I wasn’t sure how I felt about the new typeface – I don’t know from typefaces, but this rather anonymous contemporary face initially made me kind of nostalgic for the clearly archaic typeface of the 1977 Radi Os then I decided that I liked it, especially to the extent that it worked to jimmy RJ’s poem away from its default description: “contemporary poem ‘composed’ by erasing words from the 1st 4 books of Milton’s Paradise Lost.” There’s no getting around the fact that RJ made his own poem out of Milton’s words, in Milton’s order, and in an 1892 typesetting, but the 2005 typeface helps to draw one’s attention from the historical aspects of RJ’s borrowings and place it more where it belongs – with the fact of Radi Os as a poem of the late 20th century. Clark’s digitally reset the whole thing, preserving all of the spacings beautifully, and adding (wonder of wonders) page numbers, a very useful thing indeed. (My only quibble in the Gothic title type, to which I think I’m just genetically allergic.) The book’s just a skoche bigger than the 1977 Sand Dollar edition, which I gather was set directly from the 1892 Paradise Lost from which RJ “excavated” his poem. The folks at Flood, in particular Jeff Clark of Quemadura, the designer, have done a wonderful job. I am by turns making my first serious pass thru The Maximus Poems – that is, reading them all in a relatively concentrated period of time, with Butterick’s Guide and a stack of other critical works at hand – and savoring Flood Editions’ new edition of Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os, one of the great formative works of my largely misspent youth.
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