So I'll open up the floor for any questions, comments?
Yes.
Speaking of being all in it together, questions?
And I will be athletic.
Yeah.
[LAUGHING]
I have a question [MUTED].
I just want to say, I think your book is fabulous
and I think it's a fantastic expression of Whitman's verse.
And which leads me to my question.
I first read Leaves of Grass in the Modern Library giant
version illustrated by Valenti Angelo.
Yeah.
You mentioned Rockwell Kent's illustrations.
Yeah.
A number of different artists have undertaken this work.
Oh, yeah.
You couldn't be more different from Angelo.
I wonder--
Yeah.
--what you think about the various treatments
and how they affected your approach.
They didn't really affect my approach at all,
to be honest with you.
Because there's no way in hell I could ever
hope to do anything on that level.
I just-- I have to be the best me I can be.
I mean, to try to match that is kind
of dooming yourself to failure.
Your main concern is to make sure
that you're doing something that comes naturally
to you, that's coming out of you naturally,
which is also part and parcel of what
you should be doing with something like Whitman
in any way.
So for me, it was never, I can never
hope to compete or try to surpass those guys.
They were consummate masters in their craft.
So that wasn't even something.
My own incompetence made that a non-issue.
Let's put it that way.
[LAUGHING]
Anybody else?
Just a couple of quick--
was there any scheme to your choice of the background
color on the pages?
And a typographic question.
Yeah.
On the original edition, what is with that period
at the end of the title?
At the end of the title?
The original 1855 edition, I noticed
it said there was a period at the end of the title.
That's because that's a typo in the original.
[LAUGHING]
Yeah.
It is.
Yeah.
I've talked to Whitman experts, and yeah.
But each individual copy of the original 1855 version
is typographically different because commas and things
like that were always dropping out.
They were getting loose as they were printing
and they were falling out of the cages.
And so if you looked at every single copy,
you'd probably find something that was a little bit off.
But yeah.
Was there a scheme to the background color?
I'm sorry to ask you a question--
Well, yeah.
Like I said before, it's something
to hold the entire work together, really.
Because if you keep repeating those three colors,
it brackets the entire thing, even though stylistically
you're kind of moving around widely.
But also there's the added dimension of the fact
that Whitman grew up by the ocean.
And these are Yankee colors.
These are nautical colors.
And they also stand up to each other equally.
Not one is more dominant than the other.
So that was pretty important too.
So all these little things I kind of thought out.
I had an awful lot of access to archivists, historians,
and librarians in the Philadelphia area
who were experts on Whitman, one of which
I dedicated the book to, who unfortunately passed away
before the book came out.
He died of cancer.
But his collection of Whitman ephemera and letters
are now in the permanent collection
at my old Alma Mater, which is the State
College in Southern New Jersey.
So his legacy, like Whitman's, lives on.
Yeah.
Anybody else?
Another question?
Yes.
I just wanted to say, a lot of visual artists
I know don't put as much work into lettering and typography.
I'm just wondering where that interest started for you.
I assume it was before this project.
I've been doing, I've been a graphic designer
and illustrator for 25 years.
So I've designed typefaces in the past.
It's just part and parcel of the job, really.
I mean, you can't really communicate without type,
so at some point you're going to confront type.
So I'm not a real, in the classic sense,
I'm not like a true illustrator because I
don't work solely with imagery.
I'm also very concerned with text and type and layout
and how all that kind of comes together.
That's my main concern.
Like I said before, I don't really
feel like this is an illustration project so much
as a graphic design project.
It's just-- it's a design project
that I happen to have to use illustrated elements for it.
And I just happen to be able to supply this.
This kind of illustration is really rough,
sort of moderately incompetent style--
[LAUGHING]
--wouldn't have worked if it was a Dickens
collection or a Tennyson, or anything like that.
But because it's kind of clunky, it just
seems to suit Whitman's aesthetic better.
So it was just a good way for it to click.
Yeah.
Anybody else?
In instances where the text or specific phrases in the text
kind of curve around or maybe parts of some of the words
are placed vertically so that a phrase doesn't go strictly
left to right, top to bottom, I noticed some
of those in the PowerPoint.
I was just curious if you could talk a little bit
about how you made those spatial choices as to, oh, well, right
here I think I'm going to put this word sideways
or this word is going to curve.
Oh, boy.
That was on such a case by case basis for each page.
I did towards the end get pretty good at trying
to figure out how much space I had for any body of text.
There were points where I had a half a page.
And I knew how to--
I knew how it was going to have to fill that spread.
And I knew also it kind of eliminated
a lot of options for me as far as other imagery goes too.
Because I knew that, well, I got about 12 lines
to put into this spread.
I can't really do what I really wanted
to do with an image with this.
So that's out.
So I got to come up with something else.
So, yeah, it was like a really problematic sort of thing
throughout the whole book.
It was really vexing at times.
But yeah.
I could look at it and I would have to go back.
And sometimes I would just have to start from scratch.
Just throw the entire thing out again, and then just start
anew.
Yeah.
And then I was behind schedule and that was a real bear.
[LAUGHING]
Yeah.
Time for one more question.
Any more questions?
Yes.
Here I come athletically over to you.
[LAUGHING]
Thank you so much for coming to Tucson.
This has been great.
Can you tell us how you and Tin House
hooked up on this project, because it seems like such
a wonderful, wonderful match.
I used to do some contributions to their literary journal
for years.
And then my agent and I were batting back and forth
projects that might actually be of interest or something
that we wanted to try.
And this one just kind of clicked with Tony at Tin House.
And we started having a discussion,
going back and forth whether or not I could really pull it off.
And those guys are really, really approachable.
I just call them on the phone and say, hey listen,
I got an idea.
And that's what I love about Tin House.
Because they're large enough to really put
a lot of muscle behind their books, in terms of promotion,
and that sort of thing, but they're small enough
to want to take chances too.
And I can't thank them enough, just like I can't
thank the Poetry Center enough.
Yeah, so.
Thank you, Allen.
A round of applause for Allen Crawford!
[APPLAUSE]