The Instrumentalist
by Harriet Constable. HarperCollins 2024
3.5 stars - Aug 2024
I bought this after reading a short piece by the author in The Guardian – it is a fictionalization/dramatization of the life of Anna Maria della Pietà, famed 18th century violinist and perhaps the most famous of the musical foundlings from Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage that became one of the foremost musical institutions in Europe. Anna Maria was famously Vivaldi’s student, Vivaldi having taught at the Ospedale for many years, and this book is largely concerned with the (fictional) Anna Maria’s relationship with (fictional) Vivaldi. Constable tells the story of a talented and fiercely ambitious young girl, a child prodigy, who breaks and stretches the rules (and relationships) to satisfy her ambition; in the end, though, Vivaldi takes most of the credit, especially for her compositions – there is an implication that Anna Maria wrote a substantial part of the Four Seasons, for instance. It’s a ripping yarn; once I got over the fact that this wasn’t going to be a literary novel, I let myself be carried away by the story’s drama. And where Constable really succeeds is in bringing the plight of these orphan girls: without the musical ‘careers’ provided to the lucky ones by the Pietà they are penniless, statusless nobodies, and the book dwells on the implications and the fallout that comes from that precarity.
It is an amazing story, and one could take this as a historical novel – I did, at first, before I began reading some of the sources Constable credits (especially the doctoral dissertation of Vanessa Tonelli), which tell a vastly more complex story about the Ospedale. Tonelli in particular deconstructs Vivaldi’s mythic role in the history of the place, and makes a case for the Ospedale being a kind of stable collectivist microclimate that lasted for two centuries, partly because of Venice’s strict rules on gender separation, which resulted in the institution drawing on its own students to become teachers and indeed run the place for a good deal of its history. None of that appears in the novel; as with many historical dramatizations in books, TV, and film, the number of characters is cut down to a bare minimum, which of course reduces the complexity of the story hugely. In the novel, there are a dozen or so girls, four nuns, one named Governor, and Vivaldi; in fact, there would have been hundreds of girls (and grown women), dozens of nuns and staff, a dozen Governors, countless musical instructors – and a ton more religion! Vivaldi himself just wouldn’t have been so central. That said, the fact remains that a bunch of Vivaldi’s best-loved music – especially his L’estro armonico violin concertos (which famously inspired Bach), and his Gloria choral masterpiece – was composed at, for, and quite possibly with the figlie di coro at the Ospedale della Pietà. But not The Four Seasons – which Constable references in hopes that it would connect with more readers?
The Tree Whisperer
by Harold Rhenisch. Gaspereau 2022
5 stars - Aug 2024
I read this two years ago (see 2022 and rated it 5 stars, and I appreciated it even more this time around. This is such a rich book, about the pruning of fruit trees and poetry; it is an argument against abstract metaphor, against colonialist extraction, against many things. It is an argument for, and celebration of living things, relationships, apples, birds, indigenous (both North American and European) connections to the world, and much more. As in my previous reading, my one complaint in this book is how Rhenisch himself comes across as smug and smarter than everyone else in places, perhaps a necessary result of his attempt to write his own history and his unique experience into this book. In other places Rhenisch talks about the dissolution of his self, about getting past the centering of his own subjectivity; these contradictory senses are a tension that runs through this book that is otherwise very straightforwardly about things that aren’t him: fruit trees, birds, poems, places, practices.
The most rich and resonant parts of this book to me are his meditations on the history of apples in Europe, how these trees were brought from Kazakhstan through Asia and Europe, planted (along with roses) in monastery gardens and (passively) along roadways everywhere: a story of the mutual evolution of people and fruit. In a sense, this parallels Robin Wall Kimmerer’s argument about the necessary reciprocity between people and plants. I will read this again, and again.
Under the Greenwood Tree
by Thomas Hardy. Oxford 2013 [1872]
4 stars - Aug 2024
This slim, early novel of Hardy’s carries an alternate title “The Mellstock Quire: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School,” which is a good way to characterize it: it’s a prose version of one of those ‘slice of domestic life’ paintings by the Dutch masters, full of evocative details and light and shadow effects. This novel isn’t much of a story, but the portrait of a vanishing west-country rural culture and language is quite lovely.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce. Penguin 1976 [1916]
3 stars - July 2024
I didn’t really dig this. While it flows fabulously in some places, and while I appreciate that Joyce’s ‘free indirect’ thing was a big deal at the time, I struggled to figure out why I was supposed to like this book. Stephen Dedalus is an unlikeable and pretentious arse; the three main chunks of the book have no coherence with each other that I could discern; most of the other characters are cardboard, giving the impression that this novel is just Joyce’s (Dedalus’) solipsistic dream, where no one else matters.
Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens. Collectors Library 2003
4 stars - July 2024
This one’s reputation precedes it by a crazy amount; these characters are famous in their own right. In any case, I loved actually reading it – such a page-turner – but it end s unsatisfyingly like so many novels, unable to live up to the tension that is built up in the zillion episodes that Pip has to work his way through. You can understand how amazing this must have been to read it bit by bit each week in the newspaper. But perhaps that logic works against it wrapping itself up as a coherent whole.
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes, trans Edith Grossman. ECCO (Harper) 2003.
4 stars - May–June 2024
This beast of a book is too long by half, but perhaps if it were, I wouldn’t feel quite the same tenderness for Don Quixote and his long-suffering squire, Sancho Panza, as I do having lived with them so long (I felt the same after my months with Proust). The astonishing thing about this book, originally published in 1605 and 1615, is how thoroughly modern it feels. One might be tempted to credit that to its contemporary translator, Edith Grossman, except that she, in her preface, claims otherwise: that this book, in Spanish, already feels thoroughly modern. The book is remarkably arch and ironic, if not ‘post-ironic’ (a term I often use in consideration of things I see in contemporary life); in any case, the novel has many layers, several of them meta and reflexive and breaking the fourth wall (are there only four here?). The editors take pains to note the parallels between Cervantes and Shakespeare, not least that the two writers died on the same day in 1616. I don’t know how much Shakespeare is to be found in contemporary Spanish literature, but there is certainly much here that is familiar to my English ears. Grossman’s careful attendance to idioms and proverbs – often with a footnote explaining etymologies or parallels – is one of the pleasures of this book that trades so heavily and cleverly in idioms and proverbs.
Jan Tschichold: Typographer
by Ruari McLean. Lund Humphries 1975
5 stars - May 2024
I’ve gotten more interested in Tschichold, after reading a bunch of him, and reading Carl Dair’s personal recollections of him in the previous book (below). Tschichold is famous for a lot of things, and it adds up to his being the most influential typographer of the 20th century. As a young man in the 1920s, he was part of the high modernist movement (most famously embodied in the Bauhaus) and developed “The New Typography,” an approach to using asymmetrical layouts, sanserif faces, and an assortment of weights to do new design: so radical at the time, and so hard to look at with fresh eyes today, because it was so successful. He was sidelined and jailed by the Nazis, and escaped to Switzerland for most of the rest of his life, where he transcended his own youthful manifesto writing, and became an incredibly sophisticated writer on design and type. He famously re-imagined the look of Penguin Books in the late 40s. This book, by British designer Ruari McLean (who worked with Tschichold at Penguin), is a heavily illustrated biography of the man, plus English translations of half a dozen of Tschichold’s essays, including the astounding “Belief and Reality,” in which he defends his legacy against the criticisms that he had abandoned his modernist ideals. So much of what Robert Bringhurst is known for as a typographer, I have learned, comes straight from Tschichold.
Carl Dair and the Cartier Typeface: Selected Correspondence
by Kristine Tortora (ed). Gaspereau Press 2017
4 stars - Apr 2024
This is almost an amazing book. The first half is the collected correspondence of Canadian typographer Carl Dair in the late 1950s when he went to the Netherlands to study old-school punchcutting with the last practicing masters at the Enchedé typefoundry in Haarlem. This includes his noted “Epistles to the Torontonians,” which are a bit more deliberately literary, but also a lot of other letters from his time there. The detailed commentary – on the place, the time, the people, and the techniques – is amazing. The second half is collected correspondence around 1966–67 when Dair was readying Cartier to be launched as “the Canadian typeface” at the Centennial celebration. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite ready for primetime, and doubly unfortunately, he died that same year. Rod McDonald finished the work in the 1990s and Cartier Book was released in the early 2000s.
…two-and-a-half more books on typography
A View of Early Typography Up to About 1600, by Harry Carter (1969)
Space as Language: The Properties of Typographic Space, by Will Hill (2023)
On the origin of patterning in movable Latin type, by F. E. Blokland (2016)
Apr 2024
Continuing my deep reading on the topic… Harry Carter was one of the most thorough historians of typography of the 20th century, with numerous books to his name. A View of Early Typography is an exhaustive survey of the range and evolution of type produced in Europe in the incunabula period; due to Carter’s throughness it remains a standard reference on the topic. Will Hill’s Space as Language is brand new, but also a survey of the topic, beginning with the space inside letters and moving out to the shape of pages, and reviewing the literature (most of the other books noted here!) in the process. Hill’s book is a tiny little “Cambridge Elements” volume, also released open access, and also an excellent reference. Blokland’s Origin of Patterning is not a book but his doctoral thesis (from Leiden Uni), after a thirty-year career designing and teaching type at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. While this is formally about the early development of unit spacing standards, Blokland has a bit of an axe to grind, as he is firmly in the school of Dutch typographer/calligrapher Gerritt Noordzij – that type forms are derived from calligraphic forms – and I thought rather dismissive of Smeijers in the process.
