Politics As Usual

by Brett Rutherford

The antelope runs.
The lion is on the chase.
The jackal is as smug
as a country club Republican.
He looks at his watch
and sips another martini.
Just a little while longer
while fur and flesh
are torn asunder.
The jackal rides out
with cart and caddy
to find the spot
where the steaming carcass
awaits him. Dinner!

Super Flower Blood Moon

by Brett Rutherford

     May 15, 2022

A slow cloak covers
the Moon’s face,
red in shame.
Black Earth occludes
the light of sun.

For one dark hour
Luna shudders,
the perfect circle
of the Murder Planet
blotting all light,
the creeping advent
of the Conqueror Worm.

If there were gods
they might smite
those proud armies,
those squint-eyed
assassins. But no,

the Murder Planet rolls
on its course. Moon,
Sun and Earth
resume their roles
amnesiac:

the bright Sun disk,
the silver, shining Moon,
the Earth still blessed
with vast blue seas.

This was not news,
not like a Trump hand
groping a Kardashian —
barely a selfie photo-op —
an incident of no import
(who even looked up
on their way home from pizza?) —
a datum of almanac,
a planned distraction
of the eve of elections.

No, not an omen,
not even that.

Lady Cormora at the Tower of Gems

 by Brett Rutherford

A canto of my ongoing fairy-tale epic, "The Were-Raven," based on an ancient Danish ballad.
What has gone before: The Earl has been betwitched by a were-cormorant in human form, Lady Cormora, and her son, the dwarf Shagg, whom she passes off as her nephew. The Earl's daughter, Ermeline, has fled with the Were-Raven, rather than being forced to marry Shagg, whom Lady Cormora passes off as her nephew. Cormora, one of the last of the ancient Elds, appears to the Earl as a beautiful young woman: to everyone else she is a hideous crone. Cormora has turned to human form and wed the Earl because of her inordinate love of gems -- Ermeline's dowry is an enormous horde of gold and gems locked in a tower.

Of the Lady Cormora and the Tower of Gems


"The dowry is mine!” thus cried Cormora
as she rose at one dawn, at her table
scorning the dull amethysts and soft pearls
the Earl was wont to gift her, the least stones
in all the list of holy and magic
gems she craved to have around her. She rose,
and draping her black-feathered cloak around
her shriveled neck, her clawed and withered feet
crammed into velvet slippers, she walked
on rain-washed stepping-stones up to the base
of the well-guarded, high Tower of Gems.


Guards had a hundred times bowed down to her,
but would not let her pass. The barred-up door,
planks of broad oak studded with angry nails,
iron chains and adamantine locks no magic
could trick into falling away: these things,
and the Earl’s strong will in this one instance,
barred her from entering. Even the sight
of Lady Ermeline’s destined dowry — one glance! —
of the piled-high treasures wasting away
in total darkness, was denied to her. So it
ever was and is with a stepmother’s envy.


Oh! to bring light into the windowless tomb
where the many-faceted, rainbow-hued
gemstones languished! To bathe in them, their rays
a rainbow of light sparks renewing her;
to run her fingers along the facets, not touched
before except beneath the jeweler’s gaze;
to read, she could, the crystals’ calligraphy,
the angles that melded volcanic heat
into a cool geometry, the sun
itself captive as it mirrored itself
into an infinity of diamond rooms.

Last night, Cormora had implored the Earl,
“Now Ermeline has fled — I hear she sighs
in the arms of some unworthy lover;
and now that Shagg, my aggrieved young nephew,
as dear to both of us as an heir-son,
has been deprived of both bride and dowry.
Well might we open the Tower’s treasures
and add them to the general coffers.
Many defenses have languished undone,
and I conceive a hundred charities
that might endow our land with new-found fame.”

“It is yourself you think of,” the Earl charged,
his hair and beard a bramble of anger. —
“Dear husband, just as you say I am fair,
I would be counted fairer still, if but
a small portion of those gems adorned me.
The rest can find its way to greater good
through the hands of good and trusted stewards.

“Did many not come from some woman’s hand,
or some tiara’d head, some hoard that mother
held, to bless another’s generation?
Bereft as we might be, counting our days
sonless and daughterless, and without heirs,
doomed to our own gray mausoleums,
why should we not deck ourselves in splendor?”

