Breviary: how form, word and image model time

Title: Breviary
Author: Kevin Young
Illustrator: Ladislav Hanka
Translator: n/a
Printer/ Publisher (and location): Chad Oness of Sutton Hoo Press, assisted by Sidney Bauer (Houston, MN)
Date of publication: 2009
Edition: Limited printing, 100 copies
Price: $130

Physical Description:

• 16 unnumbered pages (additional two covered by wrapper)
• 3 hand-sewn signatures (two sheets per signature with deckle edges, four clean cut)
• 11 poems
• 28 x 11 cm
• Perpetua font
• Somerset paper (mouldmade 100% cotton, neutral pH, chlorine free, internal and surface sized)
• Lichen-green, handmade flaxpaper wrapper with three deckle edges and stamped bird etching in darker green
• Three illustrations – stamped black etching of sunflower (page two), stamped bird etching motif (title page in black and mid-book in brown-red)
• One blind stamped image of a tree in a circle on recto of last sheet
• Colophon printed after title page describes the limited printing and the contributing creators, this page also includes pencil marks that appear to be the poet’s signature

What strikes me first about Breviary – a collection of poems by Kevin Young, set and bound by Chad Oness of Sutton Hoo Press, with images by Hanka Lasislav – is its simplicity of form. From the folded wrapper that serves as a cover, to the short, end-stopped lines of poetry, to the loose-lined etchings, the holistic text is straightforward and structural, and yet, the hands of its three creators are all clearly evident in the product.

According to the Oxford Companion to the Book, a breviary is a liturgical book that contains the Roman Catholic Church’s Liturgy of the Hour; it is a simple, structural, chronological text text that grew out of the need to standardize liturgical practice. Under Chad Oness’ hand, Breviary draws structural inspiration from its namesake, while employing the strengths of word, image and form to create a holistic text that is simple, and yet seems to embody the theme of time’s passing.

Kevin Young is the acclaimed poet behind The Book of Hours, the collection of poems that Breviary draws its textual content from. Oness sets Young’s words in Perpetua, an unbraketed serif font that gives a nod towards Gothic scripts in its strokes and stresses, but is much simpler, cleaner and more modern. Wide margins – choice by the printer – and short line lengths ­– a choice by the poet – work together to draw the readers’ attention to the text and its content. The poems collectively address the passage of life and time, with themes of birth and grief. Breviary, in particular, begins with “Matins,” a poem that, as referenced by the title, is structured around the concepts of the morning and sunrise. Thus thematically, title, form and content are united in how they echo the passage of time.

In an interview at The Publishers’ Roundtable, hosted by Yale University in March 2008, Oness responded to a question about how he selects the artwork and poetry that will be paired together saying, “I have given artists manuscripts, however, and asked for their visual contribution, but I have always been clear with them, and talked extensively with them, about NOT ILLUSTRATING THE TEXT.” What Oness desires is a visual text that “has its own integrity separate from the manuscript,” and that is what we find in the artwork by Ladislav Hanka accompanying Young’s poems in Breviary. On his website, Hanka lists the illustrations from Breviary, in a paper binding, at $300, more than twice the list price of Breviary on the Sutton Hoo website. All the images draw on themes of nature, life, growth and fragility present in Young’s poetry. The acid etched lines of Hanka’s prints complement the decaled edges of both the handmade Somerset signatures and flaxpaper wrapper. Oness also uses Hanka’s illustrations structurally to echo the form of a breviary, which is structured around the passage of time. According, again, to the Oxford Companion to the Book, beginning in the Middle Ages, breviaries began to be divided into two sections to correspond with summer and winter; they were later divided into four sections, one for each season. Similarly, Oness uses the third iteration of Hanka’s bird-stamp motif to divide Breviary‘s eleven poems into two sections, Oness introduces a pause, a moment to recognize time’s passing, to a series of poems that are structurally unchanging; the first two iterations of the bird image are found on the wrapper and title page. Thus, once again, Oness connects title, structure and image to extend the theme of time beyond the word’s content into the text as a whole.

It would be remiss to overlook the choices the Oness makes as bookbinder, independent from the direct influence of the poet or illustrator. In his Publisher’s Roundtable interview, Oness reminded the audience, “the binding structure is a text in itself that joins the chorus early on in the reader’s experience of the book.” The experience of reading and moving through a book is particularly important to Oness. He comments in his interview on the importance, for him, that readers are able to open book flat his books, without the binding or form detracting for their ability to engage with the text. Breviary, which does open flat, is hand sewn in white thread; Oness’s small hand-tied knots are clearly visible at the center of the middle signature. He further reveals in his interview that he sees “the very labor and time intensive act of printing by hand” not just part of the process, but part of the product itself. The handcrafted, deckle edged papers Oness chooses further reinforce the time-intensive nature of the form. Thus, the physical product of the book, in how it embodies its production, serves as a physical reminder of the passage of time and how the text is connected to human experience.

Thus, Chad Oness, with Kevin Young and Ladislav Hanka, use word, image and form, to create in Breviary a text that holistically embodies the theme of time’s passage.

Edit (January 9) – added note on the colophon and a formal MLA citation for Breviary to the works cited, a clear oversight of my initial post. In citing the text in this manor, rather than in the itemized details at the top of the page, I realized how much recognition is goes to the author for the production of the work. The bibliographic reference, which we so often seem to hold as the primary form of identification for the text demonstrates how we privilege different forms of production and contribution to a work.

Works Cited and Consulted

“According to the Demands of the Text.” Publisher’s Roundtable. Yale University, 20 February 2008. Web. 6 February 2016.

“Beviary.” The Oxford Companion to the Book. Eds. Michael F. Suarez, S.J. and H. R. Woudhuysen. 1997. Web. 5 February 2016.

Hanka, Ladislav. ” Sutton Hoo Collaborative books.” Ladislav Hanka Official Site. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 February 2016.

“Somerset Printing Paper.” DickBlick. Dick Blick Art Materials, n.d. Web. 5 February 2016.

Strizver, Ilene Strizver. “Anatomy of a Font.” Fontology. Fonts, n.d. Web. 8 February 2016.

“Publishers Respond: Choosing a Publishing Model.” Publisher’s Roundtable. Yale University, 17 February 2008. Web. 6 February 2016.

Young, Kevin. “Book of Hours.” Kevin Young Official Site. n.p., n.d. Web. 8 February 2016.

Young, Kevin. Breviary. Houston: Sutton Hoo Press, 2006. Print.