civilité Disclosed represents Baskin's later investigations of twentieth-century type design. Civilité, designed by the prolific typographer Herman Zapf, is based on the typeface Granjon, of 1928, which in turn was a revival of the types of Robert Granjon, who flourished in Paris, Rome and Antwerp in the late-sixteenth century. Robert Granjon is renowned for his caractères de civilité, letterforms based on a graceful French handwriting and intended as a French version of the Italian italic hand.