Julia and President Obama

Getting going on binding more copies of Reach of the Heart. Such amazing poetry by Dan Carr, needs to be out in the world. The shop is getting energized again with a new intern once a week and an type archeology project where we are going thru standing forms to inventory them, working toward creating a book that documents letterpress projects at Golgonooza Letter Foundry & Press from the past 30 years.

Our latest Book

The Reach of the Heart is a sequence of poems that explores small epiphanies of ordinary life. These epiphanies mark openings to a larger world that constantly surrounds us, a world that also reaches us through visual symbols like the mythic images in the accompanying series of monotypes. Hidden & revealed elements flow through this series of unique prints; one layer (rock, animal, pond, bone) impressed into the paper, tracks the path of unseen life around us. The painted layer reveals the perceptions of thought and dream. Julia Ferrari & Dan Carr designed the format of the book to unify the journey of the language with the landscape of the images. The title page with its image of the stars of the Milky Way, flanked by the titles of the poems, is meant to suggest the stream of events which were often filled by a conversation between the author and the artist.



One hundred and twenty monotypes were completed for this book on a thirty inch French Tool etching press, in the Winter and Spring of the year as the bare trees shook their limbs across the Ashuelot River in full view of the Studio House windows. The poems were hand-set in Regulus, a type cut by hand by the author, with Fairbanks Italic and Sung type. The book was printed in an edition of forty at Golgonooza Letter Foundry & Press by the author and the artist on Rives BFK made in Isère in Southeastern France near the Alps. The artist bound the edition at Enitharmon Bindery.

intersection

A poem by Dan Carr with three woodcuts by Julia Ferrari created after hiking the Rattlesnake Mountains along the western edge of Squam Lake, New Hampshire. Squam, a large lake north of the more widely known Winnipesaukee, was featured in “On Golden Pond.” It has many coves and several islands and consists of two connected lakes. The early Algonquin name meant highland goose lake. It is the home of a large population of Loons, aquatic birds that have been called the most ancient surviving bird (now thought to be covergently evolved for similar habitat to the ancient grebe). Their call still evokes the sense of the prehistoric. Abenaki tribes lived on the hospitable shores of the lake for many centuries. The view from the popular Rattlesnake Mountain ridge is extraordinary and at the time of making this book showed the lake in a pristine state.


This is the first showing of the lowercase of Regulus, a type cut by hand by the poet. It records a moment in time when the momentum of cutting punches had achieved nearly the entire lower case, only the x is missing. At the same time that the typeface was becoming usable Julia was completing a new series of wood cuts. Julia’s images are an exploration of the intersection of different times, of the enduring and the transitory, of the overlapping spheres of the ancient, the present and the future. The images and the poem were directly inspired by the experience of visiting Squam.


The chapbook is printed on Mohawk Letterpress Text. The type was set by hand by the poet. The book is hand sewn and slipped into a paper wrapper with hand decorated keepers and unique hand colored woodcut. The large woodcut inside is individually hand colored by the artist. The book measures 6 1/2 by 10 1/2, 16 pages. Golgonooza Letter Foundry & Press, Ashuelot 1989. $250.00

Li Bai Broadside and galley of De Roos type

This Broadside contains Music type, Chinese type and Monotype Bembo cast at our foundry. It is a new translation paired with a Tang Lute Song transcribed by Laurence Pickens and published in Li Po & Tu Fu by Arthur Cooper, Penguin Books, 1973.

We will post our typelist here for visitors to download or view when we learn how to do that.

Also coming will be other images of Books and Broadsides which we print or publish.

I hope to start some discussions on the History of Type and in particular Punchcutting in the interest of preserving things we have learned over the last 30 years.