The Artistry of Loujon Press: Triumphs and Shortcomings: Part 2

Order and Chaos Chez Hans Reichel contained typed English translations with excerpts from the men's original handwritten letters in French. Photo by Akasha Rabut. Courtesy the Louisiana Research Collection at Tulane University, New Orleans.

Editor's Note

This is the second article in a two-part series by Room 220 editor Nathan C. Martin that examines the publications of Loujon Press, a fine-press publisher based in New Orleans in the 1960s. Part one focused on the two books by Charles Bukowski that Loujon published, as well as the four issues of Loujon's literary magazine, The Outsider.

Unlike Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller was a world-renowned author and countercultural icon by the time he began working with Jon and Lou Webb. The sophisticated European intellectualism of Miller’s prose, which contrasted to sublime effect the raunchy descriptions of sex that permeate his novels, cohered with the refinement of Loujon's book craftsmanship. Order and Chaos Chez Hans Reichel—which Loujon printed in a variety of editions including lettered copies, leather-bound copies, and orange-stained cork slipcased editions—is a meandering series of letters from the author to his 1920s Paris compatriot Hans Reichel, an artist who taught Miller to paint with watercolors. English translations are printed on one side of the page in type, with excerpts from their original letters handwritten in French on the opposite side. Prints and hand-drawn figures of crude diagrams outlining the trajectory of the men’s lives, along with drawings of humans and animals, intersperse the text, intensifying the reader’s understanding that the book is in fact a collection of intimate notes and ephemera that were once shoved into envelopes.

This formatting approach neatly opposes that of one of Loujon's periodical contemporaries, Semina, a journal whose issues consisted of loose pages of art, poetry, and prose in no particular order mailed to subscribers as such. For Semina, the loose notes and ephemera shoved into an envelope were the publication. While a great number of collected correspondences are published as books, the curatorial care and presentation of Loujon’s Order and Chaos manage to evoke a transcendent sense of the text's personal nature, while creating an exquisite art object.

The book's introduction, by Miller's novelist friend Lawrence Durrell, is printed on stepped, colored paper similar to Bukowski's It Catches My Heart in its Hands. However, unlike the fervent argument by literary scholar John Corrington that introduced that book, Durrell's text simply describes the way in which the publishing project came about: Miller had composed the notes to Reichel at about the time he “had just discovered he could really write,” and around the same time he had started sending short poems and watercolors to his friends as private gifts. The letters and art mailed to Reichel are among the first Miller sent. With the publication of Order and Chaos, Durrell writes, “It's warming to think that [Miller's] private world is at last becoming the common property of the world.”

The book won wide acclaim among publishing, literary, and celebrity circles—Nancy Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Red Skelton all ordered copies. It won awards for typography, type direction, and design from the prestigious Type Directors Club of New York, but its formal elegance and conceptual rigor were merely precursors for the bombast of bookmaking the next Loujon-Miller collaboration produced.

Loujon published Henry Miller's correspondence with artist Hans Reichel in the book Order and Chaos Chez Hans Reichel (1966). Photo by Akasha Rabut. Courtesy the Louisiana Research Collection at Tulane University, New Orleans.

The book's introduction, by Miller's novelist friend Lawrence Durrell, is printed on stepped, colored paper similar to Bukowski's It Catches My Heart in its Hands. However, unlike the fervent argument by literary scholar John Corrington that introduced that book, Durrell's text simply describes the way in which the publishing project came about: Miller had composed the notes to Reichel at about the time he “had just discovered he could really write,” and around the same time he had started sending short poems and watercolors to his friends as private gifts. The letters and art mailed to Reichel are among the first Miller sent. With the publication of Order and Chaos, Durrell writes, “It's warming to think that [Miller's] private world is at last becoming the common property of the world.”

The book won wide acclaim among publishing, literary, and celebrity circles—Nancy Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Red Skelton all ordered copies. It won awards for typography, type direction, and design from the prestigious Type Directors Club of New York, but its formal elegance and conceptual rigor were merely precursors for the bombast of bookmaking the next Loujon-Miller collaboration produced.

Photography layouts in Insomnia, or the Devil at Large help illustrate the sad trajectory of Miller's relationship with Hoki. Photo by Akasha Rabut. Courtesy the Louisiana Research Collection at Tulane University, New Orleans.

