• 1 In “‘Thank Maurice’: A Note About Maurice Darantière,” Jean-Michel Rabaté explains that the 1928 su (...)
• 2 Established in Quétigny, a suburb of Dijon, the Darantière printing press underwent a court-ordered (...)

1The careers of Anglo-American writers living in France in the first decades of the twentieth century bear a remarkable debt to the Darantière press, a small yet well-established printer who operated in Dijon from 1870 to 19281 and whose name continued to uphold its printing legacy in Burgundy for close to 150 years. There have been various successors to the original press since 1928, after which time the Darantière family relinquished direct ownership. The most recent commercial offshoot associated with the Darantière name, one of the printers entrusted with Gallimard’s prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade collection, was established in the outskirts of Dijon before closing in 2014.2 In the early decades of the twentieth century however, Darantière’s position as commercial printer was far from restricted to French literary circles. Most notably, it was of particular relevance to a constellation of expatriate anglophone writers seeking publication in France. James Joyce, whose relationship with the Darantière press was remarkably documented in a 1988 volume by the modernist scholar Jean-Michel Rabaté, is by far the most celebrated among these expatriate writers. Maurice Darantière, les années vingt: bibliographie d’imprimeur is a unique archival record that recounts the circumstances surrounding the printing of the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses by the Darantière press in 1922.

• 3 In addition to the accomplishments of Victor Darantière, maistre imprimeur, Maud Simonnot provides (...)
• 4 Simonnot retraces in her dissertation the history of the printing press in Dijon between 1820-1920 (...)
• 5 Historical accounts relate nevertheless that the relationship between Huysmans and Stock was someti (...)

3The early years of the printing house help bring into focus the distinct nature of Maurice Darantière’s participation in the print culture of Anglo-American modernism in France. Historically, the reputation of the press is established upon the outstanding craftsmanship of its original founder, Victor Darantière (1840-1922), who began a career combining his skills as a lithographer, typographer and bookseller. The artistry of Victor Darantière has been amply expounded in Maud Simonnot’s study of literary life in Burgundy between 1820 and 1920. In her 2008 PhD dissertation, Simonnot provides a well of information about the editorial and commercial structures that mediated between authors, their works and reading publics in the area.3 It is recalled how Victor Darantière carved out a place in what was already a long line of Dijon printers in 1870 when he took over the press run by J.-E. Rabutôt, a well-known local printer.4 The Darantière press built up a solid reputation amongst bibliophiles, printing de luxe collector editions that included volumes on local history celebrating Burgundy historical figures such as Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and Charles De Brosses. However, its reputation grew quickly beyond Burgundy, since it worked from the very outset with publishing houses in Lyon and Paris, commissioned for instance by Stock to print works by prominent and polemical nineteenth-century writers such as Léon Bloy and Joris-Karl Huysmans (Simonnot, 2008 166).5

• 6 In this instance, Ford is referring to the work commissioned by Edward Titus and his Black Maniken (...)

4The evolution of the press in the twentieth century is indebted to the expertise of Victor Darantière and the recognition he earned from his peers as a maistre imprimeur. In its simultaneous appeal to bibliophilic, erudite and popular audiences, the operation of the printing house from its beginnings was to have direct bearing on the fortunes of Anglo-American modernism. The most auspicious signs of this vocational influence are apparent in the undertakings of the next generation. When Anglo-American literary historians speak of Darantière, they generally refer not to Victor Darantière, but to his son, Maurice Darantière (1882-1962), who took up his father’s mantle in the first decades of the twentieth century. Hugh D. Ford is one of the first historians to extensively document the relationship between American and British expatriate writers in Paris and their printers and publishers between 1920 and 1939. In his account, the younger Darantière is awarded his father’s title of “masterprinter” (40). His achievements are lavishly praised more than once, as when Ford describes the “material majesty”6 (131) of the works his press was commissioned to produce.

• 7 My translation. “Le Premier livre des sonnets pour Hélène, Pierre de Ronsard, vendomois, 1524-1565. (...)
• 8 “Une vingtaine de typographies s’offraient aux yeux des visiteurs, dans la variété des corps les pl (...)
• 9 “Mais le maître dijonnais n’a pas seulement l’ambition de réaliser de beaux livres, à l’instar de s (...)

