In an age when anyone with a personal computer is a designer and printer, apprenticeships lasting no longer than the time it takes to boot up, Jim Rimmer kept alive arts dating back to Gutenberg.
He designed and carved by hand his own typefaces, cast molten lead into letters, operated clanging machines. He did so from a printing workshop behind his home in New Westminster, outside Vancouver. The room smelled of ink and machine grease. On sunny days, light shone through stained-glass windows to illuminate monstrous, cast-iron contraptions once hailed, as is now the laptop computer, as marvels of technology.
The clunking, whirring machinery produced the most magnificent broadsides and books, including his autobiography and an illustrated edition of Tom Sawyer for which he also produced colour illustrations. These were produced in editions so limited as to make each volume a hand-crafted wonder.
He was a printer, illustrator, graphic designer, and typographer, as well as a metal and digital type designer.
It was once said about Rimmer, who died on Jan. 8 at the age of 75, that “fine art is not above him, commercial art is not below him.” Another fan called him “a jazz musician with inky fingers.”
In retirement, he was hailed for his craftsmanship. The W.A.C. Bennett Library at Simon Fraser University, which maintains a Jim Rimmer Collection, held a night called Rimmerfest in his honour four years ago. In 2007, the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada named him a fellow, the group’s highest honour.
Rimmer was little known by the general public, though the logos he designed were part of the visual diet of everyday life.
He inherited from his father, a stove repairman, a mechanical aptitude that would help him years later when he needed to rebuild vintage machines. His father also showed talent as a drawer, though he drew only for his own amusement and that of his son. His mother had worked at her family’s commercial printing house, so knew how to rebind books. She did so during the harsh years of the Depression with gingham, the only material at hand.
Young Jim was a poor student, which he would later attribute to undiagnosed dyslexia. At the time, he was dismissed as stupid. Not for him were the disciplines of reading, writing and arithmetic. He cared only for art class, otherwise doodling in the margins of textbooks a phantasmagoria of Wild West scenes over which floated zeppelins.
Poor grades led to the parental decision that he should become an apprentice compositor at his grandfather’s firm, J.W. Boyd Printers and Publishers. The young man balked, though he agreed to talk the matter over.
“I arrived at the Duke Street house and found grandfather in the backyard, hoeing potatoes,” Rimmer recalled in his autobiography. “He propped the hoe in the crotch of the plum tree. In the cool green of his garden, he tamped his old briar, took a draw and started in his gentle voice: ‘I hear you want to go back to school. ... You have a fine opportunity to have a trade. Printing is an old and respected craft. There is art in printing. You are artistic; you will have a chance to use it. At one time printers were the only people aside from nobility who were allowed to carry a sword.’ He took a pause to relight his gurgling pipe, and midst the perfume of the rhubarb and loganberries he continued: ‘And if yer don’t take the job I’ll kick yer little arse all the way up Duke Street!’ ”
Young Jim earned $15 per week. Thus began a career lasting nearly six decades in pursuit of the mastery of fine typography.