Insomnia, or the Devil at Large is a multifaceted object consisting of a book, a dozen of Henry Miller's watercolors, and the 19x24” handmade wooden box that contains them. It is a paean to Hoki Tokudo, a twenty-something Japanese lounge singer in Los Angeles with whom Miller became enamored when he was in his seventies. She spoke little English, he spoke no Japanese, and unsurprisingly, the relationship failed. Insomnia is a tribute to their courtship and a physical representation of Miller's agitated psyche through the process of his longing for, attaining, and losing her. The cover of the wooden box features a poster-photograph of Miller and Hoki sharing an intimate moment, looking into each other's faces and brushing hands while she stands with a cup of tea and he sits on a toilet. One removes the cover to find a title page with a photograph of Hoki shot from below as she wistfully drops a flower. The chic black-and-white image paired with the stylish red font have the feel of a French New Wave film. Upon removing the loose-leaf title page one begins a search for Miller's muse in the subsequent watercolors, which are crudely drawn, colorful hodgepodges of men and women, animals and symbols, words in English, French, German, and Japanese.

In the book's “cadenza,” where Miller describes the process by which he became a painter, he cites the artist Kurt Schwitters as a significant influence, and indeed the Dadaist's drawings are technically similar and evoke the same sensations of adult-child confusion and fantasy. Flipping through Miller's watercolors, one spies Hoki's face here and there, hidden like Waldo in Miller's sexualized, surreal dreamscapes. Miller writes, “The illustrative material makes no claim to beauty, intellect, madness, or anything else. It is of the same fibre as the text, and the key to both is Insomnia. Some of the illustrations are neither paintings nor drawings, but just words, and often mere hocus pocus or gibber-jabber. They reflect the varying moods of three in the morning.”

Both the paintings and the text in Insomnia suggest Miller's desperate grasping for Hoki. Their synthesis is superb. Compared to the overhanded, literal drawings by Bukowski that accompany some of his poems in It Catches My Heart in its Hands, in which, for instance, a drawing of a man drinking while his woman yells at him accompanies a poem about the same, the figurative play between the images and words creates a compelling tension. This has as much to do with the Webbs’ finding an appropriate collaborator for their fine-press venture as it does their evolving sense of how texts and printed objects interact.

Insomnia, or the Devil at Large is a paean to Hoki Tokudo, then a twenty-something Japanese lounge singer in Los Angeles. Photo by Akasha Rabut. Courtesy the Louisiana Research Collection at Tulane University, New Orleans.

The book itself is more ornate than any other Loujon offering. Jon Webb announced that it had “foil and inlaid wood strips, and other format touches from world parts too numerous to itemize.” Its shiny cover overlaid with lotus flowers opens to a series of prints and photographs on sturdy paper stock, followed by the journal-like musings printed in Miller's handwriting lamenting his lost Hoki. A nifty trick of design and layout in the front of the books sets its lonesome tone: A spread featuring two photographs on narrow pages allow the reader to see part of the photo spread behind it. The photo on the left side of the rear spread and the two on the narrow front pages show Hoki and Miller together, laughing, leafing through one of Miller's books; in this position, the right-hand page of the rear spread shows Miller—we presume with Hoki—but when the narrow page is finally turned it reveals it’s just Miller, painting alone. This is an example of how Insomnia overcomes the pitfalls of earlier Loujon books—which are all beautiful, but not in ways that necessarily supplement the text. The format and design of Insomnia allow the book itself to participate in conveying meaning in concert with the written words it contains.

In New Orleans today, the only serious literary periodical in print is the New Orleans Review, whose look and format abides by the standard of well-done, yet unadventurous, contemporary journals: Its lines are graceful; its font clean and crisp; its heft approximately that of a short novel; and its visual elements tastefully set, segregated, and dutifully explained by titles and captions. Indeed, some of the best literary magazines of the day appear in much the same form, like the Paris Review and NOON, and although there are a slew of literary journals whose creators experiment with physical composition, they are mostly relegated to far lesser readerships. But the conversation about how much a periodical's physical form should assert itself goes on.

In his elegy to Open City magazine, the venerable New York literary journal that recently ceased after 20 years, author Bryan Charles writes, “One of the things I always liked about Open City was that good writing was always the point. It didn’t succumb to the post-McSweeney’s vogue for baroque presentation and editorial commentary rendered in microscopic type.” McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, one of the most widely considered literary magazines currently in print, has become the whipping boy for arguments of this type. Its format and composition vary radically from issue to issue, and its relevance to the conversation about bookmaking is accentuated by the success of its online counterpart, McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

Every conversation about books in the internet age is tinged by the much-hyped possibility that e-readers and other online devices will render print obsolete. One approach to negating this conjecture has been publishers' efforts to ensure that the objects they create are as well-wrought and interesting as the words those objects contain: a recent article on The Millions offers seven easy steps to Kindle-proof your book. If attention to craft and quality are indeed an avenue by which we might fight dwindling interest in printed books and periodicals, a critical examination of pioneering publishers like Loujon is not only novel, but necessary.

Miller's Insomnia, or the Devil at Large (1970) is contained in a handmade wooden box. Photos by Akasha Rabut. Courtesy the Louisiana Research Collection at Tulane University, New Orleans.

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