The Earl mused long, for still the spell on him
made autumn crone into spring’s maidenhood,
not one hag begging for a shiny stone saw he,
but instead the blush of a new-found bride.
And though he knew he could not long refuse
her pleading, since in the bed’s canopy
she reigned with more force than an army,
still with his clenched jaw, and quivering,
he once again denied her wishes. “No,”
he uttered, “Cormora! The dowry stays.
The locks will yield to no one anyway.
Ermeline knows it not, but holds the key.”

Cormora raged. The Earl she left alone
in a half-bed to rue his stubbornness.

Now here she stood. The morning sun lit up
now every mortic’d stone, so tightly set
that not a toad could make an entrance there.
Around she walked, until she spied high up
one tiny niche — or hole — God! A window? —
just under the crenelated platform
that topped the ancient tower. A window!
So small it was, that even as cormorant
she could not pass in, or re-emerge therefrom.
(Though Eld she was, it was beyond her age
to be more than a crone or cormorant.)

And then, with mounting dread, she seemed to see
a tiny beak come out from the opening,
and then two minuscule wings — a sparrow.
“You drab brown flyer, what business yours
in the dark tomb of ownerless treasure?
Dare you to nest and soil my trove of gemstones
with twig and feather and broken eggshells?”

Off went the sparrow, and in its mouth
a rainbow gleam exploded. “A diamond!”
Cormora shrieked. “She has stolen a diamond!”
Soon came another sparrow in, then out
with ruby, red as pomegranate, held
and carried off. Cormora raged. One more
went darting in, and from some heap of gemstones
came out with one huge emerald embrooch’d
in gold. Comora shook her fists in rage,
raking her own dry face until it bled no less
a red than that of a fat carbuncle
another small bird dragged from out the hole
and lifted away in grasping talons.

Then came a topaz out like shining gold,
an azure-hinted sapphire, aquamarine,
a rare citrine with the blush of a peach,
again and again the diamonds hard as steel,
jasper and gold, agate and amethyst.
A hundred flew off with each her one stone;
a hundred more came down from flock on high
as sure as bees to their own hive and out
again with emerald and chalcedony,
sardonyx, cornelian, beryl, and chrysolite,
up to the hovering herd of sparrows
until the sky was rainbowed with color.
Pearls on a twine they carried off, armlets
and necklaces, ribbons of leaf of gold.

Cormora howled. She lay around and rolled
until the dust had covered her. The guards
did nothing — even he fiercest archer
could not have drawn one fleeting bird back down
from the wind-borne host. Some higher hawk hovered
above them, vast in wingspread, shepherding
the sparrow flock and urging them onward
in circled swoop and tilt of pinions, guide
and guardian against all other raptors.

The hundred small thieves became a thousand.
The sky grew dark with their beak and baggage,
and then in one great weave they were all gone.

Shagg came to comfort his groaning mother,
his broken mouth spat newly-minted Latin,
French proverbs, and bits of Cicero. Dust-mop
of flaxen hair, humped back and spindled legs
bent over her and told her, “All is not lost.
All bronze and brass, all gilded things, all swords
and knives, scepters and crowns are still inside.
Coins back to Rome and Egypt, Chaldean
idols all bloated with emeralds; so much
remains, and all of it our own. Weep not.”

But the madness of avarice consumed her.

“All those bright, shiny things — now all are gone,
taken by the most ignoble avians,
those pea-brain sparrows, mice of the heavens.
Ah! the bright, shiny things!” She would not rise,
and in her spite she willed herself to die.

The Keys to His Apartment

by Brett Rutherford

A dream journal entry, April 14, 2022.

Planning a trip to the city
with two young friends in tow,
I suddenly recall owning
the keys to his apartment.
My hands reached in and found,
in the least-used drawer, the ring
and keys, his name and phone
on a well-rubbed tag. “Use it,”
he had told me some years ago.
“I travel so much. You may come
and go as it pleases you. The plants
will enjoy the company. Lights coming on
will confuse the burglars who watch and count
how many days of dark, who comes and goes."

How along ago, I am no longer sure.
Something had soured after the last
embrace, when someone else
and younger had taken my place,
but cards had come, reminding me
from Paris and Bangkok, London
and some island whose name
I keep forgetting, saying always:
“When in New York, please use
my place. The bromeliads
will be glad to see you. Have your way
with the Bosendorfer.”