Carol Twombly: Her brief but brilliant career in type design
by Nancy Stock-Allen. Oak Knoll 2016
4.5 stars - Mar 2024
An almost perfect little biography of pioneering digital type designer Carol Twombly, who was responsibly for a bunch of “Adobe Originals” fonts in the 90s. The story also traces much of early digital type tech and culture. I blogged a more extensive review of this at imaginarytext.ca.
Counterpunch
by Fred Smeijers. Hyphen Press 2011 (2nd edition)
5 stars - March 2024
In stark contrast to the entry below… Dutch typographer Fred Smeijers set out to learn about the original methods of type design and taught himself to cut punches out of steel in the process – which gave him the perspective to then present a reading of history that focuses on the material and the demands it makes on the craftsperson. I read the first edition of this a decade ago, and thought it was the best book on type ever. I am inclined to agree today, reading the second edition (for which Smeijers designed an entire new typeface!). His basic argument: that the 16th-century type designers – punchcutters – weren’t ‘designers’ in the sense we think of today, but rather they were closer to sculptors, thinking about metal in three dimensions rather than two, and working by hand at tiny scale. His meditations on space within and between letterforms, and how the embodied practices of the punchcutter mediate that thinking, give the whole business a refreshing quality, and much food for thought.
…a whole lot of books on typography:
– The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst
– The Form of the Book, by Jan Tschichold
– Letter Forms, by Stanley Morison
– Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type, by Geoffrey Dowding
Feb–Mar 2024
These were all published by Hartley & Marks in Vancouver in the 1990s. All except Bringhurst are new editions of classic 20th-century texts: Morison’s from 1963, Dowding from 1966, and Tschichold is a 1975 collection of his essays going back to the 1940s. I bought most of these new back in '90s, and recently decided to re-read them now with better-educated eyes than I had back then. Morison’s is the least interesting, as it pertains largely to a catalog of type specimens assembled in 1942; Morison’s essay is interesting enough without being able to see them, but it says more about Morison as the great spokesman for an early-20th century way of thinking about typography. Dowding’s Finer Points is more of a how-to manual, a micro-analysis of spacing, alignment, style, and emphasis. Bringhurst’s now-classic Elements also has the character of a ‘manual’ of typography, albeit a self-consciously poetic one. The introductory chapters are wonderful; his historical overview (or “interlude”) and his presentation of the details of terminology and character sets are unsurpassed. But the fifty-odd pages devoted to specific typefaces quickly dates this book to the time when letterpress and hot-metal types were only beginning to spill into the digital realm. Today, I’d say Tschichold’s Form of the Book is the jewel in this little series. It has lots of Tschichold sounding stuffy and dogmatic, but it also contains some of his classic wisdom, including his analysis of the proportions of page and type area: where Bringhurst makes this sound complicated, Tschichold renders an elegant, ideal model. We’re no doubt better off today without big egos like these pontificating about typography (and everything else), but at least Tschichold delivers his with panache.
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club
by Megan Gail Coates. Anansi 2019
4 stars - Jan 2024
This was pretty excellent; also quite dark. Various first-person accounts of a crappy winter day (plus lots of flashbacks) in St John’s Newfoundland. The characters’ lives are all entangled in various ways, some good, but mostly bad, and there is some really nasty trauma linking a few (most?) of them. The different characters speak in greater or lesser amounts of local argot, which allows Coates to really swing the language in places – this I think is the real strength of the book. The build is really strong, and it’s a page-turner as a result. The ending is partially satisfying but, as with so many novels, can’t compete with the build-up.
The Twyford Code
by Janice Hallett. Simon & Schuster 2022
4 stars - Jan 2024
I read this right after Christmas, and it was a great holiday escapist novel. The narrator is out of prison for some serious gang-related stuff, and the conceit is that he’s trying to work out what’s happened to him, which leads to a crazy complicated goose chase around the UK looking for clues, looking up old contacts, and trying to break the “Twyford code” which is embedded in wartime children’s books. The reality turns out to be even wackier than that, but you don’t get clued in to that until near the end. The book contains a number of puzzles (acrostics and whatnot) that I did not bother to try working out – made all the weirder by the supposed machine transcription of the narrator’s dictation. Pretty good ending, although the author drags it out with multiple epilogues for reasons that I didn’t fathom (unless they’re part of the puzzles).