5The year before Joyce’s Ulysses was published, Maurice Darantière organized an exhibit in Dijon to showcase the technical prowess of his printing house. This was highlighted in the labels describing some of the beaux livres produced by the press in 1921, as in the following example detailing the materials and techniques used to print and bind a collection of poems by Pierre de Ronsard, “Le Premier livre des sonnets pour Hélène, Pierre de Ronsard, vendomois, 1524-1565. Paris, Société Littéraire de France, M. CM. XXI. In-quarto coquille, composed in old-style italic elzevirs, ten-pt font. Cover, frontispiece, banners on each page, designed in the lush style of Sambin, the illustrious Burgundian Renaissance ornamentalist, and engraved on stone by André Hofer. Printed on June 24, 1921” (Laurent 42).7 Writing in La Revue de Bourgogne (a journal also printed by the Darantière press), the critic Jacques Laurent celebrates the sophisticated assortment of typeface and paper used for the handpressed books championed by Darantière.8 This was in the months before Darantière began allocating substantial resources to the gargantuan task of fabricating the proofs for the 732 pages of Ulysses. It was already apparent for the admirers of the press in 1921 how the mythology of the new, so central to the modernist ethos, was combined with Darantière’s reverence for beauty and for craft: “But producing beautiful books is not the only ambition of the Dijon master. As with his Renaissance predecessors, he tirelessly combines his search for beauty and for new and ingenious techniques” (my translation, Laurent 44).9 In the course of his extensive research on the writing, production and publication of Ulysses, Hugh Kenner touches upon this very matter: the challenge of creating a balance between the innovation displayed in Joyce’s literary style and the nascent technology (linotype machine-setting) that was available to printers at the time. The key question that is raised pertains to the preparedness of Darantière’s press to print what would become the quintessential modern novel. Kenner stresses how unlikely a choice Darantière may seem, given his position as a printer of small deluxe editions, not to mention the remoteness of the Dijon house from Paris, the center of French printing (599). The traditional handset methods employed by Darantière’s press provide for a technically complex environment whereby “the first novel unequivocally of the machine age was being forced through a wholly unsuitable technology” (Kenner 600). Darantière’s compositors, who neither wrote nor read in English, had to contend with the staggering length of the novel, a dearth of letter types commonly used in English (Kenner details the problems encountered with the letter “W”), and Joyce’s endless insertions during the production process. There is every reason to remark, as Kenner does, upon the “heroism” of the enterprise undertaken not only by Darantière but by the compositors who handset the entire novel, a first edition deserving of its belated acknowledgement as “a piece of handicrafted bookmaking” (Kenner 604-605).

• 10 Hugh Kenner suggests as much when describing print production in France in the 1920s. When he intro (...)
• 11 Robert McAlmon’s Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers (1925) and Gertrude Stein’s The Making (...)

6The strengths of this accomplishment argue in favour of awarding a place for Darantière’s printing house in an early twentieth-century anglophone tradition of beautiful book-making. The production of Ulysses tested to no end the ability and the patience of the French compositors, whose feats may be compared, in line with Hugh Kenner’s assessment, to those of the Dun Emer/Cuala printing house run by the Yeats family at the turn of the twentieth century (600). Darantière’s career most certainly displayed not only a keen interest in anglophone authors, to an exceptional degree in the context of French printing, but also a marked appreciation of the audacity expressed in innovative writing. If Darantière was commissioned in response to the reluctancy or outright refusal of English and American presses, intent upon avoiding controversy, censorship or risky financial investment, it would be a discredit to Darantière to remember his printing house merely as a pragmatic avenue for expatriate writers.10 Joyce’s Ulysses, as we shall see, was the first of many subsequent ventures, beginning in 1921, where the printer would demonstrate his willingness, often at financial risk to his firm, to take part in the production of modern literary experiment authored by a host of anglophone authors.11

• 12 Jacques Vonlett, La vraie méthode de bien trancher les viandes (1926) ; Maurice des Ombiaux, Les fr (...)
• 13 Rabaté underlines Darantière’s association with Payot, Stock, Rieder and eventually Gallimard (1991 (...)