I phone to be certain: no answer.
No answer thrice, and I am sure
the apartment is empty. Why not?
We find our way by bus, my friends
wide-eyed at the Manhattan view
across from the Boulevard.
His name is on the mailbox, the key,
as always, works without effort,
and we are in. Soon we regard
the crimson-copper sunset flaming up
from every tower’s windows. Atlantis
it seems, and we will ferry over
to conquer museums and theaters,
a rent-free vacation for all of us.

There is a bed for the two of them,
or big enough for all three of us
if it should come to that,
the dust-free grand piano, huge ferns
and lurid red bromeliads
in a state of perpetual arousal,
still wet from watering, suggest
that he was here and gone again
on yet another European jaunt.

We sit, alarmed by TV reports
of yet another subway shooting,
hint of a hurricane, mask-on,
mask-off, mask-on debates,
and my uncertainty grows.
Will he walk in and find us,
a trio of unexpected visitors?

There is a knock. In comes
the building super. She nods,
I nod. She holds a small pile
of junk mail and offers it.
“I saw you come in. I thought
I should give you this. Nothing
but junk and coupons these days,
since all the magazines
and bills have stopped.”

I take them. “Coupons,”
she reminds me. “These you can use
at the corner grocery. There’s nothing here
to eat, you know. It’s been so long
since he left us.”

And from her tone it comes to me —
that he has died — she thinks I know —
as surely everyone must know —

“How long will this” — I wave my hands
around to the furniture, the plants,
the grand piano, the walls of books —
“When will they …”

“Who knows?” she answers. “The rent,
utilities, housekeeper, and cable
are auto-debited. The money comes.
Until the estate is settled,
or the account runs dry, it just
goes on like a little museum.
Maybe he left it all to you.”

I shake my head. “I doubt it.
I would have heard by now, I think.”

“His other friends have nearly all
died as well, you know. I read
the black-edged envelopes, and
saw their names in the news.
Year after year, no cure in sight.
I suppose you came back
to remember.”

“Yes,” I lie.
“To remember. I told my young friends
how wonderful he was.” They blush
and keep their silence. She makes
her exit and we sit mutely,
not opening our suitcases.

We wait until the sunset gives way
to the gleaming night skyline.
There is nothing we can say
that does not seem trivial, or wrong.
“I feel like a ghoul in a cemetery,”
my younger friend says. The other
looks into the darkened bedroom,
turns on its ceiling lights and says,
“I’m not sure I can sleep in here,
knowing it’s his bed and all.”

We make a plan to go for food,
and after that, a Boulevard walk
to take in the mighty island,
the cliff-edge and the Hudson.

Just then, another key is heard,
and again the door opens.
A lean youth, pale and angular,
steps in, regard us with alarm,
and steps back out
into the corridor. I follow,
wave him back in, and take
his arm gently.

“He gave me a key,” I assure him.
“I was his oldest friend in the city.
You are his new” —

“I am the last,” he utters hollowly.
“I was his last … friend. I saw
the lights go on, and I thought;
for a moment I thought …”

“I understand,” I say. “Come in.
Please stay. I want to know.”
Among us, he says little. He knows
who I am now. He has seen my books
on the shelf and even read one of them.
“Your writing frightened me,” he tells me.

The violin case he carried in
was so much part of him
that I barely noticed it.
I walk to the Bosendorfer
and see a score: Korngold’s Concerto
in a piano reduction. “We played
the first movement together,” says Eric,
for he was ever so much an Eric,
red hair and all. — “Play now,”
I command him. — “Oh, no,”
he protests, “not without him
to accompany me.” — “Imagine
he’s there. Just hear the notes
inside your head, and play.
Play Korngold’s concerto.”

He tunes, he shudders
as he gazes at the ebony wood,
the ivory keys, the shadow
in which a player might suddenly
emerge, a skeleton.

He plays. He pauses. He plays.
We all imagine the tutti, the rests
between, where the violin is still
and the piano pretends to be
an entire orchestra. He plays,
and weeps while playing.

From three of us, from each alone
in his chair in the darkness,
we punctuate with sobs, the arc
of his bow rising and falling
like the intake and jab of grief.

Though the kitchen is empty
we ask the violinist to stay
for the night. My friends make eyes
at him, he, them.
They will sort it out.

