As I write this, it is twenty years to the day since the death of Brian Lane, at the age of 57. Brian was a powerhouse who put work above all other concerns, reflected in a legacy of meticulous publications in various media, not least his output as artist publisher in guises from Gallery Number Ten in Blackheath in the 1960s, through ‘Probable Latitude…’; Lumb Lane (with Michael Lumb); Editions Brian Lane in Camberwell; Black Circus in the 1980s, and Danse Macabre in the ’90s. The complex character with the complex career is well documented in the The Printed Performance: Brian Lane Works 1966-99, edited by the late Martin Rogers with Simon Cutts for RGAP; the comprehensive bibliography by John Janssen lists over 420 titles. So I don’t think it either possible or necessary to attempt a summary of Brian’s life and work here, and now; but I think the passage of time allows a revised perspective on his influence and legacy.
Brian was the child of a mechanical age. He was an apprenticed printer, and there was always machinery to enable projects: he was a master of the Adana tabletop letterpress machine, contributing both expertise and labour to many early Coracle projects; I remember too rubber stamps, a waxing machine, button-badge machinery alongside the various rollers, rulers and cutters. But looking back on it, I think there was a tendency to go for the lowest-tech solution available. Rather than litho, there was letterpress, or photocopying, or a duplicator; hand-stitching, stapling or comb binding always preferable to perfect binding; hand-cut and glued boxes and slip-cases. In one of his later projects, the Murder Club series for Harrap, he secured not only the author’s rights but the contract to produce page payouts and artwork for the covers, which were a collage of his hand-tinted photocopies of old murder trial flyers, with the titling – good but not perfect – done in Letraset.
This preference for the hand-finished, for the visible hand of the producer, is perhaps seen most starkly in his attitude to electronic media. He embraced this, but at entry level: much of his later work from the mid-1980s, as a writer of true crime, was carried out on what I remember to have been a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the most basic of personal computers with a 16Kb RAM. I later rigged up a method of linking this to my Amstrad, so that Brian’s copy could be transferred to floppy disk to be passed on to his publisher. The same system was used for one of his great achievements, The Artist Publisher, an exhibition devised by Simon Cutts, curated by Coracle and compiled by Brian Lane for the Crafts Council in 1986. The catalogue was composed on Brian’s Sinclair and the artwork run off on his cheap-as-chips dot matrix printer, with its graphic resolution as low as the destination board at a railway station.
This ties in with something I think central to Brian’s attitude. His background was skilled working class; he was certainly learned, but certainly not academic. This gave a bottom-up, egalitarian basis to his work. Being outside disciplines, he made his own, and was free – as in a way was Ian Hamilton Finlay – to indulge where the fancy took him, to be a polymath and to have the most eclectic of outputs. He was a heavy-duty researcher, who spent days and months in the Newspaper Library at Colindale, or in the old Reading Room of the British Library, unearthing the hard way forgotten facts and wayward opinions that he could restore and amaze the world with anew.
He was largely a social creature, and printing sessions often overlapped with rendezvous in the local pub. On one occasion a morning printing engagement for a friend’s small press was put off until after lunch, when the drinking continued at Brian’s flat. In the early evening the other participants fell asleep, waking up some hours later in the dark to find that Brian had printed off the edition alone, spread it to dry, washed up the press, and gone to bed.
He was extraordinarily generous of his time and skills, and lavish in his enthusiasm, for wet-behind-the-ears small press neophytes like myself. It is impossible to estimate what effect his own work, and his encouragement of others, may have had; personally, I’m very grateful.