Cover of Winter of Artifice

Winter of Artifice in the rare original glassine.

The Gemor Press: A Selected Bibliography

Nin, Anaïs. Winter of Artifice. 1942. Engravings by Ian Hugo. Hardcover with glassine. 500 copies.

Chisholm, Hugh. Several Have Lived. 1942. Illustrated by André Masson. Wrappers. 500 copies.

Nin, Anaïs. Under a Glass Bell. 1944. Engravings by Ian Hugo. 300 copies. Hardcover. Second printing in 1944, with fewer engravings. 800 copies.

Baldwin, C. L. Quinquivara. 1944. Engravings by Ian Hugo. Hardcover with tissue/glassine jacket. 300 copies.

Ver Duft, Lee. Ho! Watchman of the Night Ho! 1944. Illustrated by Mastrofski. Hardcover. 300 copies.

Nin, Anaïs. This Hunger. 1945.Woodblock prints by Ian Hugo. Hardcover. 1050 copies (50 with color prints).

Baldwin, C. L. Nine Desperate Men. 1946. Illustrated. 100 copies.

Clariana, Bernardo. Rendezvous with Spain. 1946. Illustrated by Julio de Diego.Translated by Dudley Fitts. Wrappers. 400 copies (20 with handcolored illustrations).

Nin, Anaïs. A Child Born out of the Fog. 1947? Wrappers.

Nin, Anaïs. House of Incest. 1947. Engravings by Ian Hugo. Hardcover in glassine (?) jacket. Print run uncertain (50 with original engravings).

Most Gemor Press hardcovers appear to have been issued in glassine dust jackets, few of which survive. Nin and Moré also printed books for other publishers, particularly Caresse Crosby.

"If you ever come to New York," Anaïs Nin wrote to one of the great bookmen of the 20th century, "I would like to show you my press." Nin penned the invitation in her flowing, graceful hand on translucent paper. I could not imagine what a proto-feminist writer of erotic, surrealistic fiction would discuss with a sober, established scholar-librarian.

At the time she wrote the letter, Lawrence Wroth was the director of the John Carter Brown Library, an expert on Colonial printing and a columnist for the Sunday supplement, Books, in the New York Herald-Tribune. His "Notes for Bibliophiles" served as the newspaper's rare book department between 1937 and 1947, commenting on exhibitions, auction sales, retirements, deaths and books of importance to the antiquarian world. I wondered what Wroth, the eminently respectable and happily married son of an Episcopal minister, and Nin-a writer whose recent novel, House of Incest, was loosely based on her "triangular relationship" with Henry and June Miller-would have in common.

Anaïs Nin's life was relatively uneventful until she met the Millers in late 1931. Henry and June transfixed her, and Nin swept easily into Paris avant-garde society. Within a year, Edward Titus, who had published Lady Chatterley's Lover, brought out her first book, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study. Nin then turned to fiction, working on two experimental prose works simultaneously. In 1935, she approached Jack Kahane whose Obelisk Press published Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Although Nin is rumored to have provided 5000 francs to pay for the publication of Miller's novel, Kahane wasn't interested in The House of Incest but offered to publish her other work-in-progress, The Winter of Artifice, instead.

Frustrated with the financial and editorial control of commercial publishers, Anaïs Nin and her circle considered acquiring their own press. Nin purchased one in 1935, but Miller and the American writer Michael Fraenkel appropriated it. They named it the Siana Press (Anaïs spelled backwards), but used it for their own purposes, and Nin's work was not produced on it. Instead, Nin's friend Lawrence Durrell agreed to underwrite The House of Incest and as a courtesy the Siana imprint was added-but Nin had to distribute the book herself, and no reviews heralded its appearance.

Nin bought a second press in 1937 for one of her lovers, Gonzalo Moré- a disinherited Peruvian aristocrat and Marxist who, "in his lazy way, engaged in political activism by working as a journalist and printer." Moré was soon receiving orders for small printing jobs, and it became his livelihood. He had until then depended upon his wife-a dancer-for a living, but she had become too ill to perform. Since he needed the money generated from this work, Nin did not insist that he produce her books.

After waiting four years for Kahane to publish The Winter of Artifice, she again turned to Lawrence Durrell, who agreed to finance it.The book appeared under the imprint "Villa Seurat / Obelisk Press" in 1939.This was the last book produced by the Obelisk Press-Kahane was found dead in his Paris apartment two days after the war was declared.

With France at war, Nin and her husband fled to New York. There she encountered even more difficulty finding publishers for her fiction than in Paris. During the 1930s, in the face of the Depression and a global war against fascism, the idea of writer-as-artist prevalent in previous decades gave way to the concept of writer as social or political commentator. Nin's psychological self-probing, written in a surrealistic, intimate style, was not in fashion. However, enough of the New York literati expressed interest in her work that she decided to reprint Winter of Artifice (dropping the initial article from the title) herself.