The bed will no longer frighten them.  

Knowing my place, I go out
to buy the makings for dinner.
The key to my friend’s apartment
weighs me down. Steps home,
with bags of groceries
weigh me down more until I move
like one in a dream who cannot
get one foot in front of another.

There is the door again.
Here in my hand, the key.
So many gone
in Love’s holocaust,
names and statistics,
a patchwork quilt
instead of a graveyard.

I suddenly know
that I have dreamt all this
and will awaken soon.
Did Eric, grieving, play
for us, or for no one?

Ask not for whom
the rent is paid:
for the dead,
or for the ghosts,
traipsing up stairs
from the Greyhound bus,
each holding the keys
to that apartment?

The Cage

 

by Brett Rutherford

Trapped in the lion’s cage,
stalked by the famished cat
that circles him, eyes locked
onto his own terrified orbs,

there is no place to hide,
except the steamer trunk
from which the roaring beast
might perch and leap,

and a large wardrobe
whose doors, ajar,
might close around him
if he hid within —

then what? Outwait
the mounting appetite
of the clawed predator?
It would only get hungrier.

He chances it, leaps in,
pulls shut the double doors,
and, thank god, there is a hook
to keep it from opening.

Lion in cage, man in wardrobe.
Tooth and claw threatened him
 — but what had he?
He fumbles in the dark. What if
this wardrobe had a cache of guns,

or the lion-tamer’s whip,
one snap of which would send
the tamed beast cowering
into a safe corner?
Has he been riddled thus
to solve it? Will those
outside the cage applaud
his feat and release him?

Alas, no whip, no cold,
long cylinder of rifle.
Up and above his back
there is something soft.
A cold snout touches
the nape of his neck,
as the unmistakable reek
of rotten meat announces

the Lion within.

 

Miss Schreckengost and the Mango

by Brett Rutherford

 Apples and oranges
     easy to draw
     no right-way or wrong
     to color the apples
she tells us

     apples are red, oh, yes,
     but they are yellow, too —
And sometimes green, I offer,
And sometimes green, she nods. 

What else? she asks.
                                  Brown,
someone says darkly. Brown
when they are rotten.

 Miss Schreckengost goes on
with blackboard examples:
The orange is round,
the apple more like
    a little heart,
     its dimpled top
     with the stem still on.

 Dutifully we draw
     one apple,
     one orange,
then, crayons out
we fill the outlines
with suitable colors,
(except for Ritchie,
whose angry scrawl
segments his orange,
slices his apple).

 I trace
    and then erase
a wriggling worm,
the kind that make
apples inedible.

 What does an apple
taste like? Miss Schreckengost
queries us? Sweet, all say.
My hand goes up,
Sour, I say. I like
green apples best.

 What does an orange
taste like? the teacher asks.
Sour! — No, sweet!
the children argue.
Red-headed Garnet
says nothing, for she
has never had an orange.

We finally agree
that something can be
sour and sweet together.

 The lesson done,
Miss Schreckengost tells us
to put away the crayons,
sign each our name
below our drawings
with a Number Two pencil.

 As we do this, she slips
into a reverie and says
There is a fruit
you cannot draw.
It is called a mango.
There is no name
for the shape it has,
no single color
in its mottled skin.
There are no words
that can say what taste
belongs to the mango.

 I was in Mexico,
where I met someone.
His name was Alejandro,
and he played guitar
with his delicate
     long fingers.
He fed me my first
     mango
          with a spoon.
There are just no words.

Her eyes looked off
beyond and above
the coal miners’ children
in the hilltop
     school-house.

 Oh! the Mango!

 (Kingview Elementary School, Scottdale PA)

Not the Lady You Thought She Was

 by Brett Rutherford

     adapted from Marina Tsvetaeva

Not the lady you thought she was
as she comes out of the narrow aisle
of the nearly-perfect cathedral,
to where the crowds scream for her
in the shadow of the onion-domes —

Freedom! Look at those diamonds
she took from princes and aristocrats.
All will be well, she tells them.
But the chorus was only practicing:
the Liturgy of Requiem is still to come.

Not the lady you thought she was,
she laughs, taps toes to the merry tune
of the Marseillaise, and sings along.
Then, crossing the barricades, the whore
leans her head upon the soldier’s medaled chest.

