Explorations in Typography: Ken Botnick Interview

Opening January 11, 2013 at the Craft Alliance in St. Louis, "Ken Botnick: Typographies" is the first solo show featuring the works of renowned printer/publisher and book designer Ken Botnick. The exhibition includes books, prints, and sculptures inspired by Botnick's experiences, travels, and collaborations with writers and poets. Botnick began his career in the 1970s as co-proprietor of Red Ozier Press in New York, and today he prints and publishes under the imprint emdash design. His works can be found in the permanent collections of the Getty Center for Humanities, the Bodleian Library, and the Yale Arts of the Book Collection, among others. Botnick is currently a professor of art at Washington University in St. Louis.

We recently asked Ken to tell us more about the exhibition and his experiences as a book designer, producer, and typographer.   

How did you first become interested in the art of book publishing and design?

I was lucky to be an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison where there was one of the leading book arts programs. I remember seeing a book by Walter Hamady, who led the program, and being struck by the sense of completeness in that object - the handmade paper, handset type, binding, images, and poetry all had the feeling of being one synchronized effort.

It wasn’t long after that I met Steve Miller, who showed me how to make paper and print on the letterpress. Steve and I eventually became co-proprietors of Red Ozier Press in New York and worked together for about 10 years. While I was finishing my undergraduate degree, Steve was already publishing in Madison and I was helping him on different projects, one being a book of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry. Steve wanted me to drive to Boulder with him to meet Allen and sign the colophon sheets. At first I balked, thinking about my classes that week, but Steve asked me a question that actually changed my life: “Ken, in 20 years will you remember the classes you sat in this week or will you remember the time you met Allen Ginsberg?” He was right. I found the experience of being involved with publishing someone of that stature so thrilling it sparked a lifelong pursuit. I still find it thrilling. I love the entire process of publishing, of taking an idea - a manuscript - and turning it into something concrete and, hopefully, beautiful.

I’ve read that your work is largely inspired by your experiences and your curiosity about “how a book means in the world.” Can you elaborate on this?

My favorite current quote is from Roland Barthes, who wrote, “The object is the world’s human signature.” In that light, the book represents many signatures. The book is a powerful cultural object and takes on multiple and quite different meanings for different people. For the dedicated reader, a book can be a valued reference or an entertainment or an intellectual quest. And we usually think of the book as having its meaning by virtue of its relationship to the reader. But way before the reader comes the author, who is the shaper of the information the reader gets - whether it’s a dictionary, poetry, fiction, or a text book. The author must reason out the way that information is obtained by the reader, whether it follows a sequential order or whether it can be randomly accessed. The book is good at either one. So authorial thinking is thinking that is shaped by the book form while it simultaneously shapes the book form itself.

In between the author and reader comes the typographer/designer/printer/illustrator who responds to the text by making the language visible, giving it texture, and shading the experience for the reader by degrees that can move from subtle to extreme. So, for each of these characters in the play — author, designer, reader — the book “means” (or comes to mean something) in a different way. The exciting thing today is that there are so many makers of books who are thinking about all these things at once across multiple platforms. Those books I would say qualify as “art of the book” and there are some really fine ones being made.

My own work has gone from my early days when I thought of myself as strictly a printer/publisher of limited editions to my most recent work in which my presence on the page is as author and editor as much as typographer and printer. It seems the more I write, the more adventurous I get as typographer. Maybe that’s a ruse intended to cover up my deficiencies as writer.

The book “means” something very different today as we approach what is considered the “post-book” world. E-books are not the devil, in fact I think they’re great because a lot of books just shouldn’t be spending all that carbon. But as e-books get a bigger hold on the minds and wallets of readers, the books made by hand will become even more valued and probably more adventurous. It’s no coincidence that the demand for printing presses and book arts programming in universities is skyrocketing at a time when we are on the brink of being post-book as a society.

Several recent works of yours featured in the exhibition were done in collaboration with poet Mary Jo Bang. How did you decide to partner on these pieces? What was the process like collaborating with a literary artist on a book arts project? 

When I started making books it was to publish work by people Steve Miller and I liked. It was amazing to me that we could publish the likes of Isaac Bashevis Singer, William S. Burroughs, Robert Bly, Octavio Paz, and many others. Amazing, and still is, and that working with them would be so easy - that a Nobel Prize winner would be gracious and appreciative of those small books, as if we’d given him a great gift. That is a very special feeling. But it was what makers of books were doing 30 years ago, publishing work they felt should be published.

