This book is a semi-autobiographical novel dealing with romance, self revelation, and poets and writers in her life while she lived in San Francisco bay area as expressed with "tour de force" experimental typography and layout. Drucker purchased a variety of cold typefaces for letterpress printing and set out to use the entire set in writing this book. As a reviewer writes, "Linguistic architecture in the personal voice as manifest in particular elements of vigorous typographic representation." In a personal communication to the Sackners, Drucker stated that 100 copies were intended but only 96 were actually collated.The following explanation of the book as copied from a 10 typed page letter, dated January 1979, addressed to Mr Groenendijk, a collector living in Amsterdam, is reproduced below. This letter is held by the Sackner Archive - the Sackners sent a copy to Johanna Drucker after a personal communication revealed that she did not have a copy in her possession.I did this book in Berkeley, California in the summer and early fall of 1977. I was working for the West Coast Print Center at-the time, a printing facility, primarily offset, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts the institution which administrates the U.S. government's art budget) to provide - and this sounds totally pretentious - low-cost printing services for the literary community. The work I-was doing there, did there, for two years, was as a phototypesetter. It was my job to render literally hundreds of manuscripts of poetry and short prose, critical articles and reviews, into the form of galleys of type produced photographically on a small, computerized typesetting machine. Now I have to explain to you, because it's an essential element in the understanding of this book, that when I first began to work in this place, in the fall of 1975, I was almost completely ignorant of the traditions of American-poetry and of the contemporary forms those traditions were manifesting. In the course of those two years the education I got from exposure to such a volume of literature and the kinds of discussion generated around it (from gossip with my fellow workers in the shop, whispering rumors at parties, back-row bullshit at readings and so on) began, in my mind, to feed into a structure of inter-relations among these individuals in which each one functioned according to their background, their education, their personal sources and motivations for producing poetry. Each one of them had their own intellectual idea about the uses of language, each one also had an emotional drive toward this expression, and as an inevitable consequence, each one had a place in the social structure of that com-plex community of writers and small press publishers in which one's identity was completely aligned with one's work and the public face of the private voice. I was fascinated, of course, by the whole thing, by my perception of these people as individuals, by what I knew about them and how I knew it, by my take on the general scene, by the way in which power was manipulated, among these folks, each one an adherent of a particular aesthetic doctrine which was dogma to the individual. Oh yeah, there was lots of material to work with and I was so full of it, so immersed in it there in my little chair by the computer keyboard that the only possible way to clear my head was to use it, use it all, that information, in my own personal manifestation.The type that is used in this book I acquired, all, from a guy who was the assistant director of the Print Center, at the time. Since he had a well -salaried administrative post and I was just a lowly typesetter working for an hourly wage, he with that miniscule stuff, an hourly wage, he was in the position of having the capital, which I lacked to indulge in his fantasy of being a letterpress, or "fine printer." In the San Francisco Bay Area, like here, the hand-crafty art of letterpress (that is, relief printing from lead or hot type) is associated with quality and tradition. The typefaces are more beautiful than when rendered into cold type, the impression on the page supposedly makes it easier to read, letterpress is usually printed on better paper which makes it endure and so on, right? So it's a matter of a little prestige, and taste - you have to be able to make those distinctions for one thing, to appreciate the quality of the object, etc. It's a little bit exclusive and cultivated. Around the Print Center there was a group of letterpress printers who dedicatedly produced small volumes of poetry or short prose and it became very fashionable to have the title page and cover type for offset books produced from proofs by these people. Even better was to acquire a couple of drawers of a few fonts of some lovely standard italian (sic) type face, and set the titles yourself. Now this fellow, the one I acquired the type from, really fancied himself as associated with fine printing. He appreciated the art, he educated himself with Aldus and Morison and Gill, and he knew the lineage of typefaces the way English school-children know the-succession of-the throne. So, given an opportunity, he bought himself a beautiful flat-bed Vandercook proof press and a 48-drawer oak cabinet full of type. Lucky for me he didn't like to get his hands dirty and also had no imagination. He sold-me everything in the case, except a tray of Centaur (one of the Bay Area fine print favorites - you can find it in any shop in San Francisco or Berkeley, usually in a whole run from 6 point to 60 with an appropriate complement of Arrighi italic) which he wanted to keep because it was the only 'good, usable' face of the lot. The rest of the stuff, everything in this book, he considered junk. So did most