Boston Bookmaker
When DAVID R. GODINE '66 picks up a book and opens it, it's a happening: a child's Christmas morning, the prelude to a gourmet's Thanksgiving dinner, the end of a father's anxious vigil in a maternity hospital, an investor's perusal of his portfolio when the market is bullish.
He weighs the book in his hand; fondles the cover; inspects the binding; riffles the pages, savoring the smell of the ink and the texture of the stock; casts a critical eye over the clarity of type and illustration and the way they go together. Satisfied, he breaks out in an exuberant grin. "Isn't it beautiful!"
For Godine is no ordinary reader. At 29, a printer turned trade publisher, he directs the Boston firm bearing his name which has earned in five short years an enviable reputation for the production of fine books. The New York Times Book Review called his Specimen Days by Walt Whitman "an edition ... so handsome, so visually arresting, that one is tempted to read this late work of our greatest American poet as if it might be a real book after all." The Christian Science Monitor characterizes Godine's publications as "a tiny but steady trickle of magnificently printed books."
At this year's New England Book Show, five of the six Godine entries took awards. They were three of six winners in the specialized-books category. Godine claims to take the awards "with a grain of salt," contending that the choices rested as much on the judges' breakfasts as the superiority of his books over other quality entries. "The trick is not to get cocky if you win or discouraged if you lose," he says. "Our ambition has always been to produce books which sustain the mind, gratify the eye, and don't offend the purse."
The headquarters for Godine's publishing venture is a sumptuous old Back Bay mansion, where a small, congenial crew - Godine, two designers, a production manager, two in promotion, one editor, and a business manager, all sharing the chief's enthusiasm and his unwavering reverence for craftsmanship - occupy part of the third floor and former "minor servants" quarters on the fourth. The Godine Press, which prints a substantial. portion of Godine publications, occupies an old barn in Brookline.
The list, though ambitious in production standards and experimental in range, is small in numbers, just over 30 titles being offered in the forthcoming catalogue. Of these, 17 are new within the last year; as Godine puts it, "It's expand or perish for the small publisher." Titles are chosen very selectively, with a judicious eye on both content and graphic potential. The balance is important, Godine stresses: "The vast majority of our readers want content, not just a pretty book; but, on the other hand, if they want only to read, say Thoreau, our first published author, they can get a cheap edition anywhere."
Although Godine books list as high as $485 for the elegantly bound deluxe edition of Flora Exotica, a collection of handsome, hand-colored prints of flowering plants with accompanying text, the publisher cherishes his firm's reputation for producing fine books at reasonable prices. More than half of Godine's books are published in paperback as well as hard cover, the editions being precisely the same except for the bindings. One offering, AMedieval Bestiary, with three-color woodcuts, is produced in four separate editions, ranging in price from $7.50 to $50. Godine is particularly pleased with a new series of Chapbooks of work by both new and established poets, meticulously designed and printed at a modest price.
The economics of the publishing trade are risky, and growing riskier by the year, as materials become scarce and costs mount. The maker of books is cousin to another sort of bookmaker in the gamble he takes on every production. "It's a speculative industry combined with a discretionary market," Godine points out. "In what other business must you commit the entire cost of a product with no other assurance than your own judgment and intuition that it will sell?" It's axiomatic in the trade, he says, that of any five books produced, one succeeds, one breaks even, and the others lose. "Our track record on the gamble is good," he says. "We've been lucky."
David Godine's love affair with books started in earned at Dartmouth, where he won a Senior Fellowship for a project on "The Classical Approach to Book Design, Illustration, and Typography," under the direction of Professor Ray Nash. After much of the year abroad, working with Nash, who was on sabbatical leave, at Oxford's Bodleian Library and studying books and bibliography on the Continent, he returned in the spring and. the following summer, finished printing his book Lyric Verse: A Printer's Choice at the Stinehour Press in Lunenburg, Vt., run by Roderick Stinehour '50.
After a time in the Army Reserve, Godine took a master's degree at Harvard - more or less to disprove an early ambition to teach - and then spent a year working with renowned graphic artist Leonard Baskin. In 1969 he established his press and two years later expanded into publishing. He recently became president of Museum Publications of America, an organization formed to promote and market fine books published by 26 participating museums and seven university presses, which operates, with a staff of three, out of Godine's Boston office.
An avid collector as well as printer and publisher, Godine finds books "one of the rare, small comforts in an ungracious age." Discouraged but undismayed by the peripheral part they play in most people's lives, he continues to produce fine volumes to sustain the mind and gratify the eye without offending the purse.