According to Philip Jason, an authority on Nin's work as a printer, "Nin purchased an old hand-press, rented space to house it, and-with money borrowed from Frances Steloff of the Gotham Book Mart and from Thurema Sokol-purchased type and paper." Her partner in the venture was her old lover Gonzalo Moré who also lived in exile in New York. They settled on Gemor as the name of the press, a rearrangement of Gonzalo's first initial and last name. In January 1942, Nin wrote in her diary:

The press was delivered. We borrowed a book from the library on how to print. Gonzalo would run the press, I would set type. I started to learn typesetting. It took me an hour and a half to typeset half a page. We decided to start with Winter of Artifice.

The creation of an individual world, an act of independence, such as the work at the press, is a marvelous cure for anger and frustration. The insults of the publishers, the rejections, the ignorance, all are forgotten. I love the studio. I get up with eager curiosity. The press is a challenge. We make mistakes.

Once there was something wrong with the press. It did not work, Gonzalo would not send for a workman, or the repairman. He literally battled with the press, as if it were a bronco, a bull, an animal to be tamed. His hair flew around his face, perspiration fell from his forehead, his centaur feet were kicking the pedals. The machine groaned. It seemed almost like a physical battle which he intended to win by force. He towered over it. He seemed bigger than the machine. I never saw anything more primitive, more like a battle between an ancient race and a new type of monster. Both as stubborn, both strong, both violent. Gonzalo won. He was breathing heavily. The wheel suddenly began to spin again. He looked absolutely triumphant. 

Work on their first book continued into the spring, with Nin recording the slow process.

February 21: On my birthday: two pages done in three days.

 February 23:Two pages in two days.

February 25:Two pages in one day.

March 4: Four pages a day. Jimmy Cooney helps us for an hour a day. His lessons save us much time.We are now up to page 44.

April: Take the letter O out of the box, place it next to the T, then a comma, then a space, and so on. Count page 1, 2, 3, and so on. Select the good ones while Gonzalo runs the machine. Day after day. We are nearing the end. I have difficulties with the separation of words. And it is a problem in setting type.

The writing is often improved by the fact that I live so many hours with a page that I am able to scrutinize it, to question the essential words. In writing, my only discipline has been to cut out the unessential. Typesetting is like film cutting. The discipline of typesetting and printing is good for the writer.

When the book was finished, it came to the attention of Otto Fuhrmann, head of the Division of Graphic Arts at NYU. Fuhrmann wrote Lawrence Wroth about it in September 1942.

Your recent statement that you have a special warm regard for books completely produced by one person (in "Notes for Bibliophiles") prompts me to bring to your attention a rather remarkable case.

A young lady of Spanish (Catalan) origin, with French education, having published literary pieces in France, now married to an illustrator and living in New York, wrote a book entitled Winter of Artifice (in flawless English, as far as I can see).

She felt the urge to give it the form she wanted; so acquired some type (Futura Medium and Italic Light), set the type (self-taught!), bought a little 8 by 12 press, run by foot-power, had her husband make some illustrations in the style of Blake, made up the format-and did a remarkably fine piece of printing. The cover paper had to be printed in three impressions (a section at a time).

I admire the general good taste as to margins, leading, evenness of composition, and I would never have believed it possible, being a practical printer myself, that an amateur, and a woman at that, could master the difficult job of production, with perfectly even inking and printing throughout, on a dinky little press. I am frank to say that with all my experience and the good laboratory equipment at my disposal, I could not have done better and might not have done as well, not being fired with her zeal. She told me that the production took three months, 10 hours a day-which is remarkably little time for a book of 160 pages in 500 copies.

At any rate, my hat is off to this determined lady, and I shall be proud to show the book to aspiring typographers as an example. You probably want to have a copy-you ought to look at it anyway and, perhaps, mention it in your column in the Herald-Tribune, although she makes no pretense of being a second Bertha Goudy; she is a writer with an artist husband. I am no judge of the literary merits of the book, but I bought a copy . . . because of its high standard of craftsmanship . . . Here seems to be a talent that needs encouragement. To me it was an inspiration to meet the author-printer. I am trying so hard to teach craftsmanship-and here is a person who acquires everything by observation and patient trial and error. My hat is off to Miss Nin (and she is as childlike as her name).

I do not know if Wroth ever took Nin up on the invitation to visit her in New York. The Winter of Artifice was reviewed by the Herald-Tribune, but Wroth apparently never mentioned it in his column. When Nin sent him a copy of the book, he wrote her back expressing respect for her efforts, "Knowing the difficulties under which you have worked, I admire enormously the persistence which led you to carry the job through."

Nin's book, austere and beautiful, is the perfectly articulated physical manifestation of a single mind on paper. Regardless of intellectual, cultural or social differences, the shared "zeal" of Wroth, Fuhrmann and Nin for books as objects is plain, rather impressive and oddly inspiring.

Author Richard Ring of Columbus, Ohio is Reference and Acquisitions Librarian at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island. His main research interest is the rare book world in America from 1850 to 1950, particularly the lives and careers of the scholar-librarians of that period.

This essay appeared in the March/April 2003 issue of OP.

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