Head Alien’s Note: An earlier version of this article was first published at blackriders.com on October 23, 2011, under the title “Like a Kid in a Toystore.”

Have I mentioned before that my favourite place at the University of Alberta… one of my five favourite places in the world, in fact… is the Bruce Peel Special Collections? The Peel was my motivation for getting my Master of Arts in English, sparked what became a series of impromptu field trip / workshops with work colleagues when I started working for Engineering at Alberta, and most recently played a key role in pushing me to go back to Library School.

And even during pandemic isolation, it provides ample inspiration from afar for me to (re)start writing about books here in this virtual space.

Back in the Before Times, all I needed to do in order to see, touch, and smell the treasures in this most special of Special Collections was to ask. And I asked often. In the coming weeks and months, I will be looking back and sharing photos and recollections of visits past, which I look forward to switching back to being “live” posts once the restrictions of the present pandemic are lifted. Until then, here it is, the first of my “Fridays at the Peel” retrospectives.

So where to begin? This is one of my favourites: The Four Gospels, published by the Golden Cockerel Press in 1931 and typeset by the remarkable but controversial Eric Gill. The following images and thoughts come originally from a visit to the Peel back in October 2011.

This book is, to me, the epitomy of what a book should be (a debate we can pursue later, I’m sure). Bound in leather and cloth, worn at the corners and spine, the book’s pages are rough and organic… alive somehow… a tangible contrast to today’s clean and mechanically cut volumes. Its size evokes the weightiness of western cultural capital that hearkens back from the first hand-copied Bibles to Gutenberg’s first printed volumes, and extending to hardcovers today. And eighty years after being first published and assembled, this volume has lost none of its power for me. I confess to have been downright giddy when the book appeared, like magic, from the closed stacks in the back of the Peel, placed before me to touch and read eighty years after Gill himself touched these very pages.

Whatever you may personally think of the contents, literary or spiritual, or of Eric Gill, as an artist or as a person… from a purely aesthetic point of view this is a good book. And since we’re in a website that’s all about books, I thought this would be an appropriate sample to show up close. After all, we are definitely about “the word” around here.

As I turn the pages, I am struck by the subtleties, the imperfections, that, ironically, make this book closer to perfect in my mind than the precision of modern digital typography. Handset, each letter on these pages was born of a singular piece of metal, selected and placed one at a time onto a plate. The ink bleeds ever so slightly at the edges of each letter, following minutely along the tangled fibres of the paper, yet restrained by the indentation left by the type, faintly shadowed marks that you can feel under your fingertips. No toner and laser here. More physical. More real.

There’s a deep irony in the basic dilemma of writing about something that is best seen and experienced directly, of sharing two-dimensional digital images of objects that are supremely three-dimensional and analog. But in the absence of the real, sometimes you’ve just got to have the picture, not the thousand words.

But only in the absence.

The ideal is, of course, all four senses, in four dimensions, like a piece of music performed live, no matter how high the ‘fidelity’ of a recording you can achieve. So my intention here is not to replace your experience with a shadow of mine, but hopefully give you some motivation to seek out this piece yourself, one day when we can travel more freely once more. With that in mind, I will plant the seed now that the Bruce Peel Special Collections can be found in the basement of Rutherford Library South on the University of Alberta campus – check here for current hours and procedures for reserving Eric Gill’s Four Gospels, call number BS 2553 A3 1931. And feel free to tell them I sent you. Better yet, let me know when you’re going and I’ll see if I can join you!

Then if and when we do find ourselves in front of this book, we can together take a close and proper look at the pages, the images, the typography. Note the way the illustrations fit the text, fit with the text, fit in the text. Listen to the pages crinkle and crackle. And when we get (back) to the first page of the Book of John, “the beginning” wherein we find “the word,” we can take (another) look for a tiny extra bit of printing… a tiny pair of riders… hidden in the valley of the page. See them?

I have yet to confirm my suspicions with the real experts in the Peel, but I wondered if these exist to make sure the binder got the various signatures* of the book in the right order, a reminder to the actual human that assembled these pages together into a finished volume. They don’t appear on every page, sometimes randomly when they do, sometimes in a seemingly logical sequence over a series of pages, clues to a mystery not even intended to be. 

Something for me to ask about next time I’m in, if I’m not already off looking at another marvel previously hidden on the shelves…

Happy Reading, Future/Past!

– Winston

* A signature is the set of pages you get when you print more than one page on a single sheet of paper, then fold and trim to size. Given that only the bottom and side edges of the pages are rough in the finished book, and given its overall size, we can safely conclude that Gill printed four pages on each side of a full sheet of paper, folded it twice, then trimmed the top edge to free the pages. My name is Winston and I am a book nerd…