 

 

 

Waiting for Someone to Come Along (for Kiev)

by Brett Rutherford

     adapted from “Высока луна Господня”  by Fyodor Sologub

God’s moon shines on high
above the still and silent city.
They have all gone
to the underground shelters,
so it is hard for me.
Nothing to do, my food quite gone,
I am exhausted today.

The old houses in this narrow lane
curve in upon themselves and stare
each into the other’s windows.
We all peer out. Not one
of the others dares to bark.
The heat is off, the lights
have been extinguished.
Alone and bored and freezing,
we take our cues from the moon
that watches and says nothing.

The street, swept clean
of children, bottles, litter,
is empty and dead.
Nothing rattles about
to make it worth our while
to set up a collective howl.

Where have they all gone?
Why did they look at the sky
like frightened rabbits
when hawks are around?
There are no footsteps, nothing
crunches into the newly
fallen snow. I sniff the street
with alarm: nothing at all,
not even a scent
from the edge of a boot-print.

Waking or sleeping, how can we do
our jobs if no one is there? The quick step
of the hurried-home, the sly tread
of the house-thief, the happy stride
of the returning traveler: the signs
for which we live and what we warn of —
just who are we waiting for
when no one is here to tell?

Hours ago an unmarked truck
went by, and then a tank,
and then the sky lit up.
Who could we tell? What was
the point of putting up a ruckus?
Were those who drove by
without regarding us friends,
or enemies? Who knows?

I have found my way out

through an open coal chute.
I am the only one, it seems

who can come and go at will.

Out here in the cold I am alone.
The eaves are little shelter
when the wind grows cold.
This cannot go on. I must do
something! Something!
I shall sit beneath this window
and howl my lungs out.

God’s moon shines on high
above the still and silent city.
Sadness torments me.
Soon I shall be too weak
to continue this alarm
about nothing and for no one
in particular. What is wrong with me?

Please break the silence!
Sisters, sisters, come to your windows.
Part the curtains with curious snouts.
No one is coming! We have been
left behind! Look! The sky explodes
with yellow and red flashes!
Bark, sisters, bark at the moon!

They Killed My Russia (1918)

 

by Brett Rutherford

     adapted from Fyodor Sologub, 1918

They have killed my Russia already,
and placed her in an unmarked grave.
Here I must choke back my weeping,
feign happiness amid the evil crowd.

Sleep in your grave, my Motherland,
until, in some long-awaited spring,
lightning will shoot from sunken loam,
and in a flood, our dreams will live.

How long must these funereal vigils
go on, disguised as celebrations?
How can we not betray our sadness
as the parade of triumph rolls on by?

What Can One Do?

by Brett Rutherford

What can one do against the tide of war?
For starters, one can write a thousand poems.
If soldiers stopped to write, each his epic,
there would be no need for bloody battles
as all the small deaths of The Iliad
are told again and anew in poems;
if sailors lay back in hammocks languidly
and counted out sonnet beats on fingers,
sleek submarines would stall, submerging not
nor even leaving their darkened harbors;
if the Seals and Marines were tasked with Greek,
to translate Anakreon’s erotics,
the boy-crazed sighing of Petronius,
or the athletic odes of high Pindar,
then verses they wrote would work themselves out
in indolent acts of one-another-
worship, the weapons all quite forgotten.

If everyone wrote each a thousand poems
there would be no time for conspiracies,
and the deer would go unkilled, the students
unmurdered in their high-school classrooms, all
manner of crimes would be but sublimate
inside poetic narratives of strife.
Each to her own Utopia, the dreamers
take to pen and keyboard — no one is slain
to prove a finer point of cold theory.

Blank verse? Free-verse? Epic? It matters not.
Saga or ballad or lordly sonnet?
Any will do. Get on with it. Send all
to your dull senators and congressmen;
dare them to answer you only in verse.

My manifesto made, my duty done.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine more to go!

The Problem With Utopias

by Brett Rutherford

It was all fine and good
in the land of milk and honey.
Everyone had the same religion
and worshiped the same elder god,
shaggy and jealous as he was,
short-tempered with plague and flood,
until the young men, tempted, strayed,
into the arms of “strange women.”

