folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)
There’s a blue plastic-covered binder in my workshop. On the spine, in a clear plastic pocket, is a rectangular card with hand-printed, very tidy block letters that reads, “Printing Notes/AB Dick Manual/Letterpress Notes Etc.” The first page inside the binder is a receipt, inkjet printed on a loose sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 paper, dated November 1, 2004: “Received from Simon Thompson - the amount of 1500.00 for a 10 x 15 Chandler & Price Letterpress, all cases, variable speed motor, chases, inks, extra rollers and parts. Thanks Simon.” The long trailing tail of Barry’s signature reminds me of a well-cast Spey line.
20 years ago, I drove the 600 km from Terrace to Prince George to disassemble and transport this significant piece of equipment, then sitting in Barry’s basement at 1420 Gorse Street. I had been to his house a few times before this; I think on one of these previous trips he had convinced me to buy the press.
I had always been impressed by Barry, this cool, slight guy with a goatee and silver hair and sharp suits, who knew all of these other cool people, some of whom were real poets. He looked like a jazz drummer, which is, of course, what he was. In the binder with the receipt, I have a photograph taken midway through the rather violent process of getting the bed shaft out so as to separate the bed from the frame of the press, and off to the side of the press are a couple of jazz kits, one yellow and white, and the other black and white. Bass drum, snare drum, floor tom, high hat.
In the Introductory Note to the second edition of The Caledonia Writing Series (A Chronicle), McKinnon observes that the chronicle of “our picaresque letterpress …would [have to be amended to] include the last move. My friend, the poet, artist, and teacher Simon Thompson bought my 10x15 Chandler Price letterpress, came to Prince George from Terrace with a truck full of tools, donned his blue mechanic’s coveralls, and started to dismantle the monster.”
The press alone weighs 1,500 pounds. The rest of the cases of type and furniture and cabinets and chases probably weigh that much again. Much of the press is made of cast iron. The parts are heavy, and awkward, and the ceiling was low, and it was pretty dark in the basement. It took a couple of days to work out how to take the press apart to the point it could be loaded onto pallets and stowed in the back of a little 1992 Nissan truck.
Barry put me up at his house, and we spent the evenings talking about the press, and how to run it. Barry showed me how to use a composing stick, and how to use tiny slips of copper to correctly kern the lines of type. Even though the press had been idle for a long time, Barry still effortlessly knew the lay of a California case, and we practiced tying up matrices of type with butcher twine and setting them in the case, positioning the type in the chase with furniture, and locking the assembly in place with speed quoins and the big quoin key, whose shape and weight are now very familiar to me.
We talked about his work at CNC, and the difficulties of being an English professor at a small college in a northern resource town that at times did not seem interested in poetic English instructors. We talked about his archive, and other poets, such as Ken Belford and John Newlove and George Stanley and Pierre Coupey and Cecil Giscombe, all of whom he admired very deeply. We talked about jazz and New York and drank beer and listened to John Coltrane records. I felt I was talking to someone who was connected to poetry and art in a way I might never understand.
We used a photocopy of the Chandler & Price press manual, received and annotated by Martinsburg News in 1958, to figure out the disassembly. The large gear cam wheel, the double ink disk, the tight pulley, the straight fly-wheel shaft and crankshaft, the gripper cam and the throw-off saddle and frames, the main shaft and the small head and lock cam, the fly-wheel, the chase hook and roller frames, the disk lever studs, the back-shaft collars, and a hundred bolts of differing sizes all ended up spread out on a tarp. The side frames and the bed had to come apart, so the bed shaft, a large steel rod that serves as a pivot and links the press frame together, had to come out. This involved a sledgehammer and a lot of patience to separate these two parts so that they could be individually dragged out of the basement door and up the stairs. I pounded in the gloom while Barry held a beer and looked worried. When I got all of it apart, Ken Belford showed up and stood watch at the top of the basement stairs, a can of beer in one hand and a joint in the other, offering an endless stream of questionable suggestions that seemed to annoy Barry to no end.
In his Introductory Note, Barry says Joy had the idea to call a tow truck to lift the frame parts up out of the basement stairwell. That might be true; what is also true is that even though it had taken great ingenuity to take the press apart in such a confined space, there is no way we could have devised another way to lift the separated frame and bed up the stairs. Soon enough, a man came with a tow truck and very quickly and expertly hoisted these very bulky items out of the dark and onto waiting pallets that were then loaded into the back of a little truck for the return to Terrace. The tow truck man seemed genuinely interested in this unusual little spectacle and was very gentle in his work. He kept saying he didn’t want to see the cast iron get bruised; he seemed to know what he was talking about.
The suspension and the engine were sorely tested over the nervous return drive. When I arrived, Terrace felt somehow new.
Over the next few months, I reassembled the press and was stunned to find that it worked exactly as it should. The press and all the other parts of the original Caledonia Writing Series press, later Gorse Press, sit in my workshop, ready for use.
Simon Thompson is a poet and a printer, and a professor at Coast Mountain College in Terrace, BC.