|
Vancouver 1949-62 Montreal New York & New Haven Vancouver Redux News & Notes |
|
Born in Alberta in 1927, Robert Reid moved to Vancouver at the age of nine. It was shortly thereafter he received his first printing set - a toy made from tin, with rubber type - and a lifelong obsession was sparked. He played at printing newspapers, and worked at printing cards, through his teenage years. During his first year at the Univertsity of British Columbia (commerce, as befits any solid young man of Scottish stock), the sight of a rubricated volume on display in the library sparked his desire to print a book. Two years later, in 1949, he issued his first limited edition, a reprint of Alfred Waddington's The Fraser Mines Vindicated, the second book printed in B.C. (by a few weeks).
1950s The success of Fraser Mines convinced Robert to pursue his passion for printing, and he established his own shop in downtown Vancouver. Through the 1950s he did a wide range of commercial printing (sometimes using the imprint Graphos Press), including the B.C. Library Quarterly magazine, and came into contact with many of the artists emerging from the West Coast at the time, including Bill Reid. He also was typographic advisor to the editorial committee at the University of British Columbia, and designed many of the university's publications during the period. 1960s Robert published three more limited editions - The Journal of Norman Lee (1959), Kuthan's Menagerie of Interesting Zoo Animals (1960), and poet John Newlove's first collection, Grave Sirs: (1962) - before departing for Montreal and a job as in-house designer for McGill University Press. It was there that he led production of what remains his magnum opus, The Lande Bibliography of Canadiana. The book remains one of the most ambitious and beautifully crafted limited editions in Canada's publishing history. 1970-90s In the early 1970s Robert decamped for the center of the publishing universe, New York, where he spent the next 25 years packaging over a million books for major publishers. He also assembled his own printing shop at his home in New Haven, but had too many distractions to ever tackle a major publishing project (his capacity for just having fun in a print shop knows no bounds). He and his partner Terry Berger did print on commission a limited edition comic book titled Pixie Meat, featuring the work of Gary Panter, Charles Burns, and Tom De Haven - all major artists in the field of alternative comics (i.e. comix). He also printed five broadsides, includings poems by Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, but none of these travelled farther than his friends and acquaintances - the fun was in the doing. CURRENTLY In 1998 Robert returned to Vancouver. Though retired, his passion for books and everything related to their creation had not diminished. He collaborated on a bibliography of his five Vancouver limited edition books, titled Reid's Leaves (Heavenly Monkey 2001), featuring actual sample pages from three of the books. He's published two more projects with Heavenly Monkey, both limited editions printed letterpress. And he's produced a number of elegant digitally-printed limited editions, including his own six-volume memoirs. Return to friends page. HEAVENLY MONKEY |
    |