Each time a holy man or woman
led hundreds away
to some hidden valley,
life was perfect, as though
all minds were of common accord,
until the children born there
had quite enough of Paradise,
craving flesh-pots and pyramids.
Utopia is not genetic; in fact,
each generation must make its own.

The worker’s paradise
looked fine on paper, way back
in the soot-chimney gloom of ‘48.
No matter that half the population
would have to be murdered at last
to give the other half a dull life

of gray and anonymous equality.

Galt’s Gulch and lumberjack liberty
appealed to many, ego-proud.
It made us feel good to be worthy,
and smart, and fully in tune
with the provisos of absolute logic.
Like Christ who pushed off
the ledge of Heaven,
all of Satan’s bad angels,
Ayn Rand
would hurl the beggars and moochers
into the nullity they so well deserved.
It wasn’t really a philosophy,
and sure as hell it knew no history,
but it was a solipsist Utopia smug
on top of a coming dystopia.

The worst Utopia of all
is the pig-selfish Heaven
the TV evangelists shovel out
as dullard’s dollars flow in
to support their personal fortunes
and offshore bank accounts.

This Heaven is a pig-sty of desire
amid perpetual harp-playing
and off-key singing, a sky
where squalling babies and lost pets
forever seek their former owners,
smug Paradise of only the saved
with choice seats
to look down into Hell.

Meanwhile, the real world
is a Utopia of Things
whose makers rule
like Byzantine Emperors.

Hail to the Six Treasures:
guns and drugs, cars and girls,
tobacco-death, sports mania.
No Utopia without pizza!
No Heaven without women
waiting to be grabbed!
No Paradise without guns,
and something quivering
to be stalked and shot.
Heaven is a big cigar,
hog-mouth open for the next slice
with lots of pepperoni,
and all of them, all men of course,
are all the spitting image
of Tom Brady.

At least the animals are not
the least bit interested
in making a Utopia.
They live in the present,
and that is all there is.

The Orphaned Vase

by Brett Rutherford

Two decades or more I have studied it:
that double-dragon-handled vase
from my New York hauntings.
Bought from a Chinese store
about to shut down forever,
its unsold vases stacked,
dust-covered orphans
that had never found a home.

Today I regard it with new eyes
and undertake to learn its origins,
and what the wriggling floral shapes
and tangled leaves can tell me.

Amid the leaves are Treasures:
a thick square book in a silken cord,
a checker board awaiting two players,
two rice-paper scrolls tied up
blank for calligraphy to come,
and two rhinoceros horns
predicting happiness
for the vase’s owner.

It was intended, no doubt,
to be a young scholar’s first vase,
its carmine glaze the blush
of a young man’s ardor,
its unknown, ardent flowers
all petals open to the sun.

It is all good omens, but no one came
to the old shop on Mott Street
to carry it off; no scholar sipped
his oolong tea and wrote poems
in the cheer of its good karma.

Close scrutiny reveals
some hint of the reasons why:
one of the dragon handles
is missing the monster’s snout.
Some accident — a fall, a ricochet
of a bandit’s bullet, broke off
this beast’s ability
to snort a blowtorch back
at a would-be attacker.

One also sees
the whole vase is a-tilt.
It leans some five degrees
off vertical, so doomed to sit
like someone whose leg
is shorter than the other,
a tipsy vase just ready
to take a tumble.

It is a century old, I guess.
It is lonely for its maker,
for the fine-haired brush
that painted it, for the wheel
on which it was cast lopsided.

It comes from a kiln
that exists no more. One day,
a Japanese bomber took sight
at the Wude Sheng factory
and all was blown
to smithereens.

Thou, sad vase,
thou, snoutless dragon,
thou, limping, tilted vessel,
orphan of war and history.

A Millennium of Printing

 by Brett Rutherford

Those of us old enough to have touched and used metal type have a sense of the astonishing printing progress made in the last half-century. The all-digital generations following us will have grown up with digital cameras, desktop publishing, and instant Internet access to vast libraries of “virtual” books. To them, the history of printing will be quaint and charming. Its only inheritance may be the traditional esthetics that distinguish fine design and printing from semi-literate junk. People will know that printing looked better in the “good old days,” but they won’t know why.

            Our printing descendants, if they visit a museum displaying printing presses and typesetting machinery, might marvel at how printers, at the turn of the 20^th century, still rubbed greasy ink on raised metal type and pressed it against paper, much as Johannes Gutenberg had done in the 1450s.

