John Brown, Austrian Style

Since 1454, when Gutenberg started using movable type, most printers and publishers have been glad that he simplified their job. But every once in a while some ant-shaming book designer has insisted on doing his printing as if Gutenberg had never existed, engraving each page laboriously by hand. Such a designer was William Blake, who a century and a half ago painstakingly etched a dozen books (with weird, mystical illustrations) on copper plates.

Last week in Manhattan another such laborious job was put on the market. Its text consisted of a long, symbol-stuffed poem by plane-piloting Poetess Muriel Rukeyser, on the life and modern significance of bearded U. S. Abolitionist John Brown, coupled with verses from the Civil War folk song John Brown's Body. Scattered through the carefully etched text were some 40 meticulous illustrations by Austrian refugee Baron Rudolf Charles von Ripper (TIME, Jan. 2, 1939), who had engraved the entire book by hand.

Weedy, bucktoothed, wild-eyed Baron von Ripper, who gave Poetess Rukeyser the idea for her poem, had worked at his book with the zeal of a medieval monk. A Catholic socialist who had spent months in Nazi concentration camps, von Ripper knew persecution at first hand. He filled his book with floggings, cadaverous nudes, autopsical goons, who hacked and bled through its pages with all the angular bleakness of rigor mortis. Three of his pages had to be done over because of small typographical errors. It took him two years of patient etching and hand-printing to turn out 60 copies. If he manages to sell half of them (at $200 a copy), Etcher von Ripper figures he can clear $1,500. Not much for two years of eyestraining labor, but, says von Ripper, whose ways with money are as fantastic as his etchings, "That will give me something to go along on."

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