Happy birthday, Maurice Darantiere! Joyce folks are rightly grateful for the heroic work he did printing Ulysses from Joyce’s messy drafts & proofs, but Darantiere did a lot more than that for modernist literature. Boring printing thread, go! https://twitter.com/johnstonglenn/status/1281595009930854402

The Darantiere printing house was set up by his father in 1870, though Maurice ‘transform[ed] Dijon into a place of creation and avant-garde culture
between 1920 and 1928’, according to J-M Rabaté. The shop burned down in the 50s sadly, along with a lot of modernist history.

Darantiere got the job printing Ulysses for Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co in 1922 because he’d been the printer for her friend Adrienne Monnier’s Paris bookshop since 1915, back when some bookshops had their own exclusive printers. Two cool women & their history-changing shops:

Darantiere printed important volumes of Valéry, Claudel, Larbaud & other experimental French writers for Monnier. The same year he printed Ulysses, he was busy with a complete edition of Molière. Here’s a lovely volume of Picabia (also a printing artist) he did in 1920:

After Ulysses, Darantiere’s biggest contribution to Anglophone modernism was probably printing for Robert McAlmon & Bryher’s imprint Contact Editions, including major work by Mina Loy, Stein, HD, Hemingway, and others.

Gertrude Stein’s 925-page The Making of Americans for Contact Editions in 1925 led to a longer working relationship between Darantiere & Stein, who had a keen interest in printing & went back to him for her Plain Editions series in the 1930s, after he’d moved to Paris.

Darantiere also took on printing challenges like Djuna Barnes’ Ladies Almanack (1928) and important modernist magazines in the later 1920s, like Ezra Pound’s The Exile and Bryher’s Close Up.

My own interest in Darantiere started during my PhD on William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All, which he printed for Contact in 1923. Ulysses had been banned in the US, so most of the 300 copies of this smaller blue book were destroyed by customs when they arrived.

I’ve never seen a first edition Spring and All (the British Library copy is missing), but the 2011 @NewDirections facsimile is a nice relic. I’m surprised no one’s done a Ulysses facsimile. But yeah, printers are cool. They should be more visible in publishing history & future.