everyone else (one notable exception being my mentor and former teacher, Betsy Davids). And while I made the outrageous claim that I was going to do a book in which I would use every piece of that type in some appropriate application, and each piece only once, so that I would in essence, 'use everything', my friend, the assistant director, went on to strip and refinish the type-case itself, revelling (sic) in the beauty of the fine piece of furniture he had acquired. The press, meanwhile, stood idle and subsequently became my private domain (though the owner refused to sell it to me), and I remain overwhelmingly grateful for having been allowed exclusive use of that piece of equipment during those months. The scrap paper, rags, ink, and solvent of the West Coast Print Center were at my disposal, I made good and constant use of them and clocked in more hours in that place in my two years than any other two staff people combined, The Print-Center, I should add, occupied a building which had been built in California stucco fantasy style as The Little Chapel of the Flowers, a funeral service and mortuary which had gone out of business. The press and type-cabinet stood in the most dank, most dark, airless room, the space formerly used for storage of the bodies. It had thick cinderblock walls and a sliding, refrigerator/insulator door, and I would hate to tell you how many of those end-less, repetitively sunny California days I spent buried in that crypt fit-ting bits of lead together in a stick. It got to the point near the end of this project, where I practically-lived in the place. In the last phase I spent over 48 consequetive (sic) hours there, crashing out in a big old armchair when I couldn't keep awake any longer while my shop companions (poets, printers, and publishers all) tiptoed in and out opening the drawers of the cabinet to see how much I still had left to do, knowing, as I knew, that when the drawers were all empty and set-up forms stood on the galley trays, I would be done. And I must also emphasize, in case you should mistake the tone of this description, that I was more excited, more absorbed in, and gained more satisfaction from the activity of this project, than any other single element in my life at that time. I had the privilege of the space, time, and materials to completely indulge my obsession, and I did.The structure of the book evolves partly from the 'use everything' premise which is one of its motivational bases. Consequently the accessibility of the language and, in turn, of the information contained therein, runs the full gamut from obvious to obscure. The idea was to associate typeface with, voice, size and spatial relationships on the page with importance, The degree of the reader's involvement is entirely dependent on his interest. What is most apparent is most accessible. The large poems and the narrative across the bottom of the page being the obvious, easy elements. All the references I in the book, however, are related, and a reader whose concentration leads him to follow the train of relations down through the six point marginalia, through the complexities of the footnotes at the end of the book, and to untangle the phoenetic (sic) phrases on the back side of the poems, will be able to perceive the entire network of information which connects to form the profile of-these individuals as well as to sketch the intricacies of their social interaction.The title page sets forth the themes which run through the book. The book is primarily, to be the exposition of what I know about the sources of and uses of language i.e., the whole, entire range, so, metaphorically, the entire alphabet of my linguistic experience - from "A to Z." Through the book every character who appears is associated with a letter, one of the twenty-six which compose the English alphabet. No other characters appear and the whole experience is in terms of those twenty-six factors. A is the main character, the heroine of the story, the speaking voice of the narrative which is addressed to Z, the so-called hero, the object of her fantasy crush, her infatuation. So, the book is in a sense the articulation, "from A to Z," of her perception of him and their possible relation. But it's a fantasy, remember, and an act of bad faith, the projection outward onto a human being, as an object, of her illusion of what he is, because of what she wants him to be. The heroine is aware of what she's doing, which is where she gets the "Incidents in a Non-Relationship" title for her narrative, clearly realizing that she does not know the man she fantasizes about and does not come to know him any better through these incidents. The incidents, however, are also connected to the wider circle which includes the other characters in the book. The incidents are readings, visits to the book store of Z, poetry parties, openings-for books - all of those cliquish and incestuous gatherings in which the principles (sic) act out their manipulations of ego and power struggles. Paradoxically, it is in these situa-tions and out of these incidents that A comes to know all of these people and who exactly they are. She does not come to know Z, but everyone else: "or how I came to not know who is." The "Politics of Language" is about the use of expression as an expression of use: everything is calculated to have an effect. The concern of Z with himself as a popular figure who uses language as a form of self-promotion is completely with language as a social/political tool, and he is very consciously manipulative in ItI hat mode. Then the whole thing, whole book, functions as a "Bibliography," the compilation of contemporary writing styles from the most banal to the more interesting, more mature, more realized. Not everyone