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Vancouver 1949-62 Montreal New York & New Haven Vancouver Redux News |
| The New York publishing world beckoned, and in 1974 Robert rented a coach house in Gramercy Park and spent the next 23 years packaging and producing over a million books for the major publishers there. It was during this time that he met the person who may have been his most important collaborator, Terry Berger (shown with Bob at right), an author, artist and partner in many of Robert's projects.
Once settled, Robert's natural instincts for the printing life led him to acquire the parts of what would become an extensive printing shop, including Vandercook presses (one found abandoned on a New York street!), two Linotype casters with dozens of fonts, paper cutters, and a new imprint - At the Sign of the Gryphon. His publishing energies were, however, focused on his commercial book packaging, and so the print shop was a place more for relaxation and play. The only letterpress material produced under the Gryphon imprint were a series of five typographic broadsides. Robert and Terry did produce a limited edition comic book, Pixie Meat, for a Massachusetts publisher in 1990 (sadly, a planned R. Crumb project for the same publisher fizzled). And Robert made a start at printing a George Woodcock drama, The Island of Demons, which he'd long wanted to publish, but stalled with only a prospectus produced. (In 1998 the book was published by one of his former Vancouver School of Art students, Hugh Michaelson, in Toronto.)
Most of Robert's private projects during this period reflected his interests - typography, design and golf. A set of vintage golf posters that he reproduced by color photocopying, and sold as sets to clubs, marks one of his earliest experiments with digital printing. A collection of famous title pages since 1478 (Eric Ratdolt), reduced to playing-card size and issued for a New York paper ephemera show in 1984, may be his earliest all-xerographic project. (He made up 20 sets; in 2005 he reproduced and expanded the collection, in an edition of 50 sets, for the second Alcuin Society Wayzgoose in Vancouver, B.C.)
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HEAVENLY MONKEY |
 BOOK LINKS: Broadsides Pixie Meat Fairy Tales Once-Upon-a-Tyne The Island of Demons  |