KIT ROBINSON'S THE DOLCH STANZAS

I was finally able to replace my well-worn photocopy of Kit Robinson's The Dolch Stanzas with the real McCoy. You can also get it from the Whale Cloth Press website at: http://www.whalecloth.org/ or in Kit's new selected, The Messianic Trees. It was published by Barrett Watten's This Press and printed at the West Coast Print Center in 1976 in an edition of 300 copies. 

At a glace, I thought it was typeset in Gill Sans because Watten used that typeface for Alan Davies's Name (I once ran into Alan at The Strand when I was reading Robert Speaight's The Life of Eric Gill and he told me that he had actually read the same book at Watten's recommendation). Gill Sans is a humanist face designed in 1926. The strokes are almost equal. Another definitive characteristic is the capital M (beautifully displayed on the cover of NAME) which is based on the proportions of a square with the middle strokes meeting at the center.  Hermann Zapf's Optima came along about 25 years later. Also humanist, the strokes swell slightly and are of variant weights--at times they almost defy their 'sans status' as if the serifs were about to blossom. This illusion may have something to do with my affinity for Zapf's Palatino which Optima resembles in many ways--especially the caps.