I knew is represented, of course, and everyone who is represented is done so only partially, so the "Partial" nature of the "Bibliography." This is also a double entendre with the im, that is, 'I'm' or 'I am' partial. The space separating the two letters into a solitary element gives the word simultaneous and contradictory meanings. It is a partial bibliography which is not impartial at a11. "Our An" has a very specific derivation because my good friend and most competitive rival printer in the Bay Area at the time, Alistair Johnston, was doing a bibliography of the Auerhahn Press, the small press which had brought out Ginsburg, Snyder, Mc Clure and the other to-be heavies of the West Coast poetry scene in the fifties and sixties. Part of my interest in doing a fraudulent bibliography came from watching him sift through the letters and notes and drafts and re-drafts of works of these people for the vicarious involvement it gave him with their lives in the name of scholarship. Being very fond of that process of research myself I decided to act it out just as thoroughly by creating all of the documents and information myself - and that resulted, of course, in this book. So "Our An" is a pun on Auerhahn which jus-tifies by defining itself further as "Collective specifics," a self-explanatory term which indicates that particular bits of real information about this whole group have been extracted as representative.On the dedication page the "Politics of Language" theme is polarized into two distilled statements at opposite ends of the spectrum defined as "Approach" and "Avoidance." The statement of approach is A's situation, and Z's situation is defined in avoidance. The only real error in the book occurs in this sequence, however, because on page F (where the poem "The Woman Who Liked To Lick" occurs) the approach voice gets transferred from the top of the page to the bottom. This was just an accident and has no significance and from that point on approach continues on the bottom of the page. Slob city - I should have been more careful, that's all. The "Deadd'cakeshum," A's typeface and voice, was composed after her text, so that substitution and innovation are already transforming the words into anagrams, phoeneticisms,(sic) and puns. The statements in the paragraph are by each of the twenty-six characters in turn, they follow the numbers 1 to 26 and the numbers correspond directly to the letters of the alphabet in terms of identity- i.e. 1 for A, 2 for B and so on. This is the initial statement by each character and as such is the expression of each one's notion of how the choice to write is made, how each one grants himself permission out of a basic motivation to produce poetry.The "Table of Contents" and "Vocabulary of Reference." The idea here is to list the terms, give them their first definition. I The characters, whose voices were first heard in the dedication page expressing themselves in a statement about essential motivation as writers, are now clearly identified by the title of a poem, associated with a letter, and then followed by some very basic information about who they are, where they come from, what their educational background is, what stage they're at in their writing career, (B, for example, whose poem "Okay Okay" is the representative selection of his work, is described as a 'drugwasted Los Angeles high school drop out who had early publishing success in New York'). The alternating line lists the incidents of the non relationship in captioned form. Reading down this list one can see, quickly, the sequence of events in the development of A's infatuation with Z and how she acts on it: "It Begins" at a "Reading" after which they go "Out Drinking," then "Nothing More" happens until she sees him give a "Hot Performance." This creates, some "Interest" which contributes to the development of a "Crush." She starts to have Dreams about him and decides to contrive some "Act" to bring herself to his attention and so on. Each of these captions is further elaborated upon in the phrases following, also with the words run together to keep it from being too obvious, but also, simply, because by that time I had no more spacing material left in ten point. But anyway, for example: "It Begins": as-sumptions based on romantic scraps of intriguing and alluring non-knowledge. These captions and phrases don't reappear in the narrative, they are supple-mental information and serve as an additional dimension to it.On the "Introduction" page the approach and avoidance statements begin their run along the top and the bottom, ("Approach": seeking permission the heavy come-on is a concession to the desire for attention…etc. and Avoidance: aspiring to fame the popular idiom promotes an accessible image wanting, recognition…etc.).Z's avoidance is really only in his per-sonal relation to A. His own language is full of accessible popular forms, he strives to be successful on the most banal level, craving the kind of rock-star success which attracts fans and groupies on the exact level on which A tries to approach him. But he thinks himself too important, too successful to be associated with her. More important, that is, he conceives of his posi-tion in terms of the external trappings and qualifications and wants to associate with a woman whose credentials are commensurate with his own, through which he can improve his own standing - i.e. another slightly famous, rising, success-oriented-star-type poet. For him writing is all self-promotion and in order to reach the widest possible audience he croons, romanticizes, and mythologizes about himself as the super-cool anti-hero. Now that's Z speaking there in the long italicized paragraph, using lots of California idiom ('From where my