Times Literary Supplement Review: A Custodian of Memory by Michael Caines

The American Kathy Whalen and the Briton Graham Moss met in the summer of 1998 at Bryn Mawr College. He was visiting and she was working there as a rare books librarian. They discovered that they both had A Shropshire Lad by heart: “she started, I finished it”. Married the following year, the couple became partners in the Incline Press, which Moss had been building up in Oldham for several years, while Whalen worked at Chetham’s Library in Manchester and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The ensuing two decades of letterpress work yielded some exceptionally handsome handmade publications, including Carolyn Trant’s biography Art for Life: The story of Peggy Angus, various poetic chapbooks and A Line by Suyeon Kim, an accordion book just shy of 17 feet in length.

Memento Mori: Memento vivere commemorates Whalen, who died of cancer in 2020, through an extraordinary exhibition of Incline’s art. This typographical commonplace book, as Moss terms it, comprises a series of fifty-one double spreads: as the reader turns the page, a specimen of some piece of printing appears on the recto; the verso offers a running commentary in the form of biographical and technical information (“this notice is set in monotype Bembo, roman, 24, 18, and 14 point sizes”). Set in Caslon and accompanied by Bert Eastman’s original linocuts is an essay Whalen wrote for Matrix about Indian toys. Set in the much more recent typeface Hungry Dutch is an excerpt from a co-written essay, “An Asylum for Scraponisms”, about the 150 scrapbooks held at Chetham’s. There are many such exercises in inventive collaboration here.

“Books, their content, structure, and making, their care and conservation, were her passion and lasting delight”, Moss writes of his late wife. Yet this commonplace book speaks of a continuity between the artefacts that are conventionally classed as books and the ephemera of which Incline has also printed a great deal. (See also Moss’s Gallimaufry of Ephemera, 2018.) The ephemeral class of production spans bookmarks, handbills and labels for jam jars (“Emergency Rations / Marmalade”), as well as a notice designed for Whalen’s NHS care team, in the last year of her life, to display in their cars when they visited, in the hope of appeasing any passing traffic wardens. “No one got a ticket.”

There is no denying this book’s intense concentration on Whalen’s last year, or indeed escaping the sense of being personally touched once you discover that the ink used in this book incorporates a unique ingredient: “Her ashes … for books are always the best custodian[s] of memories”. Memento Mori: Memento vivere – which won a judges’ choice award at the Fine Press Book Fair in Oxford in 2022 – comes elegantly bound and signed by Moss, and is limited to an edition of 175 copies. It speaks of the “time that will not come again”, in A. E. Housman’s phrase, and pays heartfelt homage to “things in bloom”.

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