Fine Print Time Machine: vol. 1, no. 3 & 4, July & October 1975

Presses/books mentioned, mostly published in 1974.

PART 2

vol. 1, no. 3 & 4, July & October 1975

Selected Press Books (short reviews)

1. Arion Press. A Commonplace Book of Cookery..... 425 copies. Printed in Goudy Monotype Garamont, Narciss, and Typo Upright Script types; Fournier borders. English Inveresk cream mould-made paper.

2. Bird & Bull Press. Henry Morris. Roller-printed Paste Papers for Bookbinding. ca. 215 copies. Text in Centaur & Codex types printed on Hodgkinson hand made B & B paper.

3. Janus Press. Federico Garcia Lorca. Romance de la Guardia Civil Español. 300 numbered copies. Monotype Spectrum on Mohawk Superfine Vellum with Fabriano endpapers.

 The Tower of Babel..... Loose folio sheets wrapped in printed paper folder and laid in a full-buckram box. Type is 18 pt. Monotype Spectrum. 100 press-numbered copies and 10 copies hors d'commerce, all signed by artist, Claire Van Vliet.

4. King Library Press. Aratus. Phenomena. 75 copies. Victor & Carolyn Hammer designed for Anvil Press; Nancy Lair, printer. Printed in Koch Bible Gothic on F. J. Head English hand made paper.

5. Oliphant Press (NY). Fitz-James O'Brien. What Was It?. Illus Leonard Baskin. 200 numbered & signed copies on Italian Fabriano in 10 pt. Walbaum type.

6. Oracle Press (Oracle, AZ). Oracle: A Voluntary of Poems and Prints. 100 signed/numbered copies plus 20 signed artist proofs. Printed on mouldmade Rives & Italia papers. Letterpress in handset Palatino. "12 original prints, including copperplate, zinc & relief etchings, wood & copperplate engravings & an original photograph, by various artists, to accompany poetry by Wakoski, Merwin & others."

7. The Penmaen Press. X. J. Kennedy. After the Death of John Brennan. 326 copies of which 300 were for sale numbered 1-300. Bembo type on Curtis Rag, all copies signed by the poet and the artist. 3 wood engravings by Michael McCurdy.

8. The Printery (Kirkwood, MO). Jean Wahl. Voices in the Dark: Fifteen Poems of the Prison & the Camp. Tr. from the French by chas. Guenther. Cochin types printed damp on La Garde, a hand-made laid pre-WWII French paper. Printer was Kay Michael Kramer. 120 copies signed by translator.

9. Windhover Press. Charles Olson in Connecticut: Last Lectures; As heard by John Cech, Oliver Ford, Peter Rittner. 220 copies from Bembo types on various handmade papers.

Number 4

Noted that Carol Blinn has started Warwick Press.

Selected Press Books (short reviews)

1. The Compulsive Printer; Elmore Mundell (Portage, IN). James Joyce. The Ondt and the Gracehopper. Printed for Chicago: Joseph J. D'Ambrosio. 1975. 50 numbered copies and five artist proofs. 18 pt. Bulmer on Rives BFK on a No. 3 Vandercook proof press. 24 il. loose in "dark green ultra-suede solander case lined with cream pinwale corduroy; upper cover sheet with relief serigraph of the Ondt and the Gracehopper over-all gilded with 22K gold."

2. Press in Tuscany Alley. Adrian Wilson. Joyce Lancaster Wilson, author & illustrator. The Ark of Noah. 1975. Centaur on Simpson Lee Recycled Text and Strathmore Grandee Cover. Hand bound; 300 numbered & signed copies.

3. Allen Press. Edith Wharton. Quartet: Four Stories. 1975. 140 copies. Romance type set by hand; display type is Dorchester Script. Paper from St. Cuthberts Mill handmade to their specs. Printed damp on a Columbian.

4. King Library Press (Lexington, KY). The Seafarer. Transl. by George McWhorter from Anglo-Saxon. 1975. Composition, presswork and binding by David Oldham, Carolyn Whitesel and Sallie Ruff, apprentices to Carolyn Hammer and Margaret Williams. 100 copies in Hammer Samson Uncial on F. J. Head English hand-made paper.

5. Rebis Press (Oakland, CA). Johanna Drucker. As No Storm; or The Any Port Party. 1975. "Once or twice tripped/Hand fed vandercooked on moisty Rives all-rag at Rebis from Van Dijck much monotyped and much hand-set then sewn and grommeted and twined and all hard-canvassed on 326 copies of which 26 are signed and alphabeted. All but the grommeting by Betsy Davis and Johanna Drucker now all done...."

Works in Progress

1. Wilder Bently: Archetype Press. Bentleiad. A mock-heroic epic, "a cross between the Dunciad and the Odyssey. It certainly is the longest if not the greates tever written by a printer on the subject of what it takes to make a master-printer out of a Hell-Box Harry and a first rate didactic poet out of an Eddy Guest." Printed in scroll form, it was noted that all scrolls up to scroll G upon which he was working, were available from Dawson's Book Shop in LA, "uniformly cased and priced at $12 to $35 depending on length."