8Alongside works of regional and sometimes anecdotal flavour,12 the lists display a range of French canonical works by Du Bellay and Ronsard, Jean de la Fontaine, Voltaire and other eighteenth-century writers, such as Goethe. This combination demonstrates the place awarded to popular literature alongside a variety of erudite or literary cultures stemming from diverse cultural traditions and historical periods. According to this picture, Darantière’s mandate as a printer was a widely diverse one, as he routinely wove together works from categories of “high” and “low” culture alike. He was not only content to publish innovative French authors of his day, among them Philippe Soupault, Max Jacob and Paul Valéry, but also worked with an impressive number of publishing firms invested in contemporary literature.13 By the early 1920s, Darantière was actively supporting the careers of an array of expatriate Anglo-American writers. Lesser-known and idiosyncratic collections such as Harry Crosby’s self-published anthology of poems (Anthology, 1923) and Joyce’s ambitiously controversial Ulysses (1922) stand side by side in his catalogue. The dense fabric of relations that brought these figures together within the compass of the Darantière press has not been overlooked by literary historians (Fitch; Rainey). The extensive panorama of Darantière’s involvement in the production of modernist texts has been brought to light in particular by Jean-Michel Rabaté, who focuses crucially on the activity of the press in the 1920s, a period of intense literary output by the substantial community of expatriate writers in France.

• 14 In 1987, Jean-Michel Rabaté founded the Ulysse fin de siècle publishing venture with François Domin (...)
• 15 As Rabaté has noted, Darantière sought out the freedom afforded by Paris to a married, though homos (...)
• 16 Darantière founded his publishing house in 1926, thus expanding his activity from printing to publi (...)
• 17 The Dijon Municipal Library has also established a list of works printed by Darantière but missing (...)
• 18 A longer repertoire made available by the Municipal Library of Dijon (erroneously stated as being r (...)

9Through a small publishing house, Ulysse fin de siècle,14 Rabaté was notably instrumental in the publication of an inventory of all the volumes that came off the Darantière presses between 1920 and 1928, before Maurice Darantière moved to Paris,15 where he continued to build up his own publishing venture, under the name Éditions du Raisin.16 The list featured in Rabaté’s bibliographic volume, Maurice Darantière, les années vingt : bibliographie d’imprimeur, contains all the works that are housed either in the collections of the Dijon Municipal Library or conserved by the estate of the Dijon book binder, André Vercey.17 It shows that while Maurice Darantière was at the helm of the family business, the social, economic and aesthetic development of the material culture of Anglo-American modernism became inextricably melded with French literary culture. These resources have all since been digitized, and the narrative of expatriate publications in Paris has variously celebrated the Darantière press, but in 1988, Jean-Michel Rabaté’s initiative in collaboration with the curators and administrators of the Dijon Municipal Library was decisive. Importantly, it opened a window onto the unique relationship between a French provincial press and the emergence of some of modernism’s leading writers in the second decade of the twentieth century.18

• 19 J.-M. Rabaté points out that though Darantière was a publisher in his own right, issuing the Revue (...)
• 20 The story of Adrienne Monnier’s career and that of Sylvia Beach have been well documented thanks to (...)
• 21 “The Undefeated,” later appearing in Hemingway’s second collection of short stories, Men without Wo (...)
• 22 e.e. cummings, “Sipliss,” from The Enormous Room (1922), French translation by Georges Duplaix; fra (...)

