The Vancouver Sun from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 42

C6c THE VANCOUVER SUN, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2008 REVIEW. BREAKING NEWS VANCOUVERSUN.COM MOUNTAIN WOMAN Remember hearing the solo wilderness exploits of B.C.'s Chris Czajkowski (left) on Peter Gzowski's radio show, Morningsidcl She's written and illustrated a new book, A Mountain Year (Harbour Publishing), and she'll be at the Central Library, 350 W. Georgia, at 7:30 p.m. Monday, discussing it and showing slides. A review to be published here soon says Czajkowski "has become her own living nature library and for that we are in her debt." BOOKS EDITOR: REBECCA WIGOD, 604-605-2565, rwigodvancouversun.com PURE OF CRAFT sk IT V- LOVE PROFILE I Jim Rimmer has had a 50-year career in ink, type, words and books.

He's such a fount of knowledge that Gaspereau has published Pie Tree Press, a new edition of his memoirs i 1 I rly If If '4f In -A VfN-v I V- lit rmmmm it v. I limnj mm mmmmm mmm mmm I nr ill III inlil PHOTOS BY IAN SMITHVANCOUVER SUN Jim Rimmer, type designer, illustrator and printer, is working on a hand-made limited edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Here he holds a lino-block he carved, and the resulting printed page. BY SUZANNE AHEARNE When Jim Rimmer was a boy in the 1930s, he lived in a planked-over log cabin in southeast Vancouver at the edge of a bog the kids called the Vivian Swamp. It was a kids-only playground.

They caught frogs, pole-fished and made rafts. They all wanted to be Tom Sawyer. Many of Rimmer's childhood memories at the tip of his tongue now that he recently completed his autobiography revolve around this swamp and his earliest attempts at making things with his hands. His earliest memory, recounts the 74-year-old Rimmer from his New Westminster studio and workshop, is of being four years old and swiping the butcher's knife from the kitchen to whittle sticks and carve little boats. He loved this illicit too-big carving tool until the Christmas his grandfather gave him his own penknife and with it, licence to create.

All the frog-filled places of Rimmer's Vancouver childhood have long since been drained and developed, but he credits those formative years, a good knife and the encouragement of his parents and grandfather with getting him started on a 50-year career working with his hands. He has been a craftsman, printer, illustrator, graphic artist and designer of lead and digital types. When he retired as a commercial artist and digital type designer in 1998, he decided to indulge his "perverse connection with old things" and return to his first love: printing. The workshop at the back of his Victorian home was already packed full of the old printing presses and hot-metal typecasting machines he'd been rescuing from print shops and garages for decades. There he recreated himself as a maker of letterpress books the method of printing books for 500 years, until offset lithography made it commercially defunct by the 1960s.

He named his imprint Pie Tree Press after the nearly hundred-year-old tree in his backyard that had long supplied his family with baking apples. Rimmer is involved at every stage of his books' production. He designs die type, melts at least a thousand pounds of lead to cast enough type for a book, hand-sets the text letter by letter, prints on hundred-year-old letterpresses, makes original linocut illustrations and hand-sews the bindings. There are dozens of like-minded private presses and a handful of metal type foundries still operating in North America, following the model of William Morris (who inspired the Arts and Crafts movement that began in England in the late 19th century) and his Kelmscott Press. Rimmer though, is possibly the only one-man-band printerillustratortype designer in the world, and West Coast printers rely on him heavily for everything from metal type to know-how to machine repair.

The titles issued by Pie Tree Press include Shadow River: Poems of Pauline Johnson and A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. He is now completing a deluxe limited-edition (100 copies, $1,000) of his favourite book, which is, not surprisingly, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a labour of love that has stretched into a six-year project. One of the reasons it has taken so long to complete aside from the sheer grandness of his vision was what he modestly calls one of his "digressions," a memoir he prefers to call a "scrapbook of my life with type." Leaves from the Pie Tree is a linen and leather-bound book dedicated to his family and printed on his "new" 1905 Colts Armory press. The now sold-out edition of 50 copies ($700) includes tipped-in original illustrations and prints. Andrew Steeves, co-owner of Gaspereau Press in Nova Scotia, considers Rimmer's sto- imi.M.iMW;.ill.tui.

i fr: Here, with ink in foreground, Jim Rimmer prints one of his lino-blocks on to the pages. Some of the illustrated pages in Tom Sawyer, a labour of love for Rimmer. ry and knowledge so important to the history of printing that he decided to publish an expanded version of Leaves from the Pie Tree. Happily for enthusiasts of letterpress printing and the book arts, an offset-printed trade edition, titled Pie Tree Press: Memories from the Composing Room Floor (Gaspereau Press, 124 pages, has just been released. The text of the cloth-covered hardcover stamped with one of Rimmer's Tom Sawyer illustrations is set in Amethyst Pro, one of his own digital type designs.

