On the occasion of the Alcuin Society's AGM, June 14, 2010, a loosely historical, visual telling of Duthies’ long life and love affair with books, fine printing and reading : Duthies BY Design
Thank you to the Alcuin Society and Howard Greaves for inviting me tonight as it has given me an occasion to make another stab at sorting out the haphazard archive of 53 years of Duthie’s ephemera. It is a fitting time, here at the end of Duthies bookstores in Vancouver, the end of the long denouement from 1999.
My father Bill Duthie always admired fine design; One of the first things he did when he opened his first store in 1957 was to invite Robert Reid to design his letterhead, and the 1st catalogue of books.
Then along came Tak Tanabe and the bookmarks began.
The early era of Bob Reid, Tak Tanabe, Chris Bergthorson and Hugh Michaelson was clearly a fine era and an era of fine presswork. It was a classic ‘modern’ time with typography and design breaking out in new playful ways ,reflecting more freedom, more international stylistic influence, and a new interest in old printing techniques.
Typographical design, specifically, Bob Reid’s original design of the back to back lower case d and b duthie books led to an amusing letter from Alvin Balkind:
Mr. Duthie: This is a letter of protest! As a guardian of Public Morals you have a responsibility to the people at large & when someone of your stature publicly displays two testicles & a penis over the entrance of your shop, I believe we have a right to protest...
The 2nd decade of Duthie 1967 - 1977 occurred during the happenings of the sixties and the bookmarks reflected those psychedelic times. I think my father was distracted then with more stores, staff and books and he did not have time anymore to devote to commissioning unique, delicate, original, art bookmarks, so he delegated the design and printing of the bookmarks to King Anderson who assembled the Book of Bookmarks: 1957 - 1977 published for the 20th anniversary.
In 1977 Bill had a brain tumour and I came back from Egypt, where I had been studying Arabic - in part for typographical (and calligraphic) reasons, to help out in the bookstore during his convalescence. Almost immediately I took over the bookmark job. A friend of the family, artist Mary Frazee, took me to meet Don Atkins and thus began my 2 decades of printing bookstore ephemera and Don became our increasingly strained, stained and sainted printer.
In 1984 Bill died and Crispin designed and printed a beautiful memorial bookmark with the quote from Virgil (Littera Scripta Manet) that we later adopted as the Duthies' slogan and reproduced on our bags, cash register receipts and 2 cube vans that raced around between our then many branches.
Between the years 1977 - 1999 I commissioned dozens of artists, designers, printmakers and fine presses for 4 sets of 4 bookmarks per year for 22 years (approximately 320) and printing about 10,000,000 bookmarks altogether.
In 1981 we launched a modest magazine of book reviews called the Reader. The first issue - was pretty crudely designed (by me) (looked like a man masturbating - someone commented) but it established the intention of the magazine to review serious good books. Various people contributed, including my mother (Mary Macneill), Hugh Pickett, John Hulcoop, and my dear old friend Jean Louis Brachet.
We were putting it together with waxed type on light tables in long late night hours. I bullied the publishers to advertise books I thought worthwhile and we persuaded other bookstores across the country to distribute it, which they did, but they didn’t otherwise participate in the review process and some years later we relaunched the Reader as The New Reader and distributed it just through Duthies.
The look of the Readers improved steadily; various friends and colleagues worked on the magazine with me, writers contributed reviews, and publishers supported it with advertising. In 1994 we got our first Apple computer and that made producing the Reader much easier - and started me on my lifetime Apple love affair. We published the Reader quarterly for 18 years, sometimes with an extra Children’s Reader.
During the 80’s I fell in with the antiquarian book world in the person of Bill Hoffer - and he introduced me to the world of fine art printing and broadsides. In 1981 we curated a show of broadsides for which I published Taboo Man, poem by Susan Musgrave, graphic by Victoria Oginsky and designed by Robert Bringhurst. and later more sedately - a CP Cavafy poem - printed by Barbarian Press.
Though I had many house designers over the years, 2 of the best were Barbara Hodgins, who designed our classic black Duthie bag with Latin motto, and, in the latter years, Stephen Gregory who did everything - for new stores, lecture series, the Readers, newsletters, on-line design (the first real graphical-interface online bookstore --Litterrascape --launched 1994) ads, promos, a veritable blizzard of printed ephemera.
In 1997 Duthie’s celebrated its 40th anniversary with a real gala gala doo at the big store on Georgia and Granville. IT was quite a party, we had the HP Lovecraft band in bug costumes, food by all the best Vancouver chefs, way too much booze - as always, a Duthie tradition. For the anniversary I engaged Bob Reid, just returned to Vancouver, to design a history/album of 40 years of Duthie Books in Vancover. But in 1998 began several years that were certainly 'annus horribilis' and the book, though nearly finished did not get published. Duthies came under increasing pressure through 1998 and 1999 from Chapters Indigo and then with the loss of the BC ferry contract to Pattison, Duthies restructured radically to just the 1 store at 4th ave. The beginning of the long end.
In 2007, happily, The Alcuin Society published Duthie’s Bookmarks, designed by Bob Reid, assembled by Howard Greaves, and a very handsome book it is. Tonight I would like to say, formally, to the Alcuin Society, to Howard and Bob and everyone who helped on the book, thank you for making this wonderful book.
PS Thank you to Bob Reid for printing a lovely booklet of some of the pages from my blog.
