“The most difficult kind of man there is, from a woman’s viewpoint.”
“Absolutely. Richard had the reputation of being the ladies’ man, because he conquered so many and they fell so fast. But it was Grayson who broke their hearts. His printshop fascinated them—they’d go in there and it was like stepping into a world they’d never dreamed of. Then they’d see what he was doing , and what he had done , with all those Grayson Press books lined up on a shelf above his matrix, and even a whore would know that something great had touched her life.”
“Did he ever show them work in progress?”
“All the time. Grayson was completely secure in himself. I don’t think the notion that anybody might steal his work ever crossed his mind. How could you steal it?—he created it all, from the alphabets to the designs. He took special delight in seeing the uninitiated light up at their first encounter with his art. In the last five years of his life, Darryl Grayson enjoyed his celebrity, as restricted as it was. He loved his uniqueness. He didn’t brag, but he’d spend hours talking to you, explaining the process, if you were interested.”
“Would you mind telling me a little about his process?”
“He was like great artists in every field, from literature to grand opera. Ninety percent of his time on a given project was spent in development, in planning, in trial and error. He created and threw away a lot of books. Sometimes he made a dozen copies, using various papers and inks, before he decided what was what. On the Christmas Carol , for example, he spent a year comparing the color reproductions on various papers. It wasn’t every day you got Thomas Hart Benton to illustrate one of your books, and it was damn well going to be perfect. And it was! What he finally chose was a fifty-year-old stock that he bought from a bank, which had taken over a publishing house and was disposing of the assets. The paper had been in a warehouse, sealed in boxes since 1905. It was very good stuff, intended for the fine-press books of that day but never used. It took the colors perfectly, the registers are just gorgeous.”
“What did he do with the dummy books?”
“Destroyed them. They were just for experimental purposes, and the last thing he wanted was for some flawed copy to turn up later, in the event of his unexpected death. Grayson was extremely aware of his place in publishing history. Rightly so, I might add. A hundred years from now his books will be as prized as anything you can name.”
“And he knew that.”
“Oh, yes. Oooooh, yes, my friend, no doubt of that at all. Grayson gave the impression of being a humble man, and in some ways he was. But don’t let anyone tell you that he ever sold his art short, or that he wasn’t acutely aware of his own importance.”
A thought crossed my mind and I shivered slightly. Huggins asked if I was cold and I said no, I was just thinking of Grayson’s dummy books. “Imagine turning one of those up. What do you suppose it would bring if a thing like that just turned up suddenly at auction?”
He rolled his eyes.
“What if a whole set survived?”
He was too much a gentleman to say it, but the look he gave me said it well. You’ve been out in the rain too long, mister, it’s starting to make your brain soggy .
“So what about The Raven ?” I said.
He gave a laugh and rolled his eyes, a vision of Looney Tunes.
“You did know he was working on it—that much is in your book.”
“Obviously he died before the project was finished.”
“Do you know how long he’d been working on it when he died?”
“In a sense you could say he’d been working on it since 1949. That’s where it started, you know, that obsession with Poe. It began in Grayson’s nagging dissatisfaction with his first Raven . Personally, I love the book. I’ll show it to you when we’re through here, you can see for yourself. It’s simple and lean, but what’s wrong with that? It was done on a shoestring budget, that’s all. It wasn’t the lack of money that kept The Raven from being a great Grayson—Grayson would never let money stand in his way. If the money wasn’t there to commission an artist like Benton, he’d get someone else to do the art. That someone might be a total unknown, but he’d be good, you could bet on it, and the book would still be a Grayson. The trouble with The Raven was with Grayson himself. He was just too young, he didn’t know enough yet. His alphabet was wrong: he was trying for an effect he couldn’t yet achieve—letters that combined the modern and the Gothic in a way that had never been done, that would draw out Poe in the context of his time and still keep him relevant to a modern reader. It was too ambitious for a boy, even a genius, not yet out of his twenties. His vowels in particular were too modern for the rest of it—the A’s and the O’s , but even the bowls of the D’s and B’s too sleek-looking to give him the effect that the other letters were working for.”
“Damn, it sounds complicated.”
“You can’t begin to imagine. At Grayson’s level it can’t even be adequately explained to a layman. But look, let’s try. You have twenty-six letters. Your goal is to have them mesh perfectly, each with the others in every possible sequence, and in absolute harmony. So you tinker around with your E . At last it seems perfect, it looks great, until you discover— after the goddamn book has been bound and shipped—that when you put it between an uppercase L and a lowercase n , as in the name Lenore , it looks just like dogshit. You can’t do this mathematically and you can’t do it with computers: you just have to slug it out in the trenches and hope you don’t overlook some silly thing that makes your work look to all the other printers in the world like it was done by a kid in kindergarten. Sure, the average guy won’t know the difference—even a collector or a bookman like yourself wouldn’t know. Any of you would look at the Grayson dummies and think they were perfect. But a printer like Frederic Goudy could tell right away, because he was also a master designer. Goudy was dead by then, but Bruce Rogers was asked about Grayson and he said what Goudy probably would’ve said—‘This is very good, but it was done by a young man who will get nothing but better.’ The remark got into print and Grayson read it. Rogers meant it as a compliment, but it stung him, and the book always haunted him. He wouldn’t discuss it, and he went through a time when he considered denying that he’d ever done it. Good sense prevailed and he soon got off that silly kick.
