New in Honnold Library Special Collections is John Walker’s Arma Virumque Cano (Untide Press, 1950).
Walker’s poem has twelve numbered parts; this is III:
The Untide Press carefully selected materials and design, and set all their work by hand. The press garnered awards for excellence in printing and design with William Everson’s War Elegies (1944), Jacob Sloan’s Generation of a Journey (1945) and John Walker’s Arma Virumque Cano (1950).
Letterpress printed in an edition of 500, Arma Virumque Cano was designed with linoleum cut decorations by Kemper Nomland, printed in Bembo and Futura types, hand-set, on Kilmory Text paper.
The Untide Press was founded by William Everson, Kemper Nomland, Kermit Sheets and William R. Eshelman, in a camp of conscientious objectors in Waldport, Oregon in 1943, as an expression of protest against World War II. The name of the press originated in opposition to the camp weekly called The Tide, the slogan of the press being “What is not Tide is Untide”. The Untide Press moved after the War to Pasadena, where they produced an occasional literary magazine and small books of poems, many of them by the poets and writers who were later to form the nucleus of the San Francisco literary renaissance.
The Rare Book Room at Denison Library and Special Collections, Honnold Library, have other examples of the work of William Everson and other mid-century poets and printers of the west coast of the U.S. The Papers of the Untide Press are at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.