Independent Publisher's Marks: The Twentieth CenturyAuthor(s): Jeffrey MillerSource: The Library Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Apr., 1987), pp. 205-207Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4308118 .

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INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER'S MARKS: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The wheel, the lever, the incline May survive, and perhaps, The alphabet.

[KENNETH REXROTH]

When I was sixteen and living in Mallorca I was invited to Palma for the day by a neighbor who was researching the thirteenth-century reconquest of the Balearic Isles by James the First of Aragon. After visiting a convent that had been the site of the Knights Templars quarters (my neighbor wished to examine inscriptions on the inner side of the city walls dating from the residency of the Templars), we went to late lunch with friends of his. Robert Graves was one of the guests. I listened attentively as Graves discussed several myths with one of the guests, including the myth of Cadmus, articulating it as that precise and important moment when letters entered into Greek civilization and thus, as inheritors of the Greeks, into our own.

This recounting of a turning point in history lodged itself in my imagination as it was to resurface when I was casting about in 1979 for a name for a fledgling literary press. Cadmus is honored for having given the Greeks that most elegant triumph of the human intellect, the alphabet: twenty-four abstract repeatable symbols capable of representing speech. The myth commences with Cadmus consulting the great oracle at Delphi. It reaches its fulfillment when Cadmus

[Library Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 2, pp. 205-2071 K 1987 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

0024-25 19/87/5702-0005$01 .00

205

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206 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

founded Thebes; he commemorated this by setting up a stone inscription, the writing of which became for the Greeks the birth of letters.

With the press named, a suitable device was required, and I ransacked works on Greek art looking for representations of Cadmus. I especially liked one from the bottom of a sixth-century B.C. Spartan cup that depicts Cadmus slaying the Castalian serpent (and as Jean-Franiois Marmontel wryly observed, "I pounce on what is mine wherever 1 find it"). Some of the pigment has flaked away in the intervening twenty-five centuries, and thus I took a graphic arts pen and sable brush and restored as best I could those damaged passages of the image I had in a photographic copy.

Occasionally the device has been used with a logotype, "KAAMO," running in a curve, printed in another color and adjacent to the curve of its circular edge; this is done in emulation of the practice of Attic vases where heroes' names are written in brightly colored glazes next to their images on the lovely curving shapes. Metaphorically, such illusory, allusive artifice, printing the name in curved fashion as if it were moving on a three-dimensional surface, suggests that, while the page is two-dimensional, its matter partakes of more and might be thought of as drink to slake our thirst from one of those well-wrought Greek vases: pure cool water from a mountain's spring, honied mead, bitter aloes ... that writing, creating, and bookmaking are part of that continuity across time that has been possible in the West through the symbols of the alphabet. First there was the inscription, then the manuscript, and later the book and its multiples, and they are our sustenance, the great good fortune we have in conversing across the gulfs of time and geography with the world's nobility, its greatest minds, its most gifted artists.

An editor and a publisher loom large in my private mythology: Jean Paulhan of the Nouvelle Revue FranCaise and Gaston Gallimard-Paulhan for the catholi- city of his tastes and staunch determination to publish good writing from across both the social and political spectrum-and for his abiding humanity in aiding writers of all stripes both before and after the war-and Gallimard for having had in his employ that most audacious of editors, Andrt- Malraux. Imagine Gallimard caught in the light of flames, papers burning on the grate of his office fireplace as the Germans storm the gates of Paris. What papers are being burned? Andre Malraux's memoranda for springing from prison a fellow writer, Leon Trotsky.

Cadmus has, in its modest fashion and short history, attempted to emulate the practice of such exemplars: no school or political tendency is either encouraged or discouraged in the work put into print. We have published voices from the far left to the far right, learned Anglican divines and proletarian voices from rust- bowl Detroit, polemics and lyrical encomiums. We have published work worthy of intelligent readers, be it disturbing or infinitely beautiful. Our sole criterion is that the writer be gifted, a sincere practitioner of his art and craft, his voice- perhaps ephemeral, perhaps not-an addition to the dialogue that has been carried on across the centuries.

Jeffrey Miller, Cadmus Editions P.O. Box 687

Tiburon-Belvedere, California 94920

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INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS' MARKS 207

The Books of Cadmus Editions

Tennessee Williams in Tangier, by Mohamed Choukri, translated by Paul Bowles (1979)

The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, by Tom Clark (1980) Nights We Put the Rock Together, by Clayton Eshleman (1980) The Pillow Book of Carol Tinker, by Carol Tinker (1980) Disasters of War, by Leighton Rollins (1981) Yellow Lola: formerly titled Japanese Neon (Hello, La Jolla, bk. 2), by Ed Dorn

(1981) Early Routines, by William Burroughs (1982) Posthumes, by Bradford Morrow (1982) The Uncle and Other Stories, by Joan Shaw (1983) How a City Sings from November to November, by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated

and edited by Christopher Maurer (1984) She Woke Me Up So I Killed Her, translations by Paul Bowles (1986) The Pigeon Factory, by John Richards, photographs by Ralph Norris (1987) The Wandering Fool, by Yunus Emre, translated by Edouard Roditi and Guzin

Dino (1987)

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