Artist's Book Yearbook 2003-2005 - Book Arts - University of the ...

doodle in a spiral-bound notebook, through its
various permutations and its eventual
emergence as a work of art. We see how he
‘cooks the books’ (the title of the Center’s
exhibition), carefully working out the details of
every publication before production begins.
As Ron says, ‘My mind is like a cauldron.
There’s a great stew of things going round and
round. In the end I serve up a dish.’
Researchers can read correspondence between
Ron and his many collaborators. A revealing
example is Ron’s collaborations with the poet
Roy Fisher, during which the two of them rarely
met in person; their frequent written exchanges
demonstrate the richness and complexity of
their partnership.
Fisher has said recently that his collaboration
with Ron on The Half-Year Letters (one of a
number of projects exploring folded and cut
letters that Circle Press has published over the
years) was of a ‘musical nature. Ron already
had a very dogmatic master text, so I thought I
would have a voice and a disposition muttering
along with his letters.’
This is interesting of course, but it is in the
original correspondence that we find the
details of the project. Roy Fisher wrote to Ron
in February of 1983: “This enormous text has
taken a long while and has grown like a sack of
potatoes from small beginnings. What I’ve tried
to do is establish a fairly vague text … which
doesn’t dramatise your letter forms in any
obvious way. My reactions to them are
submerged in my text….’
For The Half-Year Letters Fisher took a random
starting date from his own diaries and extracted
events and observations from a twenty-six week
span. From this list, he constructed the poetic
text: ‘The actual images have their starts in
notes, diary dates, lecture titles & memoranda
and anecdotes picked out of a sequence of 26
weeks a while back (i.e., half a year - which
might give us a title or part of one) - but I’ve
tried to leave them loose enough for you to
inhabit. Plain point, though, is that this is a
maximum text, from which you can use
whatever chunks & slivers are of use, and
discard or downgrade (design-wise) the rest.’
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The archive, together with copies of all the
published books, make the holdings at the Yale
Center for British Art the most comprehensive
collection of Circle Press in the world. Ron says
that their ‘most ardent support has always come
from the U.S., without which we never would
have been able to survive as an independent
self-supporting “workshop”… all this, as it were,
under a British roof in a very fine building on
American soil, couldn’t be more appropriate or
gratifying.’
In a poignant tribute, Ron and Willow are
giving the archive in memory of their son
Daniel, who died of cancer at the age of fifteen
in 1972. It will be known as the Daniel King
Circle Press Archive, to be kept in perpetuity at
the Yale Center for British Art and open to all
for research. Ron describes Daniel as “an
extremely bright, intelligent young man with a
highly developed social conscience, a good
draughtsman, and a keen stamp collector.
I didn’t realise the full extent of his collection
until after his death; I actually based some
prints on his penny blacks, penny reds, and
two-penny blues and dedicated them and the
portfolio Neighbours, We’ll Not Part Tonight to his
memory, but as we have no headstone or
plaque for him, an archive in his name, made
available mainly to young people, seems a
fitting alternative and one of which he would
approve.’
The exhibition Cooking the Books: Ron King and
Circle Press opened in June 2002 at the Yale
Center for British Art. It celebrated both the
gift of the Daniel King Circle Press Archive and
the thirty-fifth year of the Press’s existence.
While there have been other exhibitions of
Circle Press books, this was the first time that
preliminary drawings, original collages,
linoleum blocks, experimental letters, and
correspondence were on display along with the
finished projects - the ‘recipes that led to a
dish,’ as Ron put it. The exhibition’s
provocative title attracted some media attention
(the exhibition happened to open just as a
nation-wide accounting scandal was unfolding),
but as Grace Glueck from the New York Times
wrote, the exhibition ‘has nothing to do with
corporate chicanery and everything to do with
the wonderfully imaginative publications of
Mr. King, a maverick British publisher.’