In memoriam: Ian Tyson (1933-2021)

Amanda Bernstein

Book artist, master printer, and sculptor Ian Tyson has died at the age of 88. Ian was a great friend and supporter of both the Private Presses Collection and the Small Press Poetry Collection at the University of Sheffield Library. He donated works, and also his time and energy, to help develop the collections.

He shared valuable information on his collaborations, at his Tetrad Press and ed.it Press, with poets and artists including Roy Fisher, John Hall, John Christie, Jerome Rothenberg, Tom Phillips, Jackson Mac Low, Larry Eigner, and Derrick Greaves. Ian Tyson was Tom Phillips’ first ‘publisher’ when he produced the first edition of A Humument (Tetrad 1970) in a series of twelve fascicles.

Ian Tyson founded Tetrad Press in 1969. He enjoyed assisting young poets who were struggling for recognition. For 25 years Tetrad produced striking screen-printed pamphlets and posters. One large-scale work was the set of boxed prints of Jackson Mac Low’s The pronouns: a collection of 40 dances (1971), measuring 25x20 inches. Tetrad closed in 1995.

Five years later Ian founded ed.it, and began a new phase in his artwork. ed.it was a press in which he experimented with computer-based designs; and he finally gave up the printing press altogether.

His friendships were long-lasting (his working life with Jerome Rothenberg, for example, spanned half a century, beginning with Sightings in 1967). Rothenberg wrote a fine account of their work together in collaborations: livres d’artiste 1968-2003 (St Roman de Malegarde: ed.it 2003).

‘He is illustrator of the work,’ writes Rothenberg, ‘not as subject or as mood per se but as structure. The rest comes out of that, a play between the poet & the artist, where the poet’s words are taken, not for what they say at surface but for the directions they imply - the rules or inner structures that are there for him to read and follow, or evade.’

Ronald King, founder of Circle Press, was among Ian’s oldest friends. King and Roy Fisher collaborated on several ambitious works including Bluebeard’s Castle (1972), Tabernacle (2001), and Anansi Company (1992). In the mid-1960s, before founding Tetrad, Ian collaborated with Ron at Circle Press; there, Ian honed his screen printing skills.

Much later, Roy and Ian created Roller (Circle Press, 1999); a limited number were housed in ‘sculptural containers’ of MDF with a 3D sculpture rising up from the top, an idea that Ian had been developing for several years, both in print and in large-scale outdoor sculptures. He used the same technique for the CD containers for Brian Ferneyhough’s Time and motion study II (Optic Nerve, 2001).

Ian initially met Roy Fisher via Stuart Montgomery of Fulcrum Press. Their first collaborations were three pamphlets in the Tetrad Press Pamphlet series: Metamorphoses (1970, images by Tom Phillips); Correspondence (1970, images by Tom Phillips), and Cultures (1975). The major work Also (1972, images by Derrick Greaves, edition of 75) is an exemplar of technically superb printing that must be seen to be believed.

On Roy Fisher, Ian wrote:

He was a craftsman and concerned with structure in both poetry and music. One memorable afternoon was spent sitting beside him at the piano while he demonstrated the differing techniques of piano players he liked - for example why Bill Evans adopted a hunched position around the middle of the keyboard. An example of his structural care with words is seen in Cultures where each of the round poems sheds a fragment which becomes the nucleus of the next - words in petri dishes - patches of mould off the walls of Birmingham.

Ian Tyson’s last work was ‘Ode to Aphrodite’ (ed.it, 2021).