11Jean-Michel Rabaté’s introduction to the repertoire provides an essential focus on Darantière’s role in the release of the first edition of Joyce’s Ulysses on February 2, 1922, for which purpose Sylvia Beach had founded in 1921 a publishing house under the name of her Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. Importantly, Rabaté’s volume also emphasizes the acknowledgement to “Maurice” and his “Penelopean patience” that Joyce wove into the fabric of his later tome, Finnegans Wake (1988 27). The courtesy Joyce pays to his printer is indicative of the unique conditions of literary patronage from which he benefited. In the case of Ulysses, the exacting demands of the production process were arguably shared by all parties involved—writer, publisher and printer.19 In truth, Joyce’s metatextual allusion highlights the printer’s association with a model of literary patronage for which another bookseller, Adrienne Monnier, had laid the foundations some years earlier, in 1915, through her Paris bookshop, La Maison des Amis des Livres. The support network Monnier provided for emerging French literature and, by association, for innovative English-language literature would become an important model for Sylvia Beach when she founded her own bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, in 1919. When Beach was seeking a printer for Joyce’s extravagantly long and controversial manuscript, she took Monnier’s advice and travelled to Dijon in the spring of 1921 to meet Darantière. The Dijon printer had met Monnier in 1917 and by the early 1920s, he was a welcome visitor to the bookshop Monnier had opened on the rue de l’Odéon in 1915. By then, it had become a meeting ground for the older and the younger generations of French literati, including André Gide, Guillaume Apollinaire, Valéry Larbaud, Paul Valéry, Jules Romains, Blaise Cendrars, Louis Aragon and André Breton.20 In some ways providing what resembled more a reading room or a cabinet de lecture for writers than a commercial bookshop, Monnier’s goal was to foster careers and to bolster the diffusion of contemporary literature, an astonishingly ambitious project just as World War I was getting underway (Murat 31). The very name of the bookshop flew in the face of the growing conflict on the continent, extending an invitation to partake in a community of like-minded bibliophiles. For La Maison des Amis des Livres, Monnier carried not only the catalogues of the leading avant-garde French publishing houses and journals (Murat 31), but from the very start she endeavored to establish a transatlantic literary way station, in what has been described as her “bookshop salon” (Ford 7). To this end, she created an extensive lending library that made available translations of American and British literature. In addition, there was a monthly record of new publications and literary events announced in Le Bulletin des amis des livres and between 1920-1923 a collection entitled the Cahiers des amis des livres, published by Monnier and Pierre Haour, and printed in Dijon by Darantière (Simonnot, 2008 193-194). Lastly, along with Jean Prévost, and with the editorial assistance of Sylvia Beach, Monnier edited a monthly literary journal entitled Le Navire d’argent. Several English-language authors were featured the one year during which the journal was issued (1925-1926), including an entire issue in May 1926 devoted to American literature. There were selections in French translation from Walt Whitman, early short stories by Ernest Hemingway (Murat 112)21 and Robert McAlmon, extracts in prose by e.e. cummings and William Carlos Williams.22 As a sign of the journal’s commitment to Anglo-American writing, its very first number in June 1925 included T. S. Eliot’s 1915 poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” first translated into French by Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach (Murat 110) and in October 1925 early draft fragments from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

• 23 Monnier’s book of poems commemorating her friendship with French poets and the bookseller Sylvia Be (...)
• 24 Consider Darantière typesetters, who knew no English and yet were part of the elaborate transformat (...)

12As Monnier continued to demonstrate her interest in the circulation between French and English-language literature, the Dijon press was an essential source of technical and commercial support. Darantière’s first printing of Monnier’s magazine, Les Cahiers des amis des livres, and then her poems in 1923 (La Figure),23 suggests that the printer’s position as a member of this community of patrons, producers and readers is not to be underestimated. From his Dijon outpost, Darantière arguably played a role in the “commodification” of literary modernism, as Rainey called it, transforming readers into consumers and collectors of exclusive and valuable books. For Rainey, the production of a limited edition of 1,000 copies of Ulysses in 1922 and the marketing of that edition by the rare book trade signal “the decisive entry of modernism into the public sphere” (44). A distinctive and enabling feature of this process is the bilingualism of French literati and, to a lesser degree, of Anglo-American writers. As noted by Rabaté in his essay on the printing of Ulysses, Darantière had a fascination for English-language literature and poetry, in particular. He spoke and wrote English reasonably well, though his typesetters, called upon again and again to reset Joyce’s proofs, had no command of English.24 On this score, in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, the English editor of the second printing of the first edition of Ulysses (Egoist Press, 1922), Sylvia Beach once pointedly underlined Darantière’s fluency in English:

• 25 For instance, in the case of Ulysses, Darantière’s press followed the principle of publishing by su (...)