Mary Jo Bang is an extremely fine poet and one of the most interesting thinkers I know. She’s also a colleague here at Washington University and one of the nicest people, period. I’d wanted to work with her for some time but something told me it had to be an unusual project. I’d been experimenting with more sculptural books recently, and Mary Jo was very receptive (liked them very much), so we decided to do something that was working with a form of printing I was trying out: printing off the edges of the sheets - bleeding the type - so to speak, that has the effect of appearing printed on the edge when the book is closed and viewed from the fore edge. We first did a 35-line poem called “The Circus Watcher” that has one line per book and 35 books stacked horizontally so the poem reads properly, and then the book sits in a plexi case. When I finished, Mary Jo and I were looking at it and I said I had wanted to print that way all around the book, all edges, but needed a one-line poem. She said she had one called “B is for Beckett” from her marvelous book The Bride of E, and the entire poem is this: “There is so little to say.” Perfect. We did that one too, with lead covers, just to be very Beckett-like.

You’ve been to India several times, including as a Fulbright Scholar in residence at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad in 2006. How have your travels manifested in your work?

Indian sacred poetry, a tradition called “bhakti,” has been important to me ever since Robert Bly introduced me to it in the very early 80s. Later I published translated work by Octavio Paz about India that I loved very much. I finally went to India to teach at the National Institute of Design in 2003 and immediately felt at home, as if I’d been there in a previous life. During my Fulbright year I had a manuscript of the Gitagovinda by Jayadeva, a 1000-year old song cycle dedicated to Lord Krishna and his consort Radha - a very magical piece of poetry. Andrew Schelling at the Naropa Institute in Boulder generously translated sections of the Gita for me to publish in their original Sanskrit and English. I had this manuscript in India with me, not knowing what I’d do with it and actually struggling with it quite a bit. I had thought I would ask an artist to work with me on it, but then, eventually found that my own photographs could be adapted as the images, and so I used a number of images I’d taken in India that I never imagined would end up in a book.

It might sound like a bit of a cliché, but India has loosened up my work a lot, made me more adventurous in my thinking and working. Travel in India requires you to be adaptable, patient, and ready to pounce when opportunity presents. And that’s just to make it across town some days. You never know what you will be confronted with in the streets of India, and I really love that unpredictable nature. I also love that things are seldom black and white in India. Indians are comfortable with shades of gray.

I make a lot more decisions about things spontaneously on press today, and I think it has relationship to my time there. That I have begun to apply typography as the process of making patterns is the direct result of studying the development and use of pattern in Indian textiles and other craft. To understand the kind of decision making that occurs at a very fundamental level in Indian craft practice, I began writing about it as something I refer to as “subtle technology.” I’ve used my writing as the process of more discovery, and the writing itself has become a discipline I enjoy. My writing, done with Ira Raja in Delhi, has been published in several different journals internationally, and I hope to do more. But it is the discipline of writing about India that has allowed me to take a more authorial voice in the books I make in my studio, and this has been a great discovery for me.

What do you love most about working with paper and text?  Why choose paper over other media? 

Discovering handmade paper was a revelation: That something so ordinary as paper, so ubiquitous, could become a sensuous object, something designed to communicate just by itself, that really shifted things for me. The books at Red Ozier soon required too much paper to keep up with making ourselves, so I stopped and focused on typography and design. It might be that it’s because I know paper best, but I don’t feel the satisfaction in designing for screen that I do with paper. And you can’t print with a press on a screen - doesn’t work too well, and since the printing press is my chosen tool, well...

You teach at the Sam Fox School of Art and Design at Washington University in Saint Louis and oversee the Kranzberg Book Studio. What advice do you give your students who are just starting out in book and print production?

We see a lot more students who want to go out into the world and print for a living. That’s a phenomenon most programs in the country are experiencing, but it’s different today because most students aren’t going out into the world to become printer/publishers. They are hanging out shingles and doing contract work, and they’re lucky that letterpress has now been blessed by the likes of Martha Stewart, and there is a lot of demand none of us imagined 30 years ago.

The best advice I’ve heard is from Claire Van Vliet: “keep you overhead low.” Still the best advice. In our program we emphasize design and typography, and I think that’s an essential discipline. Honestly, we don’t train fine letterpress printers as much in our program as we do good designers who use ink on paper to manifest an idea. My main objective sometimes is just to get people to “think through the ink,” meaning: to get the emphasis off the idea and onto form-giving. I love ink-on-paper because it is literally the most fluid vehicle for translating an idea. Students today have the strange idea that it’s the idea, not the realization of that idea, that is important. But the realization is in the craft, the shaping of the idea, the testing of it, and also allowing it to change a bit in that magical transfer of image to paper. Actually, one of the things we do a lot of is setting up situations in the print shop for accidents to happen and then seizing on them when they do something great to the work.

What do you hope people will take away from viewing your exhibition at the Craft Alliance?

Well, I hope they take away a book and leave a check. That’s a good exchange. The great thing about books is they are multiples that go out into the world without the maker standing there to explain them. I like the self-sufficient object.

"Ken Botnick: Typographies" is on exhibit at the Craft Alliance in St. Louis from January 11-March 24, 2013. For more information visit www.craftalliance.org.