Seattle Press on Line - It Was Not Always So

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It Was Not Always So

By Stephen Herold

May 23, 2002 -- The best moments of our lives are when a wide range of connections suddenly flashes into our minds, and the world suddenly glows. Sometimes it is only a smell, or sound or light in the sky, and we are instantly transported back into that original moment, even if fleetingly like a paradise we can touch but not keep.

For me, one of those moments is whenever I take up a copy of Eliot Porter's In Wildness is the Preservation of the World, the book that turned our monochrome Kansas books into full color Oz.

Today, with our media- and communications-frenzy supported by electronic magic, it is impossibly hard to look back even 30 years and realize that communications consisted of books, radio and a juvenile TV system. Books didn't animate, pop-up, have color or even many illustrations. We were locked into a Gutenbergian typographic efficiency that made even the thought of "more" too expensive to imagine. And we believed them because all art and production was distant, complicated and expensive.

Ansel Adams showed us a grand, harsh and forceful nature in his photos that caps the imagination of pioneer painters like Cole and Bierstadt. We admired his prints and stood in awe, but we knew that they were his interpretation since the world was in color, and you never felt like hugging a formal Ansel Adams print. Yet then, high "art" photography was always the pure black and white of ancient photographs, not these upstart "chrome" kids from the film companies. Eliot Porter worked with these kids, and with the eye and skill of Adams, and he spilled paint not only into photography but into book printing, as well.

Part of a series by the Sierra Club, and the first mass awareness of the Club, In Wildness is the Preservation of the World was the title that captured the imagination of a flower powered generation. In a time when sales of 5-6 copies of a title a year was good for a small store, I sold 50--even at a higher price. Although the series came out in hardback at high prices in 1962, it was only with the daring paperback editions of Ian Ballantine in 1967 that they caught on. They were bigger than paperbacks had been, with glossy paper and great printing, and we wanted it and bought it and got the message. Ian and Eliot Porter proved that Gutenbergian mechanics was a sham.

Penguin books had pioneered the full color paperback cover a few years before, discarding their "classic" orange, brown and blue monotony, but In Wildness is the Preservation of the World was bigger and more so, and so completely in harmony with the interior pages. Taking Thoreau as his voice, Porter excerpted lyrical passages from Walden and created color portraits of nature to match them. The task is worthy, the job well done, and the match between word and print near perfect. Page after page of nature moves past you and the spell is complete, on a scale seldom used before. I have since walked and driven all around New England, and I can only conclude that in my best visions Porter got there first.

The immediate fallout was imitation, but the real result was a quickening move to the full colors of the real world that now also reside on our $100 inkjet printers. Color was let loose, raised to maturity and placed in our hands. All because of a far sighted publisher and a brilliant photographer who also respected the power of words.

Stephen Herold operates the Wit's End Bookstore in Fremont.

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