            The chronology of printing is fascinating, with its long letterpress “stone age,” followed by a burst of 19^th Century inventions such as the rotary press, the Linotype machine, the halftone screen, and photoengraving. The triumph of offset lithography after World War II, however, started a revolution in invention that is now reaching its apogee — with innovations coming so fast that the industry can barely keep up with them.

            The printing industry, even as late as the 1970s, would still have been recognizable to a printer of 100 years earlier. The industry we are becoming in the post-2000 world, though, will be one the old-fashioned printer could not even imagine. We are already at the point where we can get a book or magazine to a printing press without consuming any materials such as film, chemicals, proofs, or plates. In less than two decades, the book or magazine itself will become a  “virtual” product, with readers printing out text passages or color images only if they want to keep or share them. Coffee table art books will transfer images to virtual paintings on our walls. Virtual magazines will have moving, talking advertisements, and celebrity interviews that can be heard as well as read. Libraries will be accessible 24 hours a day, with on-line reading/printing of public domain texts. 

            We really can’t even imagine where it will all lead, but all these things are steps along the way to the inventor’s ideal: imaging machinery that has no moving parts, never wears out, and uses no “consumables” other than energy.

 

How We Got Here

            Gutenberg, Senefelder, Mergenthaler and other inventors who moved us toward our all-digital age might be startled to see where the industry they steered has gone. Most of the inventors of the past sought a short-term goal, and envisioned the profits they would make because their machines could copy words and pictures faster, cheaper and better.

            We can look back on certain inventions and say, with some certainty, that they mattered a great deal in liberating printing from the days of scribes to the days of ink dots and pixels. Here are the creative landmarks that I believe have mattered most to the printing industry in the millennium now ended, a timeline of inventions and “firsts.”

            AD 800. Books are produced in quantity in Korea and Japan from hand-carved woodblocks.

            1041. Books are printed in China from movable ceramic clay type. Although books are printed and widely distributed by Imperial order, Europeans remain unaware of Chinese printing methods for almost half a millennium.

            1221. Books are printed in China from moveable type made from hand-carved wood blocks. As many as 30,000 separate Chinese characters were required!

            1453 to 1456. Gutenberg’s Bible. The first finished, complete European book proving that cast metal type could be used to produce a Bible comparable to the best work of scribes and illuminators. By the year 1500, there would be ten million printed books in Europe. By 1507, the Church began censoring some printed books, banning others. A few printers are ordered strangled or burned at the stake.

            1495. In Venice, Aldus Manutius is the first successful printer-publisher. He uses elegant, readable typefaces, woodcut illustrations, and smaller page sizes to produce affordable copies of Greek and Latin classics.

            1535. First printing press in the New World is set up in Mexico.

            1550. Wood engravings are the predominant method of producing illustrations, but intaglio engravings in copper gain appeal. The tradition of “multi-process” books, with text produced by one method and illustrations printed on separate sheets or signatures by another method, takes shape.

            1639. First printing in North America -- “The Freeman’s Oath” in Massachusetts.

            1725. The first stereotype plate is cast from a metal type form in Scotland. This is the first instance of a permanent “plate” apart from handset type. This meant that the original type could be redistributed and re-used. The method was not widely used, though, until much later in the 18^th century.

            1796. Alois Senefelder develops the art of stone lithography, printing from a flat, grained stone surface. This is the predecessor of offset lithography.

            1800. America’s first “coffee table” art book is published, a book of hand-colored engraved plates of “The City of Philadelphia.”

            1806. Machine-made paper becomes available for the first time, thanks to the invention of the Fourdrinier paper machine—the process still used today for papermaking. Before this time, all paper was hand-made.

            1814. The London Times uses steam power to print newspapers on a cylindrical press.

            1829. First typewriter is patented in Detroit, Michigan. Typewriters capable of working at the same speed as writing longhand would be not developed until the 1870s.

            1835 to 1841. W.H. Fox Talbot develops the techniques for making photographic negatives, and from them, any number of positive copies. Modern photography is born, with a profound impact on printing. The discovery that light-sensitive materials could capture and preserve toned images of real life was a bombshell. Until then, only a trained artist could represent reality, and only using hand tools and complicated techniques to represent tone and shadow.

