The Old-Time Printer by Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens) - 1988

Baltimore: Xavier Press, 1988. Taddeo, Paolo. vi, 18pp. Samuel Clemens's account of his formative time spent as a printer's apprentice, presented as a speech at a dinner for New York printers. Illustrated with a frontispiece portrait of Clemens and a vignette depicting a compositor setting type. This copy is in a designer binding by the Italian-British bookbinder Paolo Taddeo. Onlays of salmon, grey, and black morocco form the shape of a piece of lead type, outlined in palladium-leaf tooling, creating a symmetrical design on each of the covers. The artist chose the letter H for his design, citing the letter's visual stability and steadiness, "with both feet firmly planted on the ground." As someone whose first language is Italian, he also notes that his selection of the letter H is "controversial," since it is not pronounced in his native language and gives him difficulty in spoken English. However, he writes, "in my mother tongue it's a letter of vital importance in the way that it changes the… Read More