Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness is one of those stories most of us recall from our days of required reading. I miss those days. I miss being required to read.It was like being forced to eat one's favorite dessert. It should be a requirement still—maybe stand in line at the DMV, get ready for your photo, be asked. "Well, you've read Heart of Darkness, right? Or Intruders in the Dust? At least Anna Kerenina? No?? Sorry, can't drive yet....next!" "Oh that's just fine,” one might sneer, “I'll go watch Dancing With the Stars.”

Conrad's masterpiece is one of those stories whose literary incarnation has been eclipsed by cinematic memories of Robert Duvall standing on a beach in Viet-Nam, under full attack, chesty with insane confidence and announcing, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” Obviously, Apocolypse Now was not filmed as a companion piece to the story, but it's weird presence and ghoulish intensity probably kept most of us from going back to the book to rediscover its dark brilliance.

It took printing Heart of Darkness to take me back to Marlow and his trek upriver to find the mysterious Kurtz. It's a terrifying trip, slithery, hot, dangerous, psychotic and always teetering on a greater but mercurial meaning. All hope abandon ye who enter here should have been a phrase tucked in Marlow's sweaty shirt pocket.

And the editing. Yes, I said editing. Turns out there are more than several versions of the novella (six, I think), from its first publication in serialized form, to versions both authorized and unauthorized by the writer. We decided on the Heinemann edition of 1921 for ours. Our electronic manuscript was not conistant with the Heinemann, so there were lengthy checks and corrections of British/American words, many of which were not consistant even in the Heinemann. And spaces. (——) Conrad used long spaces——lots of them. A Polish Zorro. So many, in fact, typestting becomes a Rubic Cube of widowed lines and strange end-line breaks.

Marc Castelli, whose line drawings graced the John Smith book, saw another opportunity to express his passion for all things nautical and lept at the chance of drawing a suite of images that became windows into the narrative of Heart of Darkness.

300 pounds of guillotined Hahnemühle Biblio paper later, Heart of Darkness began to take shape at Deep Wood Press in northern Michigan. Our first hurdle was to find a cylinder press large enough to print a 12x32 center spread for the book. Chad Pastotnik just happened to know some commercial printers in Charlevoix, about an hour away. They had a 1938 Kelly 2. (see video to right)....