Small Press Saturday: The Juvenilia Press
Happy Saturday!
This week we are taking a bit of a personal twist for Small Press Saturday, with an introduction to an academic press founded at the University of Alberta in 1994 and now based out of the University of New South Wales – The Juvenilia Press. The Juvenilia Press publishes early writings by children and adolescents, many (although not all) of whom went on to become well-known authors as adults.
Curious to read a story written by Jane Austen when she was 14? Look no further…
A selection of Juvenilia Press titles published between 1995 and 2020, all designed by our resident Head Alien.
My connection to the Juvenilia Press began in 1995, when I took a graduate course on Jane Austen from Juliet McMaster, the founder of the press. A few years previous, Juliet had assigned one of her classes a project to learn about scholarly editing and annotating by working on Jack & Alice, a short story Austen had written at age 13. It turned out so well they ended up printing copies, and soon thereafter a tiny press was born.
For our class, we got assigned Austen’s Love & Freindship (sic, but we’ll come back to that), on which I ended up sharing textual editing duties with a classmate by the name of Christopher Wiebe. Textual editing involves, at its roots, looking at the original handwritten manuscript (and earlier published editions, if available), and making a call on what would be the “best” version to carry forward into a print edition.
Do you fix punctuation or spelling errors? Do you insert missing words that were perhaps left out in the haste of writing? How do you translate handmade edits on the manuscript? What if there are more than one version of the text floating around?
While doing this work, I also signed up for a workshop that following summer, a design in publishing workshop at the Banff Centre for the Arts, for which I needed to bring along a project to work on during the week. The handful of previous Juvenilia Press books having been put together with a word processor by the English Department front office, I asked Juliet if I could bring Love & Freindship along as my project, to give it a proper design.
She agreed, and I’ve been designing books for them ever since.
The cover of Love & Freindship by Jane Austen, with Austen’s original spelling kept intact.
I joke that Christopher and I almost came to physical blows over whether or not to “regularize” the spelling, meaning to modernize it to our standards rather than keep Austen’s original. I joke, but our discussions got quite heated at times, and it came down to a class vote to settle the question. In the end, I reluctantly had to concede that, in order to stay as true to the original as possible, and with the goal of producing a scholarly version of the text as a learning tool, the right thing to do was to keep Austen’s original spelling.
And that is how my very first design project out of my newly launched freelance design company, Black Riders Design, came out with a giant “typo” on the front cover.
And also how I almost got into a fist fight with one of Rudy Wiebe’s children… that’s my story and I’m sticking with it.
I ended up taking two books to my Banff Centre workshop, Love & Freindship and also Branwell’s Blackwood’s Magazine, a piece by the “misfit” brother of the Brontë sisters. Young designer that I was, not only did I end up with the “typo” on the cover of my first project, my first two designs ended up looking like ripoffs of National Geographic and Time magazines.
Covers for Love & Freindship by Jane Austen and Branwell’s Blackwood’s Magazine by Branwell Brontë.
Fortunately for me, they kept asking me to design books for them anyways, even when Juliet retired in 2001 and handed the reins over to Christine Alexander, based out of the University of New South Wales. Thanks to the magic of the early internet, I was able to continue designing books with them despite the distance, with the added challenge and curiosity of having to switch between letterhalf and A5 formats depending on whether the books were to be printed in Australia or Canada.
It’s quite a thrill to be able to say you’ve designed books by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll and Robert Lewis Stephenson, Charlotte Brontë and Louisa May Alcott. But I’m proudest of the volumes by Canadian authors.
Covers for Embryo Words and Colors of Speech by Margaret Laurence.
The cover of Early Voices, featuring work by Greg Hollingshead, Carol Shields, Aritha van Herk, and Rudy Wiebe.
Cover of Sunbeams from a Golden Machine by Marian Engel.
My latest volume for the Juvenilia Press, as well as one of my earliest, are both by Margaret Atwood. A Quiet Game, published in 1997, is still one of my favourite designs. And published in 2020 during the pandemic, Early Writings had a virtual launch at which Atwood spoke, a story and video of which are available online.
Covers for Margaret Atwood’s A Quiet Game and Other Early Works, published 1997, and Early Writings, published 2020. Note the slightly different print sizes as the one was printed in Canada and the other in Australia.
If you’re interested in the writing process, or more background on a favourite author, or just some interesting little books to add to your collection – often illustrated by the original author or with new illustrations by a member of the project – do go check out the current catalogue of available Juvenilia Press volumes.
Happy Reading!
– Winston