            1840. First paper made from wood pulp instead of rag fibers. Bookworms started the march to extinction since they couldn’t eat paper made from wood pulp.

            1844. Richard Hoe’s first letterpress using an image carrier (stereotype) cylinder.

            1850. First stone lithographic press with automatic inking and impression cylinders. Lithographs rapidly became the principal means to produce posters and low-cost art reproductions.

            1860. First rotary gravure printing on paper in France. Gravure would one day become a printing giant, used for Sunday supplements, catalogs, and long-run magazines.

            1864. The halftone screen is invented. For the first time, a printing press could reproduce a photograph, simulating all its gradations of tone using dots of various sizes.

            1865. First web press built by William Bullock, with rotary letterpress image carrier and impression cylinders. Web printing is off and running.

            1868. First rotary litho press using zinc plates.

            1870. In-line folding machines fold sheets into signatures as they come off press. Laid-off New York City bindery girls, in desperation, become dance hall performers.

            1872. Photoengraving of letterpress plates is introduced. Engravings of halftones or line drawings can now be printed on the same form with metal type.

            1875. Carl Klitsch develops photochemical engraving for gravure printing.

            1879. Thomas Edison invents the electric lamp, with a profound impact on American culture and industry. The electrification of cities and factories means the end of reliance on steam and human power for printing machinery.

            1886. Ottmar Mergenthaler unveils the Linotype machine, the first successful device to automate typesetting. The Linotype, one of the greatest inventions of all time, cast individual, justified lines of metal type, using matrices that dropped from an overhead compartment. After being used to cast the type in molten lead, the matrices were automatically redistributed. Productivity was 500% greater than setting type by hand. His invention would sweep the world and would be the dominant method of typesetting for more than 60 years.

            1891. Tolbert Lanston introduces the Monotype typesetter.

            1892. First color printing using three-color halftone screens.

            1904. Offset lithography is invented. The act of printing “second hand” from a cylindrical rubber blanket instead of by direct contact with the image carrier had profound implications – so profound that offset, in less than half a century, would become the dominant printing process.

            1930. First four-color offset press is installed. American “photolithographers” would spend decades perfecting the four-color printing process.

            1942. Magnetic tape introduced. Although it took decades for cheap, recordable/ erasable magnetic media to impact the graphic arts, today we rely on it to store all our jobs.

            1951. First color television. A technology that would lead to color computer monitors and the whole world of color perceived as RGB.

            1954. Phototypesetting begins with the introduction of the Harris Fotosetter. During the next 20 years, phototypesetting became faster and cheaper, and the typesetting industry came into its glory days as entrepreneurs bought the new technology. Metal typesetting was all but obsolete by 1970.

            1957. Helvetica typeface introduced. A dark day for printing.

            1960. Invention of the laser. No single invention since the Linotype has had more impact on the graphic arts industry. The laser’s ability to focus a microscopic dot at high energy levels has brought it into use in all kinds of imaging devices – and the end is not in sight.

            1962. First Xerox copier. The copier would come to dominate the black and white printing market within two decades.

            1964. Introduction of word processing systems. The existence of text in stored media instantly presented both challenge and opportunity to typesetters and printers. By 1975, word processors became affordable standalone units with disk storage. The first inklings here of putting the prepress into the hands of the customer – another trend that isn’t over yet.

            1968. First all-digital typesetter. No more film fonts, since fonts are now “software.”

            1972. First color copiers. A harbinger that “color on demand” would one day be the customer’s credo.

            1980. The desktop laser printer. Within 20 years, there would be a desktop printer accessible to almost anyone with a computer.

            1981. Introduction of PostScript by Adobe, Inc. , the first device-independent file format for text and graphics. Today’s wildly popular PDF format is an offshoot of PostScript.

            1984. Apple Computers introduces the Macintosh, the first computer whose operating system included on-screen type and graphics.

            1985. Desktop publishing is introduced to Mac users in Aldus Pagemaker, and to PC users with Xerox Ventura Publisher. For the first time, ordinary computer users are able to lay out complete publications and see them represented on screen exactly as they will print.

            The 1990s. Well, you’ve lived through them. An explosion of new technology, at plummeting prices. Cheap color printers, cheap scanners, 50-cent type fonts, huge PC disk drives, the Internet, digital presses, wide format printing – yegods, where will it all lead us?