Blog

At the tail end of summer I printed the covers for the sixth issue of my roughly annual literary magazine, AMERARCANA: A Bird & Beckett Review. I set the titles in Bulmer and used the back of wood type to form the grained block pattern. After a few delays getting the final interior text file… Continue reading AMERARCANA issue SIX →

Continuing my work at the Cowell Press, (taking a cue from the previous print "o : O : o") I used large lowercase wooden "e"s to make a sort of pinwheel/flower and small uppercase wooden "e"s to make a square/lattice, printing each in grey, turning 90 degrees to print again in grey, then swapped their… Continue reading Further vowels →

This is the second print I did at the Cowell Press, a couple weeks ago. Composed of 3 types of wood "o"s arranged in blocks and printed all together in yellow, rotated (#1 to position 3, #2 to position 1, #3 to position 2) and printed again in blue, then rotated again and printed once more… Continue reading Cowell Press Continued →

I've just entered into what I hope will be a long-term relationship with the Cowell Press on the UC Santa Cruz campus, currently run by Gary Young, poet, printer, protégé (so to speak) of William Everson/Brother Antoninus, poet/printer nonpareil, who taught for years at the university and lived and worked just up the mountain. The… Continue reading Cowell Press →

Released on the same day, at the same time, in the same place with Brian Lucas' Eclipse Babel, was TAKES, by Jason Morris, a chapbook of brief essays and poems published by Bootstrap Press. This is the second of Bootstrap's new pamphlet series. The poet and the publisher met me down at the San Francisco Center for… Continue reading TAKES →

Ensemble Editions, a new collaborative publishing venture, releases its first book this month: Eclipse Babel, with text and drawings by Brian Lucas. I designed the book and printed the covers from handset Bulmer type on the front and spine, and a photopolymer ISBN barcode on the back. For the front cover I set the title and… Continue reading ECLIPSE BABEL →

For the latest Impart Ink project, a pamphlet published under the auspices of Bird & Beckett comprising roughly half of Patrick James Dunagan's long poem (or poem sequence) BOOK OF KINGS, I experimented with wood type and color layering for the first time, to mixed results. The typesetting for the text was tricky, too, but I'm pleased… Continue reading from BOOK OF KINGS →