It contains colour reproductions of his illustrations and presswork, as well as samples of his digital type designs and those designed for metal at his Rimmer Type Foundry. It includes a reworked guide to his impro-visational typecutting and -casting processes (photographs by Alex Widen) and a new chapter about his work in digital type design. Eric Swanick, head of Special Collections at Simon Fraser University (where Rimmer's archives are held), contributed a bibliography of his noteworthy printing for other presses and graphic design agencies and a listing of Pie Tree Press broadsides and publications. The heart of the book is Rimmer's lively, The narrative moves through his career as a type compositor for a number of B.C. newspapers (including this one) to his commercial lettering and illustration work, digital type design and the day he bought his first press.

The narrative comes full circle to the making of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a book he dreamt about making back when he was setting type for classified ads. Andrew Steeves says Rimmer's edition of Torn Sawyer is a lot like its maker, "full of real humanity and vitality. What comes through on every page and every letter that he's drawn is just his sheer excitement and love for doing this." In the inspiring conclusion to his memoir, Rimmer writes: "It is my hope that before the electronic way of doing things overshadows human hands, at least a few will take up a tool and make something." Suzanne Aheame is a Vancouver writer and photojournalist. To order The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, contact Jim Rimmer at Rimmertypeshaw.ca. Go to Vancouversun.com to watch videos of Jim Rimmer.

conversational account of his life in printing. It begins with his early school years, which were marred by "a learning disability, a runaway imagination and a thickish smattering of laziness." Then he describes enrolling in a printing program at Vancouver Technical high school, where he first "marvelled at the beauty and perfect precision of type." His grandfather quashed his art-school dreams and got him an apprenticeship as a typesetter at J.W. Boyd Sons Printers, saying: "Printing is an old and respected craft. There is art in printing. You are artistic and you will have a chance to use it And if yer don't take the job, I'll kick your little arse all the way up Duke Street." Thus began his career in type.

A CLEAR-EYED VIEW OF VIOLENCE IN HOCKEY tumt if PUCK THE MEANING OF PUCK How Hockey Explains Modem Canada BY BRUCE DOWBIGGIN Key Porter Books. 232 pages ($29.95) met remains so violent when other sports have strict rules and penalties about fouls, unfair play and violence. We might believe the defining moment was the 1972 Canada-Russia series, certainly the only time I've ever screamed and cried at the end of a hockey game and stood up on a chair in a bar. Dowbiggin reminds us that Canadians and the "drunken frat-boys" of the Canadian team learned nothing from the skill of the Russian players and how the game should have changed for the better. Instead, he writes, Bobby Clarke's two-handed slash that broke Valeri Kharlamovs ankle "was a reminder that with Canadian pride or a Stanley Cup on the line, anything is acceptable to Canadians." We remember only the victory and, to this day, continue to celebrate violence.

Maybe Canada and its culture, politics and national game will grow up when men like Don Cherry are recognized for the troglodytes they are. Canwest News Service view of the torments and treasures of the country." He spares none of us: nationalists, separatists, hockey fans, smug Easterners, arrogant Westerners and, above all, those of us who still hew to the old conceits about how we're so much nicer, more polite and generally "better" than Americans. He writes: "In a country of so many contradictions, the disconnect between hockey values and the values characteristic of Canadian society in general is startling. Only hockey and lacrosse both Canadian products allow a player to fight and still remain in the game." How does a country that still prides itself on being a nation of peacekeepers justify lionizing "brawlers such as Todd Bertuzzi, Tie Domi or Georges for their aggression" and still put forward the notion that combat is the exception to Canadian culture? Puck isn't an easy book to read because it requires time to think about these dichotomies, to ponder how a team game BY CATHERINE FORD Bruce Dowbiggin writes the way he talks, which is a good thing for his readers. In person, he'll pin your ears back with his opinions; he does the same in his CaJgary Herald columns.

He's clear, concise and occasionally infuriating, but he speaks a language we understand. Thus, The Meaning of Puck: How Hockey Explains Modern Canada is insightful, angry, caustic, funny and exasperating, rather like the man himself. Puck starts with the presumption that hockey is Canada's game, in the same way baseball is America's. Except, as all sports fans know, the reality of both sports is much different than the myth. Dowbiggin takes the myth of hockey and Canada apart Few other writers could do this believably.

Dowbiggin can because he's more than just a jock writer. Born and raised in Montreal, he moved to Calgary 10 years ago. In between, he studied at the National Theatre School of Canada, wrote prose, poetry and plays (all published) and won two Gemini Awards for his television work. If Dowbiggin can't have strong opinions about the state of the country and its hockey myth, then nobody can. He believes sports "can be a window into a nation's soul" and, having worked in five of the six Canadian cities with National Hockey League teams, he believes he has "a clear-eyed.