“Only daily-work art is worth a button”

“‘Only daily-work art is worth a button,’ said [W.R.] Lethaby. ‘The craftsman must be a workman,’ said [Edward] Johnston, and [Eric] Gill, in his writings, never ceased to proclaim that the artist must be an ordinary man and not ‘a hot-house plant.’”

—Priscilla Johnston, from Edward Johnston, 1958. W.R. Lethaby was Johnston’s primary professor at the Royal College of Art. Eric Gill was a friend and fellow student.

reds and blues and greens

“The most remarkable of [Edward Johnston’s recurrent childhood] dreams was one that he came to connect with the lifelong fascination exerted upon him by the mysterious recurrences in mathematical series. He dreamed that he climbed a great brass chain till he found himself in a scale pan. There he saw the Trinity throned in glory, surrounded by the Apostles. Their robes were of the most intense and brilliant colours, reds and blues and greens. The whose scene was one of the greatest splendour and yet, as he gazed at it, he had the felling that, wonderful as it was, this was not quite it, not the ultimate and final vision. With this thought he looked up and there was another great brass chain. Again he climbed and reached another scale pan and again there was the vision but even more brilliant than before. The colours filled him with delight yet still he knew that this was not quite what he sought. So he continued to climb up and up and each time the vision increased in brilliance until at last he reached a scale pan where the colours almost vanished in pure light and he knew that he had reached his goal.

Afterwards, when he began to be fascinated by the illuminations in early manuscripts he found again what seemed the very colors that he had seen in his dream, and recognized them with a thrill of joy.”

—Priscilla Johnston, from Edward Johnston, 1958. Priscilla was the daughter of the great calligrapher and type designer. (You may not know his name, but if you read English you have seen his type and felt his influence.)

a skyblue day

“. . . it was a skyblue day in December sixty-nine (the nineteen silent). . . .

A skyblue Plymouth, with the sun in its tailfins, sped past young rice fields and old rubber trees on its way to Cochin.”

—Arundhati Roy, from The God of Small Things, 1997. (The first ellipsis is hers, it opens a chapter. The second is mine.)

black cat—shaped holes in the Universe

“With the certitude of a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured the twins that there was no such thing in the world as a black cat. He said that there were only black cat—shaped holes in the Universe.”

—Arundhati Roy, from The God of Small Things, 1997.

Glass beads

“[Glass] was probably accidentally discovered by Egyptian or Mesopotamian potters while they were firing their wares. The first glass was in the form of a glaze, a mixture of sand and minerals fused onto the surface of stone or ceramic objects in an oven, producing a hard, shiny, outer layer. Later it was found that if the glaze were thick enough, it would stand by itself—the first solid glass. . . . Glass beads were highly prized in the ancient East. Some were mounted in gold, like precious stones—and some have even been used, in parts of the world, as money.”

—from The Corning Glass Center, published by Corning Glass Works in 1958.

obsidian

“Glass itself is older than man, as old as the earth. The first glass was fused in the fires that built the continents, natural glass formed from masses of silica by volcanic action; chemically, it is very much the same as manufactured glass. A most common natural glass is obsidian; there is an entire mountain of it in Yellowstone Park. Usually black and translucent, obsidian can easily be chipped or flaked into long, sharp pieces. Over 25,000 years ago, men fashioned these pieces into weapons and tools; in time, mirrors, jewelry, and even ceremonial masks were carved or ground from this hard natural glass.”

—from The Corning Glass Center, a beautiful hard-cover souvenier book published by Corning Glass Works in 1958. Penned by perhaps the first anonymous corporate technical writer in New York State history—no writer or editor is mentioned.

wings of mellow green

“The green woodpecker flying up and down
With wings of mellow green and speckled crown”

—John Clare, the opening lines of The Green Woodpecker’s Nest. The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse, edited by Tom Paulin, 1988.

A fashionless Delight

“It’s like the Light
A fashionless Delight
It’s like the Bee
A dateles Melody”

—Emily Dickenson, “It’s like the Light”. The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse, edited by Tom Paulin, 1988.

my scarlet ladybird

“Come back, my scarlet ladybird,
Back from far away;
I weary of my dolly wife,
My wife that cannot play.

She’s such a senseless wooden thing
She stares the livelong day;
Her wig of gold is stiff and cold
And cannot change to grey.”

—Christina Rossetti, from I caught a little ladybird. The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse, edited by Tom Paulin, 1988.

the greene fresh fading withered rose

“Like to the thund’ring tone of unspoke speeches, . . .
Or like the gray freeze of a crimson cat, . . .
Or like a shadow when the sunne is gone, . . .

Like to the greene fresh fading withered rose, . . .
Even such is man, who dy’d and then did laffe
To see such strange lines writ on’s Epitaph.”

—Richard Corbett, from Nonsense. The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse, edited by Tom Paulin, 1988.