2. Wiliam Holman. Al Lowman. Printing Arts in Texas. To cover Texas printing from its beginnings to 1829. To be printed in folio format, hand-printed on paper from Spain, with decorations by Barbara Holman.

3. Lawton and Alfred Kennedy (San Francisco). Working of a complete bibliography of the work of Lawton Kennedy. Among other things, Lawton Kennedy printed work for the Champoeg Press of Portland, OR.

Recent Press Books

1. A. Colish, Inc. (Mt. Vernon, NY). Melville. Moby Dick. Artist's limited edition, signed by Jacqyes-Yves Cousteau (preface). Illus LeRoy Neiman; one original serigraph, signed, plus several double-page plates. Full brown morocco binding. 1500 copies.

2. Janus Press. Susan Johanknecht. Birthcords: Three poems and a lithograph. 8vo, 10 pp, wraps. 50 copies, signed.

3. Press of the Pegacycle Lady; William Dailey (LA, California).
 a. Roger Bacon. The Mirror of Alchemy..... 1975. 24 pp.
240 copies; qtr cloth $25; qtr morocco $65. For the Globe Book Store.
 b. Marquis de Sade. A Letter from the Bastille...Heretofore Unpublished. 9 pp + 4 pp facsimile; qtr cloth, 150 copies.

4. The Penumbra Press; Bonnie Pratt O'Connell (Lisbon, Iowa). Three titles. Reviewer said "A young press with few but excellently printed books to its credit, featuring evocative use of photographic images, unusual Japanese & German papers and tasteful touches of color, mostly in titles and pagination. Highly recommended."
 a. Steven Orden. Sleeping in Doors. Poems. 200 copies; Palatino types on Nideggen mould-made paper.
 b. Tess Gallagher. Stepping Outside. Poems. 38 pp. 30 copies in green cloth on Uwa rice paper; 100 signed on Gekkeikan handmade and 100 copies on Wookey Hole in wraps.
 c. Jon Anderson. Counting the Days. Poems. 30 pp; rust cloth. 160 copies on Hosho Special and 40 on white Hosho.

5. Pomegranate Press (Cambridge, Mass.). Joyce Carol Oates. The Girl; a short story. 1974. 6 orig. silkscreen-linoleum cuts by Karyl Klopp. 34 pp. 50 copies hardbound; 250 in wraps. 18 pt. Janson. 1st edn. Signed by Oates on t. p.

6. Stinehour Press (Lunenburg, VT). Virginia Woolf. The London Scene; Five Essays. Printed for NY: Frank Hallman, 1975. 46 pp. Cloth with printed d/j. 750 copies designed by Ronald Gordon.

7. Warwick Press; Carol J. Blinn (Easthampton, MA). Brahms. A German Requiem.... 1975. 4 hand colored woodcuts by Blinn tipped in. 18 pp, paste paper over boards, 30 copies ($50); 15 copies with additional signed print ($60). Cochin open type. "Pleasant and colorful, but overpriced," said the reviewer.
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That's it for this round!

Impressive swathe of well-known and lesser-known titles together, quite the eclectic list. Both of those King Library Press titles are on my wishlist, there are some new additions likely to come from this posting as well. Thanks!

>1 Glacierman: Thanks for posting these! It's a really good way to point up the books and printers from a very interesting period in American fine press.

"Bird & Bull Press. Henry Morris. Roller-printed Paste Papers for Bookbinding. ca. 215 copies. Text in Centaur & Codex types printed on Hodgkinson hand made B & B paper."

This is a really cool book, part of an ongoing saga in Henry Morris' printing life in which he concocted a plan to mass produce paste papers and the various hiccups along the way, e.g., no one wanted to buy mass quantities of paste papers; and making paste papers is quite difficult. Several Bird and Bull Press books resulted from this business venture, all hilariously told throughout the Press' 3 main bibliographies.

Works in Progress:

2. Wiliam Holman. Al Lowman. Printing Arts in Texas. To cover Texas printing from its beginnings to 1829. To be printed in folio format, hand-printed on paper from Spain, with decorations by Barbara Holman.

Printing Arts in Texas turned out to be a fantastic book, a thorough look at all of the big events in printing in the state, and one of my favorite Texana books overall. Extremely well designed by William R. Holman, father of David Holman of Wind River Press etc., and I think a supremely talented typographer who published several very good historical books under the Roger Beachum imprint. He helped build collections at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas, and led the work on several AIGA-winning titles from UT. Lowman's "Printing Arts" is printed beautifully by David Holman in Janson on mouldmade paper by L. Guarro Casas of Barcelona. The cover is sort of rough book cloth, and it works.