Jan 22 2020
2 Comments
Copperman's Day, Transitions

Be of Good Cheer

Here it is: Our Copperman’s Day print for 2020. We are both slightly late (Copperman’s Day was a week ago Monday) and it’s also been a while since we last printed one of these annual prints. This time of year can be a little rough on me. My dad had his stroke on MLK, Jr. Day in 2017, and the last Copperman’s Day print I made, which was that year, conveyed the words Wes Hel: an older version of Wassail, the old drinking toast that essentially means Be of Good Health. My small way of helping to insure Dad’s good health. A year later––a year after Dad’s passing––I began setting type for Copperman’s Day, 2018. But I didn’t quite have it in me to print it. Same in 2019. But here we are today, in January 2020. I worked on Copperman’s Day resetting that same type I had begun to set two years ago, finished setting it a day later, and each night after I printed a different color by hand on the Vandercook 4 in our shop. By Friday I was done. I guess you could say this print took three years to make. I like it very much, and I feel like my father approves of it, too, and wants us all to take its advice to heart, and to Be of Good Cheer.

Copperman’s Day falls on the Monday after Epiphany each January. It’s an old Dutch printer’s holiday celebrated mainly by the apprentices, who would have the day off to print whatever they wanted. The resulting prints would be sold for a copper. We sell ours for 300 coppers (3 bucks), but, you know, paper and ink don’t cost what they did centuries ago, and a week’s worth of labor doesn’t cost what it did back then, either. 300 coppers is a real bargain, if you ask me. And we have an additional special running, too: order three or more of any of our letterpress mini prints––all of our Copperman’s Day prints to date, our B Mine Valentines, and our famous Keep Lake Worth Quirky prints––and we’ll take $5 off your domestic order. This, to help balance out our flat rate $8.50 shipping charge, because even though a flat rate shipping charge of $8.50 is pretty damn good, we know it’s not such a bargain if you’re buying just a few small flat paper items. If you’re doing some Valentine shopping, though, or picking up a few other things, we do, as usual, offer free domestic shipping when you spend $50 or more. (Folks in Canada and Mexico and elsewhere on the planet, write us at mail@conviviobookworks.com and we’ll figure something out for you, too.)

Over the course of a week of printing nights, I was accompanied by a sleepy cat always nearby and some pretty wonderful music: Valse de Noël: An Acadian-Cajun Christmas Revels, and Elizabeth Mitchell and friends singing and playing on The Sounding Joy: Christmas Songs In and Out of the Ruth Crawford Seeger Songbook. Copperman’s Day is very much an extension of the Yuletide season for me, tied as it is to Epiphany, and for a couple of guys who just decorated their tree on Christmas night, well… we are subscribing this year to the old tradition of keeping the greenery up until Candlemas. Our tree is still glowing on this cold Lake Worth night, and all here remains calm and bright. The cat is asleep on a wool sweater, and here I am, connecting with all of you. We are, most definitely, of good cheer.

 

Jan 20 2020
4 Comments
St. Agnes Eve

The Honey’d Middle of the Night

La_vigilia_di_San'Agnese

Tonight brings St. Agnes Eve, another old and obscure holiday, and with St. Agnes Eve we begin to set our sights toward the romance that burgeons forth each Valentine’s Day. For the old belief is that on St. Agnes Eve, young girls could expect to see visions of their future loves. I am always fascinated by these old ways of conjuring that incorporate magic spells of sorts, for they hint at the strange bedfellows the Church has kept in its history––especially with old customs that are hard to keep down. And so in this odd dance we honor St. Agnes by casting spells that most certainly have come down to us from the Old Ways––pagan earthbound religions. It is this very sort of thing that would get old Cotton Mather and his Puritan flock all worked up over just about any holiday… Christmas most especially, and, one can easily imagine, St. Agnes Eve. But we are human, after all, and these are our ways, passing customs on generation after generation from time immemorial. I think that’s a wonderful thing, and I don’t think Cotton Mather and I would agree on much of anything.

And so in Italy young girls might go to bed tonight without supper, quite voluntarily. The idea is that this will help them dream of their future husbands. Young girls in Scotland, meanwhile, will go to bed sated, but they may stay up later than usual. There, the custom is to throw grain onto the soil of a field at midnight while reciting the following spell:

Agnes sweet and Agnes fair,
Hither, hither, now repair;
Bonny Agnes, let me see
The lad who is to marry me.

