I had my fun all right.
But the boys got even with me. A year later, the editor of a well-known art magazine and his wife, with careful deliberation and much ingenuity, sold me down the river with a hoax that I gobbled whole. So we are even and everybody is happy.
Why are we so cracked about a private press? I often wonder myself. The house smells of printer's ink and type wash. Right now there are eleven metal-strapped type boxes on the sunporch where the expressman left them a week ago; and my wife is to have a luncheon tomorrow. Fine looking mess. I'll get around to them soon. There are piles of printed signatures of our Christmas book all over the place. The composing room is crawling with undistributed type. Can hardly work without spilling it. My pet Vandercook brayer has fallen arches—it was left in the sun yesterday and its insides turned to soup.
Next morning on my desk I found the proof of our new broadside Emmer Jane with the drawing at the top beautifully colored by the artist. It's swell. Presently the messenger brought in the advance copies of the new Sonnets bound in blue natural-finished cloth stamped in gold, just as I wanted it. I can hardly wait to get home to show them to my wife. We must get that new type to use for The Ghost Ship. We'll start it this week-end. How slow the days go. Isn't a private press fun!
Postscript 1951:
Still hard at it. We are older but no wiser. Nowadays the grand-children come in the back door and call up the composing-room stairs, "Arthur, may we play type and picture cuts?" They spend hours at it and I spend hours putting things to rights.
The check-list has grown to 186 books and pamphlets. The work is still as exciting as ever, though we try to check the fury a bit. The skipper of the Golden Hind retired in January 1950, which released more time for the press; being in business always was a nuisance.
We spent the summer doing a first edition of a Mark Twain book for Harpers—mixed with a lot of farming. For a retirement occupation we can commend a private press. It keeps up the interest in life.
Offers of work flow in, much more than we care to accept. We are not in business and we have more projects of our own than we shall ever complete.
It's fun to get up with the chickens and work together all morning, spend the afternoon puttering about outdoors, and retire at night dog tired—what my wife calls "nice tired," no nervous tension.