or the sixteen Christmases since we were married, George Walker and I have received the gift of a new letterpress keepsake book from Poole Hall Press.   Bill Poole would always say, "Here's a little book for the kids", as he hand delivered it, wrapped in Poole Hall Press printed brown paper, at the fall Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) Book Arts Fair.   Christmas 2001 will be our first without a new Poole Hall Press book.  

Bill Poole, printer, designer, and teacher, died accidentally on 14 March, 2001 at the age of seventy-seven at his home in Grimsby, Ontario, on the Niagara Escarpment.  

Since this year's Grimsby Wayzgoose, when I was asked by DA to write something of an appreciation about Bill, I have done everything but.   I thought for awhile about what I would like to write, and sat for a long time at the computer.   My mind began to wander and I thought about Bill and the Intertype Linecasting machine in the relief room at OCAD.   I was always astounded by how many different tasks were completed by that machine.   I remember mentioning to Bill that when I sat to type lines of poetry on it, I imagined the presence of the ghosts of men put out of work by the Industrial Revolution.   Bill understood.   He felt that letterpress and fine printing had become crafts, in much the same way that pottery and hand weaving had, due to the relentless mechanization and automation of printing and publishing for efficiency (and profit's) sake.  

The book art fairs at OCAD, the Grimsby Wayzgoose, and the Bartholomew-tide fair - all of which Bill was instrumental in founding - act as reminders of the pre-industrial past, and are an opportunity for printers and print lovers/buyers/collectors to celebrate and honour letterpress and fine printing as crafts.  

Later, still unable to write, I went down to the print shop in our basement, the home of Biting Dog Press/Columbus St.   Press, and looked at our Vandercook proof press.   I thought about Bill printing, in the numbing cold in early spring for the Wayzgoose and in late fall for the OCAD fair, in his unheated print shop.   That afternoon I collated, punched, and then sewed the signatures of three copies of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1988), published by Cheshire Cat Press.   This had been a collaboration between Joe Brabant, Bill Poole, and George Walker to publish the first Canadian edition of Alice in Wonderland, with Joe acting as editor, George as engraver, and Bill as typesetter and printer.   Then I busily collated, punched, and sewed a copy of Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1998).   I tidied some endpapers.   Now, it occurred to me that I was doing a lot of the same work that Bill would have done every day.   He would have worked away at the piles of many projects around the press in his shop.   And as he and George had worked together as part of Cheshire Cat Press we would have worked on exactly the same projects some of the time.   But I am no typesetter, and especially not a hand typesetter.   The patience and bullheadedness necessary to hand set and hand print all the pages of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1988, 177 copies), then Alice's Adventures in Toronto (1991, 177 copies), then Through the Looking Glass ( 1998, also 177 copies), seem unimaginable to me.   But then Bill Poole was a deeply patient and philosophical man.  

In the last days of his life Bill Poole appeared to be simply an overalls-clad letterpress printer who lived with Margaret, his wife of fifty-three years, high atop the Niagara Escarpment.   They kept prize chickens, grew beautiful gardens, and lived a rough and very physical life as pioneers in a century old house, surrounded by several small, ancient buildings all connected by a dirt path.   These tiny old buildings, including a fruit shed that became his studio, had been saved from demolition years earlier and were moved by Bill up the mountain to a perch on the Escarpment.   People who knew Bill as the unassuming little man in overalls would have been surprised to learn the full sweep of his careers as an award-winning industrial designer, a gifted teacher and mentor, and a letterpress printer.  

Born in Toronto to a printer father and classical pianist mother, Bill was involved in the arts from an early age.   He studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music from age sixteen and during the 1940's played saxophone for the swing quartet "The Four Bills" (comprised of four friends, all named Bill).   Bill was the first to admit that he had hated school as a child, finding the teachers stupid and the whole thing uninteresting (he later found it ironic that he ended up teaching).   But in 1942 he found his niche in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, in which he stood first in his class and became a flight engineer for the duration of the war.   In 1945, Bill worked for his brother building display material for Motion Picture Promotions.   The next year he got a job at the Toronto weekly newspaper The Ledger, where he worked as a reporter and re-write man.   Bill also learned how to set type and developed a love for the smell of ink and printing presses.   Before long, Bill was called to help with the family business.   Bill's father had started a company that eventually became a large manufacturer of school supplies.   Bill worked in the design department and he hired another self-taught Canadian designer to help with the fine work.   Poole claimed that he only hired the man because he lived on the next street over from Bill.   That designer was Carl Dair.  

Bill and Carl met in 1950 or 1951, worked as design partners, and won many awards together.   Carl's sudden death in 1967 affected Bill profoundly.   Bill had a deep appreciation for recycling before it was fashionable.   This may have resulted from his being a child of the Depression, or perhaps was influenced by wartime salvaging and rationing.   The concept of recycling certainly affected his design career.   Long before advertising types who were working for banks encouraged us to "think outside the box," Bill Poole was doing it.   For example, in the 1950's he designed the octagonal-shaped J-Cloths package that doubles as a serving storage/container; this award-winning design is still in use today.  

Similarly, Bill incorporated the packaging into the designs he made for Reliable Toy, incorporating a kind of function-follows-form twist on modern design precepts.   For instance, he designed a box that became a garage for the truck it packaged, and a paint set that came in a box that turned into a totem pole ready for painting with the new paints.   It was like Bill was trying to help kids do what he knew they would do anyway, use what is at hand and their imagination to make relationships between things.  

