What's In A Name?

It is difficult to find a name for a private press that hasn’t already been used. In my library I have books that list hundreds of names that enterprising printers have used to separate their efforts from any other printing firm, be it private or otherwise. In 1960 Elizabeth and Ben Lieberman of the Herity Press assembled and published The First Check-Log of Private Press Names, which listed over a thousand different press names and the year of origin, if known. This was followed by yearly updates, and continues today in an online format at the Briar Press website. I am grateful that these resources were unknown to me 16 years ago when I was searching for a name for my own press.

Having just acquired my first Washington style hand-press, I was consumed with heady thoughts of the the famous private presses from around the turn of the last century. Kelmscott, Doves, Ashendene, Vale, Eragny, Cuala, Village; they all painted (or should I say imprinted) images in my mind of the making of  beautiful books that surely would be in my own future. From William Morris’ stately home on the Thames outside of London, to the barn that housed Frederic Goudy’s first efforts, they all conjured up the magic of  beautiful hand-made books. Never mind that at the time my press was located in an unheated, uninsulated, two-car, brick garage in rural northern Indiana, and winter was coming on with plenty of  lake-effect snow. I wanted to use the name End Grain Press, but discovered that friend John DePol had appropriated that name before I was born. I couldn’t think of any appropriate flora or fauna that hadn’t already been used, and the corn fields and sloughs around my home failed to inspire any lofty apellation.  While I was paging through the only old printing reference book I owned at the time, American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking, published by Howard Lockwood & Co., New York in 1894, I came across the entry of:

      Devil’s Tail - The bar of a hand-press, by which the impression is taken. 

Well, this invoked (in my mind at least) the romance of a Renaissance print shop, of the sooty printer’s assistants called ‘devils’; of hand-made paper, and hand-cast Fraktur types. I took the name under advisement.

Shortly before I left Indiana I had the opportunity to read the back volumes of Bookways, a marvelous periodical that continued to represent to the book-making community what Fine Print had started, which I also had just discovered. One of the early private presses that had captured my imagination, was the Cuala Press, started in 1903 as the Dun Emer Press by Elizabeth Yeats, the sister of the poet William Butler Yeats. In volume 6 of Bookways I found an article by Richard Kuhta about the Cuala Press titled, “On the Breadth of a Half Penny: The Contribution of the Cuala Press to the Irish Literary Renaissance”. At the very beginning of the article is a quote from a 1929 letter to private press historian and writer Will Ransom by Ms. Yeats, describing her reason for not writing a history of the Cuala Press:

       I could never write the history of Cuala - it’s just the history of financial 
       struggle - what we call in Ireland Pulling the Devil by the Tail all the time 
       - or existing On the breadth of a half penny. 

I knew then I had found my press name, the Devil’s Tail Press. What is a private press, but a project that compels its owner to invest all available monies, for presses, for paper, for type, or for that little border or ornament to decorate some future project, with no though of proper recompense? It seemed to fit my ill-formed business model very well.