Against the Grain: Interviews with Maverick American Publishers

David Godine

David Godine David R. Godine issued its first books in 1970, mostly handsome printings ofclassics like Whitman's Specimen Days and The Collected Songs of Thomas Campion, and museum books like The Sculpture of Rodin. Policy, however, quickly shifted Godine's emphasis to original works, and over the nextfifteen years its list expanded to include books in history, art and architecture, typography , photography, books ofpoetry, fiction, and even children 's books. Godine's authors include William Gass, Andre Dubus, Stanley Elkin, and George Starbuck. Its Nonpareil series has reissued the letters ofWilliam James, scholarship by Francis Steegmuller, fiction by Jose Donoso, and poetry by Greek poet George Seferis. The following conversation actually took place on two different occasions two years apart. The first meeting occurred 228 AGAINST THE GRAIN on a hectic Friday afternoon in June 1980 in the publisher's Dartmouth Street offices in Boston. The second meeting occurred in the house ofa friend, late in the evening, in Iowa City. Each interview was singularly plagued: sections of tape inexplicably blank, statements muzzled by background noise, lost threads. Often it seemed that David Godine, like the unphotographable Crazy Horse, had the power to defeat both technology and history. DANA: You once said the army was a better experience than Harvard Ed. Do you want to elaborate on that? GODINE: Nobody believes me who hasn't been in the army, and anyone who's been in the army understands exactly what I mean. It's a leavening experience. You meet people in the army whom you will never meet again in your life. Whereas you meet people at the Harvard Ed school whom you will continue to meet for the rest of your life. DANA: Did you meet anyone in the army who moved your career in the direction of publishing? GODINE: No, but there were some very good writers. I was in basic military journalism, and we had to write every day. DANA: Anybody who has since turned up on your list? GODINE: No, these were career people. These were people in the army teaching people to write camp newspapers. DANA: Did you work on a base newspaper? GODINE: Yes. I worked on the one at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis. It was a very good newspaper. DANA: Was that your first editing experience? GODINE: I guess officially. You had to edit for brevity, sense, and comprehension. The readers ranged from high school graduates to Ph.D.'s. It was a very mixed bag, and the experience demanded a mixture of good syntax and great humility. DANA: Can we review the Dartmouth period? You began setting type there as an undergrad? GODINE: With Professor Ray Nash. He just died two years ago. I was in two of his courses: Prints and Printmaking, and Books and Bookmaking. David Godine 229 DANA: How did you happen to take his courses? GODINE: I'd heard good things about them from people who'd taken them. It was the way so many decisions evolved in those days. These were the days before published curriculums were available, so you really relied on word of mouth. Also, Dartmouth was a small school and had very few extracurricular activities. So I would spend half ofmy time practicing music-playing, usually every night from seven to nineand then I'd go and set type until eleven, or whenever I'd finish. There weren't many of us in the course, twelve people max. Nash taught an advanced course, which I took my junior year. This was a very interesting combination of purely academic study and practical application. Namely, when was this book published, who did it, how can you tell, what materials was it made of, what was the style involved? That was to develop , I think, your visual sense. A lot of reading in the history of books-and for printmaking, prints-along with the workshop, so that you weren't just learning typesetting in the abstract. You had to go set type and then print it. You had to wet the paper and print it damp. And that, to my knowledge, was unique in the Ivy League, although it was becoming common in the West and Midwest at that time. DANA: What year was that? GODINE: 1963-64. Because my senior year I had a senior fellowship, and that absolved me of all coursework to print a book called Lyric Verse and to...