14Darantière’s close connection to Adrienne Monnier drew him into a select circle of anglophone expatriates who were shaping the avant-garde cultural production of the day. For instance, his connection with Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions shows how the example of publishing by subscription engineered by Monnier, or by Joyce and Beach, could represent a beacon of hope for some in 1920s Paris. The distance separating anglophone writers from the publishing centers of London, New York or Chicago was one obstacle. The difficulty of securing financial backing in the absence of an established American or British publishing house was another. While there were smaller houses in the 1920s willing to risk publishing innovative texts (the American publisher Boni & Liveright, for instance), the relationship between writers and printers was all the more crucial for the expatriate endeavours that failed to garner their support. The commercial allowances made by Darantière25 and, additionally, the creative choices to which he agreed were contingent upon two essential factors. First, his departure from his vocation as an imprimeur de terroir, a local printer, so as to support experimental projects in a foreign language caused him and his typesetters hours upon hours of anguish. Secondly, on a more private note, his loyalty to the Paris côterie associated with Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach certainly might explain his interest in an assortment of writers disinterested in literary norms. His own social marginality is in keeping with the portrait literary historians provide of Darantière living as a reputedly flamboyant homosexual in the town of Dijon in the early twentieth century. This context may reasonably suggest that the ties consolidated between his press and expatriate literature was only a prelude to his own relocation to Paris in the late 1920s, away from the conservatism of provincial France.

• 26 Post-Adolescence, Contact Publishing, Dijon, 1923; Village: As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year P (...)

15Darantière’s willingness to embrace the exoticism of Anglo-American circles made his relations arguably easier with the enterprising though inexperienced and prickly mediator that was Robert McAlmon. Between 1923 and 1926, McAlmon brought a total of 10 volumes to Dijon that bore either the imprint Contact, Contact Publishing or the joint imprint, Contact Editions, Three Mountains Press, the latter reflecting McAlmon’s collaboration with William Bird, an American who a ran a small press in Paris. The works which ran through the Dijon presses in the mid-1920s carried an important association with Robert McAlmon. While he was self-publishing several of his own volumes,26 he was also anthologizing the work of his peers (Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers, 1925) and securing the publication of major modernist volumes under the Contact Publishing Co. imprint, such as Spring and All (1923) by William Carlos Williams. Significantly, the colophon printed at the end of these books did not merely read as in most instances “Printed by Darantière” (as with Djuna Barnes’s 1928 chapbook, Ladies Almanack) or “achevé d’imprimer par Darantière”. Instead, the colophon highlighted the personal association between these works and their printer, as though sealing a partnership. For example, as with most of these volumes, at the back of the Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers, the inscription reads rather conspicuously “Printed at Dijon by Maurice Darantière.” (Figures 3 and 4).

• 27 Ford documents how Carl Van Vechten had failed to have his own American publisher, Knopf, take up S (...)

16One author on the Contact list who had the most enduring and perhaps the most complex personal relationship with Darantière was Gertrude Stein. After she gave up on the efforts of literary agents to intercede on her behalf in the United States and England (Ford 233), Gertrude Stein approached Robert McAlmon in Paris in 1925 about a Contact edition for her manuscript, The Making of Americans Being a History of a Family's Progress, first presented fourteen years earlier to the English publisher Grant Richard, who then rejected it (Ford 56).27 Darantière printed a single volume of 925 pages (September 1925), sidestepping the strained business relationship between Stein and McAlmon, and essentially finding himself drawn into the thick of sometimes fraught exchanges with Stein and Alice B. Toklas. For instance, while reviewing the proofs for The Making of Americans, Toklas complained of the difficulty both she and Stein had with the “errors of French compositors” (quoted in Ford 62). Stein was characteristically shrewd about the repercussions these typesetting errors had on her circuitous prose, claiming that she didn’t bother to correct them in each instance:

• 28 See Annotated Reference Guide to Collectible Books and Original Prints. artunderwraps.com/Gertrude- (...)

