The man who revolutionised printing goes back to his old hand-press

Press, 16 August 1978, Page 21

The man who revolutionised printing goes back to his old hand-press

By

GARRY ARTHUR

Leo Bensemann, a man who has done as much as anyone to lift the quality of book design in New Zealand, has retired ta his garage to continue his life’s work — designing and printing small typos graphical masterpieces. For more than 40 years he has been a director of Caxton Press, the Christchurch printing and publishing house which introduced the best innovations of the English private presses to New Zealand. Denis Glover started caxton Press in 1936 with a kindred spirit, John Drew, principally to publish Glover’s poetry. He had been printing in a room under the university clocktower, but his lampooning of university professors so incensed the establishment that his journal “Oriflamme” was suppressed by the college council. Caxtorf Press began in a stable in Peterborough Street, and Leo Bensemann met Glover and Drew in 1937 when he was dealing with them over the publication of his collection of black=andwhite drawings, entitled “Fantastica.” The artist showed such an interest in the printing process, and such an aptitude for it, that they invited him to join them. In spite of his own successes, Leo Bensemann feels that Denis Glover’s ability as a typographer has probably never been matched. Glover corresponded with Eric Gill, the famous English typographer and type designer, which gave him more than a head-start on other printers in New Zealand, so far from that part of the world where printing innovations were taking place. “Oddly enough,’’ says Leo Bensemann, “we began as printers and pub-

Ushers in much the same way as the very earliest of book producers. “In those days the central figure in book production was the printer, who arranged the manuscripts, selected works, selected the type and the paper, decided on the binding and the number of copies, faced the book himself, and saw how it went. “About the time of Penguin Books the publisher came to the tore. Before that, all the early printers were publishers in their own right. “When the outside publishers took over, the printer was just a unit in the deal. We were traditionally printer-publishers, not publishers who em* ployed themselves as printers, and that was unique. It continues to this day.” When Caxton Press began to produce its slim volumes of New Zealand poetry and other writing —some of them hand-set —its young founders followed very closely on the pattern laid down by the great English private presses. Leo Bensemann remembers that the cumulative effect of advances in English printing reached New Zealand very late. “Printers here were very much part of the

Victorian tradition, the Victorian lack of taste,” he says. “Improvement spread Out here only gradually. It was easy enough, of course, for us to start from scratch, whereas it would have been difficult for the many ordinary printers to reorganise their printshop, chuck out their old type, and start again — and they had no interest in doing it." Leo Bensemann learnt his trade, his craft, and his art by observation and practice — chiefly by sheer hard work. John Drew recalls that they used to work 80 and 90 hours a week in the early days. It was the middle of the slump, and they made very little money. Before he joined Caxton Press, Bensemann took some evening classes in life drawing at the School of Art, as well as a bit of painting. “But I couldn’t stand it,” he says. He found work with Bullivants, the printers, drawing pots and pans for advertisements. The Bensemanns are of German stock. Their forbears founded the old German settlement at Upper Moutere, and Leo was born at Takaka. Max Hailstone, senior lecturer in graphic design at the Canterbury University School of Fine Arts,

thinks Leo Bensemann may have inherited an ema pathy with the printed word from Germany, where moveable type was first, used some 500 years ago. He certainly turns to the German father of printing, Johann Gutenberg, for his favourite definition of the craft — “adventure and art.”

“In all examples of, his typographic design one can identify first a sensitive and responsible attitude towards the traditions and cultural heritage of printing and the printed word,” Max Hailstone says. “And second, a desire to provide a product of quality with the right materials and production techniques.

“Caxton Press showed other New Zealand printers that printing and typography were more than just a means of making money. Leo Bensemann also demonstrated that there was net excuse for bad craftsmanship and bad design, and that if printers were not prepared to exercise great care and quality control at all stages of production, then they should question their right to be printers.” Commercial printing was the firm’s bread-and-butter, but Caxton’s name

soon became well-known in literary circles for its artistic typography, demonstrated in little gems of books that were often hand-set and hand-printed on hand-made paper. “We became established as something the equivalent of the English presses,” Leo Bensemann says. “We never really were, because we never had the resources of the English private presses — and this often caused us a certain amount of embarrassment because we were expected to provide facilities that we couldn't really have.”

These artistic works soon brought Caxton an enviable reputation — but not much money. “It wasn’t easy for us to get lucrative outlets for our publications,” he says. “It was very hard, and they rarely sold in any great numbers.

“We vrtainly had our successes, but even if a book was well reviewed — and many significant works were highly praised both typographically and for their content — sometimes we would sell as few as 25 copies.” But they were not discouraged. “It was a curious anomaly at our place,” says Leo Bensemann. “On the one hand we were printers, and on

the other hand, at the drop of a hat, we would do a hand-made book. “We did some really lovely things. The typebook that Glover and I put out is still one of the unique things in printing. It reveals more than anything else the lengths to which we went to get new types into New Zealand. “We brought in many fine types that had never been heard of before.” An example of these little books, made largely for the love of printing, is Jonathan Swift’s “A Letter to a very young Lady on her Marriage.” It was printed in an edition of only 125 copies on handmade paper, the text was hand-set, and it was illustrated with Leo Bensemann’s own drawings and lettering, which he coloured by hand.

“It sold for about ten bob,” he recalls. “We couldn’t possibly make it financially viable. We liked doing it, that’s all. If an idea occured to us, it was done.” Leo Bensemann did a lot of drawing and handcolouring for Caxton’s productions, and the firm’s individualistic works soon became collectors’ items. Some bibliophiles built up complete collections by buying the publications one by one hot off the press. Leo Bensemann would

like to think that h s career as a creative typographer has had an influence on the art in New Zealand, but he is not sure. “Where it might have had some effect,” he surmises, “is that people buying this sort of thing would bring external pressure on other printers to do the same.” Caxton Press's edition of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was said at the time to be the turning point in New Zealand book production. It embodied Caxton Press’s best qualities — meticulous care in the choice of type, and in the method of printing. “We had very poor machinery at that time,” Leo Bensemann admits, “but we used it well. It’s just as easy to print badly, you know, as it is to print well.”

Leo Bensemann is not optimistic about the future of typography in New Zealand. “Nowadays.” he says, “a vile race of graphic designers has sprung up who are bound to produce work for offset machines — work that has to be designed for the camera. The day of the purely working typographer is pretty weil over.

This “vile race” of newcomers works with bits of printed paper, scissors, gum, and ink, whereas the traditional typographer

works with solid metal type. The graphic designers. says Leo Bensemann. turn out plans for a book “that would do justice to the construction of a power station.” “When your hands arc actually working with type.” he says, “you get to know the inadequacies of it and just how well it can be used and how badly it can be used. It’s a very much more intimate thing than fiddling with a lit of paper pasted on a bit of board to be photographed: and it’s a iot more demanding. “Typography is a very suttle game. In fact the whole printing craft is one of the most complicated in the world. There is no craft. 1 should imagine, which has more pitfalls.” His pre-eminence as a typographer was recognised in 1969 when he was awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council fellowship to study typography and the graphic arts overseas. He took a collection of New Zealand books to Detroit for exhibition, and went on to Frankfurt to attend the book fair there. Although despondent about the future of typography, he is happy to see the growing interest in private printing presses “Nowadays anyone who can afford one gets his hands on a hand platen press and sets it up in his shed.” Leo Bensemann is one of them. With printer’s ink in his blood, it is inevitable that he should retire from printing to take up printing. In his garage there is a small platen press on which he continues to create the works of typographical art for which he is renowned. But only as a hobby. His Huntsbury Press produces small editions of lovingly composed and printed works that he gives away to his friends.