In my library, there’s a lovely little volume called Lyric Verse: A Printer’s Choice. I’m a glutton for anthologies and commonplace books. The most delightful come not from major writers, but rather from unusually individual readers: A Tub of Gold Fishes by Nina Cust, for instance, or The Open Road by E. V. Lucas. Lyric Verse was the work of a Dartmouth undergraduate who had won a coveted senior fellowship in 1965 and used the money to steep himself in the rare volumes at the Bodleian, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Gennadius in Athens. Back in the States, he tried his hand at fine printing at the renowned Stinehour Press in Lunenberg, Vermont: five hundred copies of his choice of poems in four languages, from Horace and Villon to Kipling and Lawrence Durrell. My copy is on Curtis tweedweave paper, but Curtis rag and both heavy and light Fabriano were also used. The poems were set in nine individually chosen typefaces: Arrighi, Bell, Bembo, Bulmer, Caslon, Centaur (Bruce Rogers’s “Noblest Roman”), Goudy, Romulus, and Tudor Black. The book is all of 112 pages, which required fourteen thousand passes on Stinehour’s hand-cranked Vandercook proof press.
