Limited Editions

Time-honored ways of making books have inescapably given way to new methods of production. Why set an entire text manually from metal-cast type, impress the type on paper, and then pull printed sheets one by one from a hand press when the work can be done by let-your-fingers-do-the-walking computering? Letterpress equipment, for Gutenberg’s sake, isn’t even being manufactured anymore. On the other hand, such dubious accomplishments of modern technology as perfect binding and shrink-wrapping do exist. Brave New World of printing, here you are to stay. But for those of us who still value books as enduring objects of beauty, it is reassuring to remember that there are still a few smudge-fingered anachronisms around.

The Yolla Bolly Press in Northern California’s Covelo is of this maverick minority. Over the past decade Yolla Bolly has published fine press editions of, among others, the works of John Steinbeck, D. H. Lawrence. M. F. K. Fisher and Robinson Jeffers. THE HOUSE THAT JEFFERS BUILT by Garth and Donnan Jeffers ($245; 175 numbered copies; cloth with slipcase; 74 pp.; illustrated with photographs), their latest limited edition, is a two-volume set of memoirs by Jeffers’ sons growing up in Carmel when Jeffers was engaged in the Herculean labor of building with his hands the stone house that would shelter his family.

The narratives describe how Jeffers rolled boulders from the beach up to Carmel Point, how this most private of men planted thousands of trees around his property to keep the world at bay, how he added a 40-foot Gaelic stone tower by hoisting giant rocks via block and tackle up to the isolated heights from which he could observe circling hawks, compose brooding poems and fly the American flag.

Previously unpublished photographs of the Jeffers family and of architecture in progress counterpoint the twin texts. These sepia-rendered duotones superbly invoke the bucolic nature of what is now called Jeffers Country in the quiet years before the Scenic Drive would set thousands of cars in motion across the entire Monterey Peninsula. The books’ covers are decorated with labels printed from wood-blocks of Tor House and Hawk Tower. Like their subject these are handsome and sturdy volumes--built to last.

Another way of bookmaking (by a publisher who, anomalously, is also located in Covelo--population 1,500) is through the honorable (and politically correct) use of recycled, acid-free papers. This illustrated, limited edition of FAITH IN A SEED by Henry D. Thoreau (Island Press/Shearwater Books; $100; 600 numbered copies; cloth with slipcase; 285 pp.; illustrated) grows out of a manuscript that reposes in the New York Public Library. Written in journal form toward the end of his life, Thoreau’s long and sober account of closely observed field trips in his own neck of the woods lacks the moral imprimatur of his major Transcendentalist works such as “On Civil Disobedience,” which would influence Martin Luther King, and other passive resisters a century hence and “Walden,” the ostensible account of its author’s voluntary removal from home and friends to a nearby pond in quest of solitude in the midst of wildlife, which in fact is an inner search by Thoreau for the essence of his own nature.

While little such philosophical authority is to be found in “Faith in A Seed,” a true Thoreauvian preciseness of observation and phrase informs its pages. Convincingly and feelingly articulated is the author’s espousal of the then-disputed proposition that seeds are not spontaneously generated, but moved to new locations by animals, birds and winds. Thoreau’s scientific writings will engage those who wish to walk forests with him on paper, but their narrowness of subject matter may cause a few impatient readers to side with the character in the Carver/Altman film, “Short Cuts,” who bristles: “Now, don’t get environmental on me.”

Two gift editions of varying quality bring us full circle with regard to the relative physical permanence or evanescence of books. Harcourt Brace’s 50th Anniversary edition of THE LITTLE PRINCE ($50; cloth, boxed; 97 pp.; illustrated) makes Saint Exupery’s inspirational parable of human interdependency available to readers in a superior format. This edition features several unused Saint Exupery illustrations and facsimiles of pages from the holograph manuscript, which is in the Pierpont Morgan Library collection. With the exception of a superfluous, tight-fitting gift box that inhibits the reader from perusing the book at will, this is an attractive production that will last to greet another generation of children as well as adults.

The giddying success of Michael Crichton’s 1990 bestseller and the recent hit movie, has encouraged Alfred A. Knopf to bring out a signed gift edition of JURASSIC PARK ($35; cloth; 461 pp.; illustrated) whose gaudy illustrations of laboratory-grown raptors are better suited to a science-fiction comic book. My review copy arrived with a cocked spine, indicative of the use of second rate materials and careless production methods. The book’s rear hinge is already unhinging at its glued juncture with the cover. The insubstantial, ill-fitting plastic dust jacket which bears printed matter slides off the book when it is handled. This from a publisher renowned for well-made trade books through the years. Within a short time copies of this book will have gone the way of, well, dinosaurs.