The Imprint of Alan Swallow: Quality Publishing in the West

4 Stern Critic

60 4 Stern Critic the Swallows drove to Powell for the summer of 1940, taking with them in the car the printing equipment, the new type, and Alan’s plans for the Fitzell book. Arriving in Albuquerque in the fall, he discovered Hazel Dreis, who was enjoying a growing reputation as a bookbinder from her studio in Santa Fe. She prepared a case binding “at as low a cost as she could,” which was $202, and the book came out in the fall.1 He always thought the Fitzell book, in blue ink on grey paper, was one of the best printing jobs he ever did, but his effort to market it taught him an interesting lesson in publishing. Entering a bookstore and showing the book to the proprietor, he was asked, “My God, why do you waste your time publishing this sort of thing?” The bookseller then offered to show him some publications he could “make some money with.” The books turned out to be pornography, which the entrepreneur thought would sell particularly well “with the boys going into the army so fast.” It was, said Swallow, “a good object lesson to have right at the start of my publishing work.”2 With the move to Albuquerque, Alan Swallow’s professional career took other steps forward. Although still an LSU graduate student working with Warren on his Stern Cr itic | 61 dissertation, he was a faculty member at New Mexico, teaching freshman English. There he met Horace Critchlow , a graduate student who was both older and wealthier than he and who shared his interest in printing. Critchlow bought a Chandler 10x25 press as well as type and other equipment that an Albuquerque resident had used as a doit -yourself printing plant in the basement of his home. He and Swallow rented a garage near the campus, pooled their printing equipment in it, and went into business as Swallow and Critchlow. During their six months under this imprint, they formed Big Mountain Press, which did such printing jobs as a letterhead for a church, a leaflet for a plowboys’ ranch, and invitations for sororities. They used a linotype they bought from a Baptist publication. Big Mountain, which would continue off and on throughout Swallow’s career, later also produced “author’s editions,” charging a fee to the writer for publication and in some cases assistance in marketing.3 The aim of these commercial ventures was to enable them to publish serious literary works, which they began with a twenty-eight-page chapbook by Swallow called The Practice of Poetry, for which he received the same 10 percent royalty that he offered other authors. Under a new imprint, Sage Books, they published two regional works, translations of Three Spanish American Poets and an anthology of Rocky Mountain Stories. The anthology included a story by Vardis Fisher, whose work Swallow had read and admired as an undergraduate and would publish much of in the future. Swallow took over the quarterly magazine Modern Verse, beginning with the issue of January 1941. In an 62 | The Impr int of A lan Swallow editorial announcement he pledged “to keep his standard of selection catholic and broad, even though his journal’s contemporaries seem largely to have become organs of groups or cliques of one sort or another, as much as anywhere in New York, the supposed literary capital of the nation.” The issue contained poems by McGrath and Fitzell and three by the Stanford University poet and critic Yvor Winters that marked the beginning of a long and friendly professional relationship.4 The third issue announced the inauguration of the Swallow Pamphlets, beginning with McGrath’s First Manifesto.5 The journal ceased publication after its fourth issue, which featured work by the rising American poet J. V. Cunningham as well as witty couplets by the editor’s partner, Critchlow.6 Alan also became poetry editor of the New Mexico Quarterly Review (NMQR), which took over the subscription list of Modern Poetry.7 Cunningham predicted the journal “could be made into a good thing if it can be kept going in these times.”8 Many little magazines were failing, and this became the fate of Experiment, a Salt Lake City publication formed by a cooperative group at Swallow ’s suggestion. He had been unable to find room for their work in NMQR. Alan Swallow would have much to do with a reincarnated Experiment some...