personal space is at' etc.). But the main section on this page is a categorization of writing traditions and the inter-relations of these folks as writers through these traditions. So A's style is derived from two main influences, Q and E, representing the tradition of personal, humanistic statement in the style, say, of Ed Dorn, and E representing the most formal/procedural linguistically concerned writing, of, say, Clark Coolidge, in which language is used to construct a system by its use in which all of the significance of the piece can be determined inside that framework of use according to the intention of the writer, Now the joke of all this is the small statement under "Introduction" which is a direct quote from two separate sources. You see, here I was being this presumptuous and energetically pro-lific kid in this group of serious writers and printers. So naturally I got some criticism from some of them, mainly a couple of young men, one of whom was a poet and one a printer (both of whom appear in this book, by the way -J is the writer and P the printer). Each of these two on separate occasions and in separate circumstances challenged my presumption to write and to print by saying I didn't know anything about the traditions of writing or printing so how could I possibly do anything…and how little I actually knew is stated in the note below, which is also a quote, which was the first question which I asked old Betsy (Davids) when I began working at the Print Center. I knew that little about American poetry that I had to get her to distinguish these three giants for me.The next twenty-six pages have a uniform format. On the front side are basically nine elements and on the back side is one element with a number of factors-to it. Top and bottom are the approach/avoidance statements continu-ing, already discussed at length. Next (missing from page B and C) is the identifying letter for each character, A on the first page through Z on the last. Then I there's a poem. The type face was selected to correspond with the personality, to lend an appropriate rendering of-the voice, However, remember, this was a matter of taking what I had, what was there, and using it - not pulling anything I wanted out of a catalogue or vast stock. No, the idea was that what I found in those cases should be adequate, should some-how, actually, for being in the same time and place as I the experience, make a correspondence to the situation I was trying to present. So, in each case is a drawer felt to constitute, by the total of the elements, a whole per-sonality. The front page poem is the obvious statement, the clearest possible text, I could evolve from the type in the drawer, and the back page, the phoenetic (sic) arrangement of the sorts (sorts being what is leftover, miscellaneous type) is the rest of that entity: the whole being the sum of the two. What's stated is selective, what's leftover from that selection, however, is not to be denied. As it turned out what I had was four families of type faces and six odd faces. The odd faces, Reno High (A), Jenson (G), Cloister (I), Stymie Extra Bold (J), Text (N), and the Bold Italic (Z) are the most distinct if not necessarily the most important I individuals. (These names came off the drawers and are for identification only, they don't necessarily have anything to do with the real names of the faces.) The four families are Sans (used for contemporary, intellectual statement B, D, P, T), Century,(for traditional, humanistic, slightly romantic and quite personal statement C, F, 0, Q, U, W, Y), Brush(for sentimental, cliched, sticky and excessively personal state-ment H, K, M, S, V, X) and Copperplate (for procedural, very formal language for the sake of language E, L, R). For the most part the most important indi-vidual in a certain group, the one with the most influence is the one ren-dered in the largest point size. So, in a sense, K is a giant influence in the Brush world - and that is appropriately borne out in the social references contained in the notes. The poems themselves are completely imitative attempting to render the style of these real individuals. Almost without exception they are based on real writers, some of reknown (sic), some obscure and known only to their peers and likely to remain so, and some in the transition from obscurity to reputation. Many of them are quite young since that particular group around the Print Center was mostly in their late twenties and thirties, so their development and enduring qualities have yet to be proven. Many of their identities are obvious to anyone well acquainted with that group, so no names appear and the gender is usually reversed in the references. The most famous among them is possibly Tom Raworth (D) whom I can mention since I admire him and his work and none of the information about-him is in the least derogatory.The marginal notes, the six and eight point, type on the left. hand, are all quotes from incidents involving these characters. They are statements over-heard at readings, excerpts from letters from one to another about the acti-vities of still others, they are extracted from critical reviews, from newspaper articles, from tape recorded interviews and so on (all fictitious, mind you, like everything else in the book). Following each one of the notes is a number, or, where a series of sources have been quoted in one note, following each segment. That number corresponds to an explanation at the rear of the volume in the "Sources Quoted" section. This was the last piece of work in the book. It is the place where the last bits of 'type were being used (as it happens I did not manage e to use up all of the six and eight point type) so the level of innovation/substitution gets very