My neighbor’s sister, who lives in Scotland, wrote a couple years ago on this evening to tell me that there in Scotland, Agnes is a common first name, and so is the name Senga––which happens to be Agnes spelled backwards. Perhaps there is some magic even in that. In other places, young girls will be baking cakes with the hope that their future husbands will come and turn them, or they will be walking to bed backwards with the hope that their future husbands will come to them in their dreams, or they will be eating a hard boiled egg before bed, yolk removed, the cavity filled with salt. The hope there, too, is to see their future husband. (With any luck, he’ll be carrying a pitcher of water, as well.)

The poet John Keats wrote, back in 1820, a long poem titled “The Eve of St. Agnes.” It would make fine reading for tonight. It is full of the romance and ghostly apparitions of that period of literature, and it is a poem that will take you some time to get through. Perfect for a cold wintry night like St. Agnes Eve. Here, if you can’t read the poem in its entirety, is the sixth stanza:

They told her how, upon St. Agnes’ Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honey’d middle of the night.
If ceremonies due they did aright,
As, supperless to bed they must retire,
And couch supine their beauties, lily white;
Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require
Of Heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.

Helen Barolini, in her book Festa, which I was lucky enough to stumble upon at a library book sale and which has become one of my favorite books, also writes about the Eve of St. Agnes. Helen’s husband was the writer Antonio Barolini, and for her, the night and its customs are more personal. What she wrote in her book about this night always moves me, and I hope she wouldn’t mind my closing today with her words, describing her fascination with St. Agnes Eve when she was a young girl, intertwined with the bittersweet perspective that comes with age and experience…  all that life brings our way––all its joys, all its sorrows:

And though I fasted and hoped to see my intended as I slept on that eve, I never did picture Antonio Barolini in my imagination or in my dreams. But now I think how strange it is that his death came on January 21, Saint Agnes Eve.

She made an error in the day (January 21 is St. Agnes Day, not St. Agnes Eve), but still, that passage remains for me a poignant one. Our joys, our sorrows, intertwined, like the intimate dance of saints’ days and the old ways that will not die. Everything blends together: religion, custom, old ways and new, all the generations through human history, even oceans at some point in geography meld together. The waters, the people, the customs: we all become one.

 

This was an edited reprint of the Convivio Book of Days published originally on St. Agnes Eve, 2016. The image is of a painting by John Everett Millais, called “The Eve of St. Agnes,” made in 1863, and housed in London, part of the Royal Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Jan 09 2020
4 Comments
Book of Days Calendar, Christmas

Bursting Forth, or Your January Book of Days

Nine days in, and here, finally, is your Convivio Book of Days calendar for January. I won’t even bother to apologize. Eight days late is just the way I am right now. Cover star: the Christmas cactus we neglect all year long, blooming spectacularly since Christmas. How all those magnificent blooms burst forth from those gangly stems is anyone’s guess, but each year it surprises me, and it always reminds me of the scene in The Homecoming when Mrs. Walton, played by the wonderfully quirky Patricia Neal, descends to the basement for apples and while she’s there, discovers her Christmas cactus blooming, too. It is, I think for everyone, a most surprising gift from nature.

In creating this year’s January calendar, I realize we completely missed talking about St. Distaff’s Day, and that is something I am sorry about. It is the great traditional post-Christmas Back to Work day for the women, who, in ages past, would return on the 7th of January to their spinning, but not without a great deal of mischief and merriment from the men, who still were underfoot in the house. What tripped me up this year was forgetting that St. Distaff’s Day is a fixed date, while the traditional Back to Work day for the men is a moveable day: Plough Monday falls on the Monday after Epiphany, which this year is the 13th. That also is Copperman’s Day, the great Dutch printers’ holiday in which apprentices got the day to themselves to work on their own print projects. Perhaps we will do a Copperman’s Day print this year. It’s been a while.

With Epiphany, Christmas has passed. Most traditions have us take the Christmas decorations down after Epiphany, but if you, like we, are still holding on, here is good news: there are traditions in which Christmas ends only with Candlemas at the start of February. As for us, our tree is still thirsty and drinking water daily, we’ve just polished off some roasted chestnuts and mulled wine, and Christmas music from the Baltimore Consort is in the air as I sit and type this on the couch, next to the glowing tree. I guess we are following the Candlemas tradition.

Your January Book of Days calendar is, as usual, a printable PDF, so you can print it and pin it to a bulletin board or tape it to the fridge. It’s a good companion to this blog, and a daily reminder that we wish you all good things these winter days.

 

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