(1980) Volume 3, Number 5

              volume 3 number 5 september 1980 bern porter an interview editor's note during a brief visit to los angeles bern porter spent an evening in venice during which time the editor of umbrella interviewed him on 22 january 1980 poet physi cist he helped develop the cathode ray tube pioneering television as well as the atomic bomb and pioneering book maker bern porter lives in belfast maine when he isn't going around the world in 1920 i started making books up in maine my problem was the simple act of reproduction in those days xerox had not arrived and mimeograph was very crude certainly too expensive for me and rubber stamps had not yet come in or certainly were not available in maine so my problem was to draw them by hand this meant writing printing the text and making the illustrations and it meant an edition of five copies an incredible work in terms of hours and of effort the trick was then to condense to redigest to state and to hand letter and to hand-illustrate an edition of five copies my first such book was done in 1920 it was hand sewn hand drawn hand-lettered and it had a slip-case which was also handmade and since i had difficulty with titles in those days i simply called them numbers like 179b and the next book of course was cd21 thus every title had at least one number and one initial my audience was a woman who lived down the street about four blocks and when i completed a book i would take it down to her and she would give me a dozen eggs which i would take back to my mother so i was making artists books in those days one book for a dozen eggs a sort of barter system the lady who received my mother who received and i who made it received no money i continued with this edition of five and as far as the woman who swapped the eggs for the book some friends from boston would come to visit her in the summer and she persuaded them that they should give me the magni ficent sum of one dollar and would take one of my books and take it back to boston and take it into a gallery to some of their art friends and see if there were anyone in boston who would like to swap hand-made books my first out-of maine client tve forgotten his name was also making a kind of art book i don't think they were as sophisticated as mine but he was playing with words and putting them on numbers those were very rich years 1920-21 in maine with swapping and bartering and the man in boston who sent the books to some folks in philadelphia who bought some books and the next thing you know they were tied up as far as new mexico after about a year and a half of production at no point were the editions more than five copies i ve been told that one of these editions that i pro duced in those days now sells in the auction for 750 some what different from a dozen eggs which in those days sold for about 30 cents i personally have no more of those but the master collection at the ucla campus in westwood does have the magazine which i handlettered which runs to about three pages so i began at the age of 9 mail i also did what has later become mail art about that time and was receiving postcards through the mail and would take a razor blade and cut them up into three sections and then repaste them together so that we had a sort of a montage in fact of a distorted image later i encountered in copenhagen a man named diter rot from iceland and he and i swapped cards which we had cut and we called those simply cut cards to make it easy so mail art was beginning in those days and i later found that marcel duchamp was doing it about the same time and kurt sch witters in switzerland i later learned they were inde pendent of each other but 1918-1922 was a very rich time for the beginning of artists books mail art and what we later called posters it was always shattering to me to sit in maine thinking that someone else was also doing the same thing and we got to know one another becoming friends instead of rivals the first artists books went through the mail and were swapped very much as we do mail art now as for artists books five copies of 30 pages was really a issn 01600699