Bookman's wake

now scrambled to get on Grayson’s subscription list, but few dropped off and Grayson refused to increase the size of his printings. The Christmas Carol was limited to five hundred, each signed in pencil by Benton and in that pale ink that would later become his trademark by Grayson. There were no lettered copies and the plates were destroyed after the run.

I skimmed through the history and learned that Darryl and Richard Grayson were brothers who had come to Seattle from Atlanta in 1936. Their first trip had been on vacation with their father. The old man had their lives well planned, but even then Darryl Grayson knew that someday he would live there. He had fallen in love with it—the mountains, the sea, the lush rain forests—for him the Northwest had everything. After the war they came again. They were the last of their family, two boys then in their twenties, full of hell and ready for life. From the beginning Darryl Grayson had dabbled in art: he was a prodigy who could paint, by the age of eight, realistic, anatomically correct portraits of his friends. It was in Atlanta, in high school, that he began dabbling in print as well. He drew sketches and set type for the school newspaper, and for an off-campus magazine that later failed. He came to believe that what he did was ultimately the most important part of the process. A simple alphabet, in her infinite variety, could be the loveliest thing, and the deadliest. Set a newspaper in a classic typeface and no one would read it: use a common newspaper type for a fine book and even its author would not take it seriously. The printer, he discovered, had the final say on how a piece of writing would be perceived. Those cold letters, forged in heat, sway the reading public in ways that even the most astute among them will never understand. Grayson understood, and he knew something else: that a printer need not be bound to the types offered by a foundry. A letter Q could be drawn a million ways, and he could create his own. The possibilities in those twenty-six letters were unlimited, as long as there were men of talent and vision coming along to draw them.

Personally, the Grayson brothers were the stuff of a Tennessee Williams play. They had left a multitude of broken hearts (and some said not a few bastard offspring) scattered across the Southern landscape. Both were eager and energetic womanizers: even today Atlanta remembers them as in a misty dream, their exploits prized as local myth. Darryl was rugged and sometimes fierce: Richard was fair and good-looking, giving the opposite sex (to its everlasting regret) a sense of fragile vulnerability. In the North the personal carnage would continue: each would marry twice, but the marriages were little more than the love affairs—short, sweet, sad, stormy. The early days in Seattle were something of a career shakedown. Darryl got a job in a local printshop and considered the possibilities; Richard was hired by a suburban newspaper to write sports and cover social events— the latter an ideal assignment for a young man bent on proving that ladies of blue blood had the same hot passions as the wide-eyed cotton-pickers he had left in Atlanta. Having proved it, he lost the job. Huggins covered this thinly: an academic will always find new ways to make the sex act seem dull, but I could read between the lines, enough to know that Richard Grayson had been a rake and a damned interesting fellow.

A year of this was enough. They moved out of town and settled in North Bend, a hamlet in the mountains twenty- five miles east of Seattle. With family money they bought twenty acres of land, a lovely site a few miles from town with woods and a brook and a long sloping meadow that butted a spectacular mountain. Thus was the Grayson Press founded in the wilderness: they built a house and a printshop, and Darryl Grayson opened for business on June 6, 1947.

From the beginning the Grayson Press was Darryl Grayson’s baby. Richard was there because he was Darryl’s brother and he had to do something. But it was clear that Huggins considered Darryl the major figure: his frequent references to “Grayson,” without the qualifying first name, invariably meant Darryl, while Richard was always cited by both names. Richard’s talent lay in writing. His first book was published by Grayson in late 1947. It was called Gone to Glory , an epic poem of the Civil War in Georgia. Energetic, lovely, and intensely Southern, it told in nine hundred fewer pages and without the romantic balderdash the same tragedy that Margaret Mitchell had spun out a dozen years earlier. Richard’s work was said to have some of the qualities of a young Stephen Crane. Grayson had bound it in a frail teakwoodlike leather and published it in a severely limited edition, sixty-five copies. It had taken the book four years to sell out its run at $25. Today it is Grayson’s toughest piece: it is seldom seen and the price is high (I thumbed through the auction records until I found one—it had sold, in 1983, for $1,500, and another copy that same year, hand-numbered as the first book out of the Grayson Press, had gone for $3,500). Huggins described it as a pretty book, crude by Grayson’s later standards, but intriguing. Grayson was clearly a designer with a future, and Richard might go places in his own right. Richard’s problems were obvious—he boozed and chased skirts and had sporadic, lazy work habits. He produced two more poems, published by Grayson in a single volume in 1949, then lapsed into a long silence. During the years 1950-54, he did what amounted to the donkey work at the Grayson Press: he shipped and helped with binding, he ran errands, took what his brother paid him, and rilled his spare time in the hunt for new women. He freelanced an occasional article or short story, writing for the male pulp market under the pseudonyms Louis Ricketts, Paul Jacks, Phil Ricks, and half a dozen others. In 1954 he settled down long enough to write a novel, Salt of the Earth , which he decided to market in New York. E. P. Dutton brought it out in 1956. It failed to sell out its modest run but was praised to the rafters by such august journals as Time magazine and The New Yorker . Amazing they could find it in the sea of books when the publisher had done what they usually did then with first novels—nothing at all. The New York Times did a belated piece, two columns on page fifteen of the book review, just about the time the remainders were turning up on sale tables for forty-nine cents. But that was a good year, 1956: Grayson’s Christmas Carol rolled off the press and Richard had found something to do. He wrote a second novel, On a Day Like This , published by Dutton in 1957 to rave reviews and continued apathy from the public. One critic was beside himself. A major literary career was under way and America was out to lunch. For shame, America! Both novels together had sold fewer than four thousand copies.

His next novel, though, was something else. Richard had taken a page from Harold Robbins and had produced a thing called Warriors of Love . He had abandoned Dutton and signed with Doubleday, the sprawling giant of the publishing world. The book was a lurid mix of sex and violence, a roaring success in the marketplace with eighty thousand copies sold in the first three weeks. The critics who had loved him were dismayed: the man at the Times drew the inevitable comparison with Robbins, recalling how in his first two books Robbins had seemed like a writer of some worth and how later he had callously sold out his talent for money. The only critic in Richard’s eyes was his brother, though he’d never admit it or ask for Grayson’s judgment. It was clear, from a few surviving pieces of correspondence, that Grayson had had nothing to say beyond a general observation that whoring—a noble and worthy calling in itself—ought to be confined to the bed and never practiced at the typewriter.

Richard never wrote another book. His big book continued making money throughout his life. It was filmed in 1960, and a new paperback release again sold in vast numbers, making an encore visit up the bestseller charts. Huggins viewed Richard as a tragic literary figure, lonely and sensitive and often mean, ever seeking and never finding some distant personal El Dorado. He continued to live in North Bend: had a house built on the property for his wife, who soon left him for another man. But there were long periods when he disappeared, absorbed into the decadent life of Seattle and Los Angeles and New York. In North Bend he filled his nights with classical music, so loud it rocked the timbers. Often he would drift down to the printshop, where he sat up all night composing poems and bits of odd prose for nothing more than his own amusement. Sometimes he would set these pieces in type, striking off one or two or half a dozen copies before dismantling the layout and staggering to bed at dawn. Old acquaintances might receive these in the mail, lyrical reminders of a time long past. One poem, containing four stanzas and lovingly printed on separate folio sheets in Grayson’s newest typeface, was fished out of the garbage by a neighbor. It