17In blurring the distinction between her own stylistic experiments and the technical errors imputed to the printer, Stein appears to be planting the seeds of literary legend: can any heed be paid to the somewhat fanciful notion that Darantière’s typesetters were unwitting members of the literary avant-garde? Stein’s equivocations appear to dangle before our eyes an image of modernism in the making. In a superbly paradoxical manner, the writer seizes upon the failings of modern machinery to instrumentalize the reception of her experimental prose. Technique in its relationship to art is celebrated not for its precision and productivity, as one might expect. Instead, Stein draws attention to its capacity for error and the ensuing randomness of the creative process. Was this the sign of a prescient writer, anticipating procedural contemporary poetics, or simply a ploy on Stein’s part to further obfuscate attempts to explicate her syntax? At the very least, Stein’s efforts to narrativize her compositional processes are in no way hindered by her ambiguous relationship with Darantière and his typesetters. The alleged errors of the printing house notwithstanding, once the book was finished, praise was heaped upon Darantière and his workshop, to the detriment of McAlmon, her publisher, whose involvement Stein discounted as far as the design of her book was concerned (Ford 68). Darantière’s sheets were used to print 500 copies and five deluxe issues printed on Japanese velum (100 distributed in the US, plus 5 deluxe issues printed on Japanese Velum),28 before being purchased by New York publishers Charles and Albert Boni for a small number of American issues published in 1926. The technology of Darantière’s press was appropriated in this fashion, returning American literature from whence it came, by way of a small controversial publishing firm. Stein’s writing was thus taken up by an elaborate production circuit, transiting from Paris to Dijon and then across the water to New York, so as to appear ultimately before a small American readership.

• 29 Between 1930 and 1933 the Plain Edition released five books: Lucy Church Amiably (1930), Before the (...)
• 30 The next book printed by Darantière was Matisse, Picasso and Gertude Stein, with Two Shorter Storie (...)

18Through Darantière, Stein gained a new measure of control over the production and distribution of her writing. After struggling notoriously with the publication of her work (Stone)—until the popular success in 1933 of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—Stein appeared to avail at last of a creative and commercial nexus that had eluded her for years. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, she subsequently called upon Darantière directly for some work on the series of books she co-edited in the early 1930s with Alice B. Toklas under the Plain Edition imprint29. But she wasn’t quite prepared to sacrifice the quality of her books for the sake of readership. When Stein saw the binding for her 1931 volume How to Write, this time she voiced her displeasure, chastising Darantière for the faulty molding and overall slipshod assemblage of the book. Here, as the “master printer” argued in his defense, the blame lay with the mechanics of modern printing: “What can you expect, Madame? It is machine-made, it is not done by hand” (Ford 241). Tellingly, for future endeavours, Darantière promised to turn his back on modernity and handpull her books.30 Despite these small upsets, Darantière was valued for his craftsmanship and, interestingly, for his career not as a deluxe craftsman but as a commercial printer. He was called upon to produce books that would allow for wider distribution and sales. To that effect, Alice B. Toklas wrote to Darantière in the early 1930s that “Gertrude Stein wants readers not collectors” (Ford 244).

• 31 Rainey recalls how Bryher funded the printing of H.D.’s works (The Hedgehog, Kora and Ka, Nights) b (...)

19There is a strong case for correlating the accomplishments of Darantière’s press on behalf of those writers who would go on to represent literary modernism and the transatlantic circulation of literary culture. It may legitimately be asked whether Stein would ever have found an audience for The Making of Americans without Darantière. The professional relationship he maintained with McAlmon and Stein for close to ten years is instructive in this regard. By virtue of his sometimes straddling the role of editor and printer, he helped these avant-garde practitioners navigate in and out of the margins of the marketplace. Others may argue to the contrary, as indeed Laurence Rainey, who has suggested that Darantière’s limited editions have exacerbated the “privatization of culture” to some degree, citing the example of the volumes by Hilda Doolittle that were printed in Dijon in the 1930s. Highlighting H.D.’s choice to address her work to a “minute coterie” and comparing the circumstances of H.D.’s editions to the 1922 edition of Ulysses, Rainey argues: “recourse to Darantiere had been prompted by a legal obstruction of cultural circulation and debate; now it was merely a mechanism to avoid the public sphere altogether” (154).31 At the same time, the ties between the French and Anglo-American circles radiating out of Monnier and Beach’s lending libraries were only stronger thanks to his press. Having put out William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All in 1923, and by the end of the 1920s, printing copies of Ezra Pound’s journal, The Exile (Murat 150), Darantière appears to have secured a place in the material and symbolic communities of literary modernism. If, as Shari Benstock has suggested, literary modernism was a “social, political, and publishing event” (21), Darantière’s deft management of the demands often laid at his feet directly by authors—thereby overriding intermediaries—underscores the centrality of the printer’s role. His willingness to adapt the technology of his printing press to meet the specific letter-type requirements of English-language modernist works is no less noteworthy. The multilingual environment displayed in the Darantière catalogue reads as a unique model for the print economy of literary modernism and, more widely, of transcultural book production.