At Jacket2: Shifting Attention to Gertrude Stein as Bookmaker

Sarah Stone writes for Jacket2 about the editions, carnets, cahiers, copybooks, and "idiosyncratic conceptual matchmaking practice" of book design, hybrid English and French naming, and other "paratexts" (defined by Gerard Genette, Stone notes, as “all the liminal devices — titles, signs of authorship, dedications, epigraphs, prefaces, notes, intertitles, epilogues, and the like — that mediate the relationship between text and reader”) of Gertrude Stein, effectively extending her poetics into such practices. "Her three-year career as copublisher of the Plain Edition (with her partner Alice B. Toklas) occasioned drafts and correspondence that show Stein engaging with the book as a material object. While her writing is now recognized as among the most innovative in the twentieth century, Stein’s paraliterary work in book design and publishing has gone largely unexamined."

Between 1930 and 1933 the Plain Edition released five books: Lucy Church Amiably (1930) [image at top], Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded (1931), How to Write (1931), Operas and Plays (1932), and Matisse, Picasso & Gertrude Stein (1933). The couple funded their venture by selling one, and maybe more, of their beloved Picassos.[1] The sale yielded cash and the promise that Stein might leverage one kind of sociocultural capital to acquire another. Having gained notoriety as an art collector and the charismatic hostess of the salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus, Stein nonetheless continued to feel profound frustration as her writing, which she considered her most important work, was repeatedly rejected by major publishers and ridiculed in the popular press. Trading a painting for “an Edition,” she hoped, might shift public attention away from her personality and toward her writing.

It then becomes necessary to write these editions back into the history of modernism:

The vast majority of items in Stein’s 173 boxes of collected papers at Yale are accessible in person. Perhaps the difficulty of accessing the relevant materials is in part what led critic Jerome McGann to insist in his foundational book on modernist book history, Black Riders (1993), that while one could — and even must — write the history of modernism as a history of its book-objects, Stein’s books are not important to such a history.[4]

While McGann borrows the title of Stein’s famous essay for his second chapter, “Composition as Explanation (of Modern and Postmodern Poetries),” he dismisses her in his introduction, arguing that while her writing was innovative, “Stein did not utilize the physical presence of the book in any notable ways” (21). If one were to write a modernist book history, he says, “Ezra Pound would once again appear the crucial point of departure” (76). Having jumped from Stein to Pound in the white space between his chapter heading and first sentence, McGann traces the printing history of the Cantos without a backward glance to the allusion of his title.

McGann’s larger argument, that modernists’ turn toward material features of book design and typography as meaning-making components of their literary works was made possible by the late nineteenth century “Renaissance of Printing,” is both convincing and important. Renewed interest in fine press printing “encouraged writers to explore the expressive possibilities of language’s necessary material conditions” (19). McGann identifies two major styles that modernists combined as they carried on the legacy of the late nineteenth-century “Renaissance” — the medieval revival aesthetic of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press and the modern look of Bodley Head books. These two styles converge in the finely printed books of Yeats and Pound, books that fuse poetic project and book-object such that “the semantic content of the message is carried by their graphic features” (83).

For McGann, by contrast, Stein’s contribution was limited to the level of semantic content. She found “linguistic equivalents for the bibliographical innovations that were being developed and explored by others” (22). While McGann celebrates Stein as “a far more innovative writer than Pound or perhaps anyone else writing in English during the first two decades of this century,” he explicitly excludes her from the lineage he constructs (19). His dismissal recapitulates much modernist history-making to date, summoning Stein to view just long enough to account for her exclusion.[5]

Further, Stone looks at the books in detail:

Stein’s idiosyncratic conceptual matchmaking practice governs both the inside and the outside of the book, including its telling cover. The cover’s electric indigo color — one American reviewer called it “painfully blue” — alludes to copybooks. As Stein’s Toklas reports in The Autobiography, “Gertrude Stein wanted the first book Lucy Church Amiably to look like a school book and to be bound in blue” (emphasis added). A “school book” here means a copybook, a blank book where students write their assignments. Stein’s likening of a finished book to a handwritten artifact of learning, the copybook, undoes the clear division between her manuscript drafts?, which were composed in notebooks, and the final printed books.

Read this great essay in its entirety at Jacket2.