The books that Bolton

A legendary Canberra bibliophile

Brenda Niall

Made

A Maker of Books: Alec Bolton and his Brindabella Press

by Michael Richards National Library of Australia

$49.99 hb, 471 pp

‘Ihear that those new people have decided to have books in their library,’ remarked Edith Wharton disdainfully. That put-down, from an eminent novelist and book lover who was also a wealthy member of upper-class New York society, was delivered without ambiguity in the 1920s. The ‘new people’ were using books as interior decoration. They would never disturb the display of handsome volumes in their unused library by taking one from the shelf. Could they even read? Probably not, Wharton thought: they had been too busy making money.

Today, Wharton’s words no longer carry the same dismissive meaning. It is indeed possible to have a library without books in it, assuming that the definition of a book involves paper and print. We have e-books and talking books. Last time I looked around the magnificent domed Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria, most of the readers were intent on their screens. Today’s joys, which include Trove and other digitised sources, have changed the scholar’s world, and mostly for the better. There are losses – the serendipity of finding a misplaced or unknown document might be one. Touching the original of a letter, even with a gloved hand, brings its writer closer. Another loss is the diminished companionship in a Manuscripts Room. But does anyone really want to be an internet Luddite?

There needn’t be a choice. As well as the newer ways of transmission, the book in its traditional form still flourishes. There are books in the National Library of Australia, as always. The Library now celebrates fifty years as a publisher with the remarkable story of Alec Bolton, the first director of its publishing program.

Michael Richards’s fine scholarly work A Maker of Books: Alec Bolton and his Brindabella Press isn’t a conventional biography. There is far more about the books than the man. Richards might more accurately have chosen as title: ‘The Books that Alec Bolton Made’. Yet he doesn’t spend much time on the books that Bolton published for the Library. The real subject is Bolton’s passion for letterpress printing, which first of all gave him a weekend vocation and, on his retirement from the Library at the age of sixty-one, brought him an absorbing new life.

A book doesn’t exist until it’s published. How it is published is part of its meaning. For Bolton, a dedicated maker of books, it was a struggle for perfect unity between the text and its chosen paper, typeface, page design, jacket, or cover. Richards celebrates Bolton’s creation, the Canberra-based Brindabella Press. In telling the story of the press, he gives a number of case studies that show how Bol- ton brought authors and designers together in creative enthusiasm. Richards’s book is often over-informative for all but the specialist reader. Few will want to know that Geoffrey Serle’s Percival Serle was ‘machine-set in Monotype Baskerville by FitzHarding–Bailey with 2 point leading’. Yet the author’s admiration for Brindabella and its creator lights up the book and kindles interest in a quixotic project.

The author’s admiration for Brindabella and its creator lights up the book

Bolton began his career at Angus & Robertson in Sydney in 1950, when the redoubtable Beatrice Davis ruled, and the editorial team was talented, dedicated, and alert to new writing from Australian authors. It was there that Bolton met the gifted poet Rosemary Dobson. Their marriage in 1951 began a remarkable and happily united partnership in life and art. They were both creators for whom the words on the page were as essential as the air they breathed. Their time at Angus & Robertson was a crucial period in Australian literature. In that small, struggling, and underrated world, the ties between author and publisher were close, though not always easy. Davis expected her editors to be ‘patient and self-effacing’. If any rewriting was needed, it had to be in the author’s own voice. With that background, Bolton was well equipped to deal equably with the people he brought together for his Brindabella books. All aspects of design and production, the paper, typeface and binding as well as the nature, size, colour and placing of illustrations, had to be brought into the right relation with one another.

Once or twice, Bolton miscalculated. Eager to enlist the Adelaide writer and wood engraver Barbara Hanrahan in his Brindabella list, he invited her to work on a collection of poems by Canberra poet and academic Dorothy Green. Writing to Hanrahan, he warned of the risk that ‘a powerful artist might run away with the book’. With tactless candour, he said that the illustrations should be subordinate to the text. Back from Hanrahan came a firm disagreement. She wasn’t an illustrator, Hanrahan said, and she could not accept the principle that her engravings should be subordinate to Green’s poems. Text and illustrations should be equally strong. Moreover, she could only work with ‘writing that [she] related to intensely and felt deeply about’. Bolton took the rebuff calmly. What Dorothy Green thought is not recorded. Bolton found another artist for Green’s book, and after some time had passed he went back to Hanrahan with an open offer, asking her to choose any Australian author for whose work she felt an affinity. Hanrahan didn’t hesitate. ‘I would love to do Shaw Neilson,’ she wrote. The result was one of Brindabella’s most beautiful books. The engraving for Neilson’s ‘The Orange Tree’ won special praise.

All in all, the Brindabella Press was a happy experience that ended with Alec Bolton’s sudden death in 1996. It never made money for its creator, but many of its books survive as collectors’ items that show what a book can be when words and images unite in perfect harmony. g