Author works to capture

life in hand-lettered book

By RON LARSEN

Journal Staff Writer

"Who on earth was

Mary Worth?"

NEW ULM -- Ward A. Bloedel has worked long hours for nearly three years to capture the essence of his life in a book.

The 45-year-old New Ulm resident has finally completed the task, but you won't be seeing the book anytime soon in book stores. That's because his is a one-of-a-kind book, not produced by a photo-mechanical printing process as virtually all books are created today.

Every word is printed by hand, his hand. Every cartoon is drawn and colored by hand. There are some pre-printed items in the book, but they are lost within the 504 ledger-sized pages that become the billboard of his inner-most thoughts and recollections.

Since the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, hand-lettered books have become virtually extinct as practitioners of the ancient art are few and far between.

Like the unanswered question about Mary Worth, many of the poems and the complete novel that occupies 31 ledger pages raise more questions than are ever answered in Bloedel's writings and cartoons.

Is there a common thread that runs through the myriad of writings and cartoons that defines the man and his purpose? "No," says Bloedel.

"There are so many poems, cartoons and stories that came out from me -- they're like an extension of myself -- and there are so many that it could be sometimes hard with this volume of work that I've written to pinpoint one thing that characterizes myself. (You need to consider) the work on the whole," Bloedel reflected.

His first literary work, completed in 1968, to find its way into his autobiographical compendium is a poem, "The Death of Apple." In it, he ascribes human feelings and characteristics to an apple that has fallen from a tree and lays moldering in the grass surrounded by its siblings.

"It's rather morbid, too. My first poems were basically poems that dealt with the dark things like death, sorrow -- you know -- really traumatic stuff."

Bloedel said his latent morbidity really was exposed in 1968 when, at the age of 10, he became fascinated with the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, author of "The Raven," ("quoth the Raven, nevermore").

"Reading about his life, and the kind of works that he did. Also, seeing scary stuff on television and hearing about things in real life kind of fed my fantasies and my thoughts so it would be certain that the first poems were going to end up this way," Bloedel explained.

It didn't help, either, that Bloedel's family had just moved into a house that apparently had its own dark past.

"The house we were living in Fairmont at that time was reputed to be haunted. Certain people in the neighborhood had said something to the effect that it was haunted by the spirit of the old guy that previously lived there."

If there is an apparent central thread to Bloedel's imaginative but dark view on life, it is the apple which reappears in 1977 as the "Poor Apple," and as a cartoon character, as in Jug and Apple in "A drench of blood," and the "Jug and Apple Chronicles."

Also making multiple appearances along the way in Bloedel's journey into his imagination is Mother Mad in "Mother Mad and Mouse" and Mother Mad's successor, Mother Madkin.

However, Bloedel's book is not all doom-and-gloom. In the midst of the dark-side writings and cartoons is a yearbook oasis, cheek by jowl, with an engagement announcement featuring his second-grade teacher, Judith Ann Lewis.

"She was one who saw my writings and cartoons and encouraged me to keep on going," Bloedel said. "I lost touch with her over the years, and I don't know where she is now."

Another editorial oasis is devoted to a thank-you card from British actress Anna Calder-Marshall, to whom Bloedel had sent a hand-written book of his poems. She expresses her appreciation for the gift, as well as of his talent as a poet, and apologizes for not responding sooner. As she notes, her publicist apparently had temporarily misplaced his address.

Only in seeing the printing on the ledger page can one appreciate the painstaking job of lettering done by Bloedel. The page is lined with horizontal rules about the same distance apart as the rules in a standard school notebook. He writes two lines of words between the rules! The result is letters that are no more than one-eighth-inch high.

It would seem to be an exercise that would interest only a masochist, but Bloedel says he would have it no other way.

"I adhere to that philosophy. Nowadays, you've got computers, you've got things that do things real easy for you. I want to be able to do it like those 17th Century philosophers and writers. You know, do it by hand like I think all great stories, poems or whatever should be done."