high. However, these notes and the marginalia by the poems are chockfull of information on these people, their affairs and infidelities, perversities, competitive backbiting, etc. But the language-in them is really free-form, triple entendre, associated, prosy, and very indulgent - I really let myself go figuring anyone who would bother that miniscule stuff would bother with the complexities of the language as well, so I totally enjoyed making them as intricate as possible, these pieces. For example: Note 4: D wuz mutha t'uz awl but G wuz mon ange, won, what looked, up and took up, so: D was the mother to us all but G was my angel, one (that wom), that I looked up and took up with. Now in the "Sources" section, it explains, 4: From a letter A wrote after G's reading because how A comes to be here is by being a distant relation. Here's another example: Note 10: Gimme, gimme, gimme which is explained in the Sources as 10: Quick quote of the really very loudly boisterous C leaning over some refreshments after D's reading at Z's store while making some rapid moves.)Then, still on every page, there's the elements of the narrative, six of them. Here's how they work in relation to each other using page "B" as a sample. There's the main part of the narrative, in ten or twelve point type, with a boldface intro line ('After the reading you came up to me, to thank me for some work I had done. You were very charming, but I didn't feel very susceptible to you. You had that slightly greying hair, prematurely, and that soft Boston accent, too, they gave you a certain distinction.') This is A's straight story about her perception of Z and her fantasy relation with him. Directly above that is a line with two parts. The first is a word in capitals ('CONDESCENDING') which states A's mood succinctly. The runtogetherline which follows that ('Well why not after all he's just curious just like the rest') states her sexual orientation at the moment. To the left of that, in small Century, on every page but the first, is a statement of time and Place ('Minutes later after the reading finishes.'). Below that is a one word statement of the element of Z's character coming into play in that situation ('Arrogance') and then a statement by Z of his state of mind ('Another easy moment to advance, very little capital investment, choice indicators.') His language is calculating and materialistic. He thinks in terms of gains and losses as if his popularity is something he can take stock of in accounting terms on a balance sheet.The back side of each page, then contains a phoetic (sic) critical review of the book from which the poem on the front side is supposedly extracted (remember this is all fictional). But for an example, A's poem, Some Intentions,, comes from a book of hers called Acute Perceptions. The price of the book is an expression of the financial standing of these people in relation to each other, basically from $1 to $26 with D, at $1, being the poorest and E at $26 being the richest. The number of pages in the book corresponds roughly to the age of the character, A was 25. Sometimes the type face is identified, sometimes the point size also. Then follows what is partially a critique of the book and partially just phoenetic (sic) words or phrases which are further indications of character. In the case of A this phoenetic (sic) writing translates into regular English as, 'An improvisational, provisional quest of how and why search.' Have choice quote from famous quarrels. Backs subjects with good quality mixed views. Sledge hammer gives vacuous crush, why ask how banks give and have to buy, smacks knowingly harm bugs, has job to acquiesce business, so is gradually bold and wish undoes: how toxic objects do off!' Even when the statements are unravelled (sic) from their phoenetic (sic) state they must be taken as associative and implicative rather than as direct information.The last bit of information is contained in the "Key to Abbreviations Used In This Book." There the letters are all listed and beside them are physical descriptions of the characters. In capitals, spelled backwards, are diseases which are appropriate to each personality. In the case of both the disease and the description, great liberty was taken with reality so that what is described is a character, not necessarily in physical, but in metaphysical, form. So, for instance, in the case of J, that-over-intellectual fellow who challenged my presumption to even write without a Masters degree from a creative writing program, the description, in which he is transformed, calls him a drab, sallow, sullen and humorless young woman who would constantly be troubled by hemmorhoids (sic).So, to sum up, the references to any one individual occur in the following places in sequence through the book. First in the Dedication by number, Second, in the Table of Contents by letter and poem title, Third in the Introduction by letter and tradition, Fourth, on the individual poem page with the back side included, Fifth in the key at the end, and then in numerous places throughout the book in the marginalia and notes. The narrative of A and Z's relation, includes the information on the Table of Contents, the Approach/Avoidance statements, the statement of Z in his introductory remarks, A's poem, the narrative and surrounding bits, and then in Z's poem, plus any other references which appear in the notes.I finished the books about two hours before I left California, in the middle of October, 1977. And though of course it has autobiographical sources, that's not to be taken to literally just as the book as a whole is to be considered more an intellectual then a critical exercise.Johanna Drucker -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.