Lessons in Printing
a memoir
A printer’s daughter explores the decline of her father and of his craft of letterpress printing
In the middle of her college years Klancy de Nevers' father began to hear voices. Her reaction to his breakdown was not what you would expect from a “well-brought-up” girl. At a time when housewives waxed floors, ironed sheets and washed woodwork, the mentally ill were often warehoused, or tranquilized and sent home to fend for themselves. Shielded by her mother from the reality of his condition, de Nevers willingly looked away, and didn’t mourn when he died. In Lessons in Printing, exploring evidence carefully preserved by her family, she revisits her father’s life and reconsiders her own responses. The result is a meditative memoir, a journey from scorn to compassion, from guilt to forgiveness.
Now available at The Kings's English, Weller Book Works and Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City, UT and from the publisher, Scattered Leaves Press.
“In Klancy Clark de Nevers’ unflinching Lessons In Printing, the life-lessons are often hard—the sorts we recall our parents referencing when they asked, ‘Did you learn your lesson?’ As with this memoir, such lessons only take on a regretful clarity much later. Along a path of meticulous prose, we are brought into a printer’s shop and are taught the lessons of a fading craft and a fading craftsman, Klancy’s small-town editor-father. Over the course of this memoir, both the printing craft and the printing craftsman diminish—recede in their own ways. But neither are lost. This lovely memoir reaches into a dim landscape of regret and lovingly reassembles its lessons in printing—not as museum objects but in a way that breathes new life into the ghosts and spirits of their past.””