Bill never forgot how to play, and he was always a great facilitator.   Bill Poole got into teaching by accident.   In the early 1960's his old friend Carl Dair was teaching at the Ontario College of Art (OCA) and invited Bill to his class as a guest lecturer.   Dair was convinced that OCA needed Bill Poole, but OCA didn't agree - at first.   But in 1965 Bill was hired by the OCA to teach Three Dimensional Design in the Foundation Studies program.   At that time the instructors at OCA were paid horribly low wages.   Bill was an established designer and could have made a lot more money with design work.   But, as he later explained to his friend and fellow OCA professor Morris Wolfe in a 1993 interview, "I just liked workin' with the kids.   I felt an awful lot of people had helped me, being self-taught and, that maybe, maybe it sounds high flowin' but it was time to put somethin' back.  "

In the mid-1960's all a student needed to be admitted to OCA was $300, a grade 12 diploma, no portfolio, no interview, and no particular artistic talent.   Often Bill got into trouble with the administration of OCA because he gave his students free rein.   The students closest to Bill's heart were in the General Studies department.   They were fiercely independent, with their own focus, and just wanted to be left alone to work.   Students in the printmaking studios were technically General Studies students.   And Bill really did "put somethin' back".   Bill Poole taught a whole generation of industrial designers.   Interestingly, at one point he had taught every member of the Industrial Designer's Group but was not himself eligible to join as he was a self-taught designer.   And, of course, Bill inspired many of the letterpress enthusiasts who came out of OCA, including myself.  

In 1975 I was an uninspired sixteen-year-old slowly growing up in Dryden, Ontario, when I encountered a travelling demo printing and art show called ARTREK.   It rolled into town one day manned by two printing students from OCA.   Irv Osterer was one of the students, and we wrote to each other for years afterwards.   It was the very first time I'd heard of batik, and screen-printing, and OCA.   The young men demonstrated printing techniques and splashed free ink around, which gave me the motivation to travel the 1,500 miles southeast to OCA to study.  

Twenty-six years later, after having completed General Studies at OCA (and having met George Walker there and married him) I found out that Bill Poole had designed the ARTREK.   He had actually brought me to OCA! (I heard Bill whispering in my ear when I wrote that last sentence because I had wanted to write, "Bill had the idea", or "It was Bill's idea".   But I talked with him so often over the years I could hear Bill insisting it was a group effort and many people put their ideas and time into it.   Bill would not let something like that be glossed over, that all the glory or thanks be given to him (he wouldn't tolerate it).   Anyone who met Bill Poole was eventually changed by the experience.   His whole being was put toward helping people realize their potential or feel their own self worth.   Several times in his life Bill was able to say, "I think this is a good idea, and if no one else will do it, I'll do it myself until someone else takes over".  

Bill was a focussed, aggressive person who avoided the limelight.   The things he caused to be done were done because they were right.   So it was a good idea to start an art gallery in a small rural community (the Grimsby Public Art Gallery).   It was a good idea to start the Wayzgoose letterpress printers' gathering (now in its twenty-sixth year).   When the OCA brass wanted to cut departments because no one would take charge of them, Bill agreed to head up both the Foundation Studies and Industrial Design departments.   Bill went on to establish the first and only Designing for the Handicapped course in Industrial Design at OCA.   It has taken me months longer than I thought it would to write a small piece in appreciation of Bill Poole.   Bill would understand about putting important personal things on the back burner.   Consider the book he was writing on the history of glass containers, which had been on the back burner for over forty years.   Recently Bill had put a push on, working away at the text with his friendly editor, Morris Wolfe.   Glass and containers in general were one more of Bill's fascinations.   Greg Smith of Blind Pig Press, another good friend of Bill's and a letterpress aficionado who worked most weekends in the Poole Hall Press ex-fruit barn, is taking on the enormous task of seeing the project through to completion.   Greg also has many volunteers wanting to do what they can to help Bill finish this last project.   It's payback time, in a sense.  

In July 2001 George and I were showing his work at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition in Nathan Phillips Square.   A young woman who was a book arts student of George's at OCAD was chatting with us.   George brought up the topic of Bill, and how it was a shame that he had died in March.   George wasn't sure she knew him as Bill had been retired from OCAD since 1991.   To our horror the woman burst into tears.   Bill had been her mentor, and they had corresponded for many years.   Between her tears she told us something that Bill had always told her, that she owed it to the rest of the world to paint.   For Bill, this was like Gospel.   It was simply wrong if someone were to sing nothing (or paint nothing, or write nothing) when they had such a fine strong voice (or eye, or ear).   Realizing the value of work, needing to be busy, expecting the best of people around you; these are the lessons of Bill Poole's life.  

More and more people noticed what Bill was doing, and planning, and working on, and soon there were many of us discovering letterpress, or making paper, or setting type, or sewing books, or writing poetry .  .  .   or cherishing and collecting real letterpress books.   Bill was always patient and funny, and loved being kissed by the ladies.   He was a fine man, a great printer, and a generous and sweet friend.   Bill Poole was the eye of so many storms, if storms may be seen as positive, community-building, caring forces.   He was at the heart of our community of book lovers and makers, and in our memories he always will be.