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Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti turns 90 on March 24, 2009. All through the years I lived in San Francisco, he was a familiar figure in coffeehouses or walking in North Beach, a guardian of the City.

I first had the nerve to speak with Lawrence, when I found myself standing in line with him at the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market. I gushed that City Lights Books was the center of the universe. He looked at me skeptically, but smiled. Years later, after I had designed a number of book covers for City Lights, I worked with him to edit and present a selection of his life drawings in Life Studies, Life Stories. 

“I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety to drop dead”. This line, from Coney Island of the Mind, in 1958, still rings like a clarion call. Ferlinghetti’s best poems offer this sort of deep optimism and faith in life. Of course, we can tell the modern age to drop dead so that a gentler world can replace it. Of course, we can go sit in the poetry room at City Lights and read Basho on a foggy night when nothing else makes much sense. Of course.

I’m working on a project where we are sourcing images from the Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley. Last week, I was able to examine the Nuremberg Chronicle from 1493, and snap a few photos.  This is the most lavishly illustrated manuscript of the fifteenth century.  Here is a lively Danse Macabre, as well as a spot illustration of the moon, printed from woodblocks. The original version of the dance is roughly the same size as the screen on a 20 inch, flat screen computer, so that is definitely a big woodblock.