A new year at DoubleCross Press

Hello friends!

I tapered off in the press-blogging in 2009; while 2010 is fresh and new, I'm going to make an effort to improve. It's a time of resolutions!

Good things have been afoot here at DoubleCross Press, even though they haven't made it to this little blog. For one thing, there's the Pocket Lab Reading Series, a bi-monthly series of readings and performances by poets and like-minded others we've been curating at Rogue Buddha Gallery in Northeast Minneapolis. We've got a reading coming up this week: Local poets Amara Hartman, Brad Liening, and Juliet Patterson, plus the tireless Syracuse-based Nate Pritts and musical guest Eliza Blue.

And, yes, I did say "we." There's been an addition to DoubleCross Personnel: Jeff Peterson, who designs the retro-scientific Pocket Lab fliers, has agreed to come on board as a collaborator. He'll be doing a lot of the artwork for the upcoming books: right now, he's working on a screenprint design for Danielle Roderick's Sextuplets Are Not That Heavy, to be finished by the end of the month (I hope).

I've also begun working a 20-hour-a-week administrative job at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, which has kept me a bit busier, but also allows me to form a closer relationship with an amazing community of studio artists. I run the adult programs: classes, tours, etc. If you're curious about MCBA, check out their website here, or drop me a line at my fancy new work email: mchyland@mnbookarts.org.

Another Word is out!

It's been a while, but look what I'm holding in my hand! An all-finished copy of Another Word, by Matthew Henriksen! Go buy one here!

Back on the press (with collaborators!)

Ok, so after a month or so of intensive writing/teaching and little-to-no book progress, I finally got back on the press this weekend to take some proofs for Matt Henriksen's Another Word. Which, friends, let me tell you, is a heck of a poem. And now that I'm rolling again, I'm totally freaking psyched about this book. Because not only is the poem great, but the book is also going to have as a cover image a beautiful photo by awesome Minneapolis photographer/all-around cool guy Rich Fleischman. And I've also commissioned a screenprint from letterpress intern/screenprinting aficionado/tornado of fun Jeff Peterson for the book itself. It's gonna be pretty. In fact, it's gonna knock your socks off. More images to come, but in the meantime, I'll leave you with the picture Jeff took of me in the letterpress studio at MCBA. Printing with other people=pictures of something besides my hands! Documentation! (Isn't the MCBA studio sweet, by the way? Look at all those presses!)

AWP!

Somehow, I forgot to take pictures of the table at AWP, but big thanks to the lovely Stephanie Anderson of Projective Industries (go buy their books here!) for this photo. It's one of three from the last day, and may be the photo in which we look the most alert. (Note to self: never again allow pictures to be taken on the last day of AWP. I think I may have just finished drinking a Sparks, or I may be drinking it and hiding the can under the table.) At least I was doing better than Sam (the other half of Projective Industries, on the left), who was apparently whisked away in the whiskey-filled (fueled?) Forklift, Ohio limo the night before.

While I'm telling you to go buy books, buy some from Matt & Katy Henriksen, the fearless leaders of Cannibal Books Nation. They are prolific, flawless in their taste, unfailingly generous, and snappily dressed. You may not be able to tell from the photo, but Matt's shirt in this picture is velour. Fancy!

GO TEAM BOOKBINDER!

Big thanks to fabulous bookbinding volunteers Eliza (Blue) Bonacci, Emma & Lauren Allen, Anna Drennan, and Baker Lawley for turning the piles of tiny papers in my living room into the above: 95 copies of Edgar Huntly and 65 (with more to come as soon as I print more labels) of Hotel Winter. AWP, here I come!

"Sweet, I know"

A long night of printing last night (3 runs: 2 on one book, and 1 on the other). Here's an early photo of the drying rack, with the single sheets from Hotel Winter drying in it.

Something I've been thinking about a lot with these books is how to incorporate imagery that feels appropriate to the poem without being overly illustrative of it: I don't want Hotel Winter to resemble a hotel room in any way, but I want there to be a clear and organic relationship between the poem and the book (why else go to the trouble of making books this way?)

So here's a bit about my thought process. In both of these books, I've focused mostly on book materials as imagery--for Edgar Huntly, that meant using graph paper and maps as materials to bring out the sense of restless movement through the city (coupled with a semi-translucent endsheet with a squiggly line printed on it from a linocut). My original vision of the book involved all sorts of decorative sewing (using the sewing machine instead of the press to make the squiggly lines denoting movement), but then that felt like too many mixed messages (and too done--and I didn't have a good enough reason for using both). I'm still binding the books with a sewing machine, though: I want there to be a trace of that thought process left in them.

Hotel Winter took me a little longer to figure out. Since it's such a short poem, with no stanza breaks, my initial thought was that the book should be a little mini-broadside with a wrapper. I kept thinking that (I even bought some chipboard to print it on, thinking that would give it some sturdiness) until I took a proof of the text on some Frankfurt paper and fell in love with the whiteness of the paper and the blackness of the text. So, a new vision: no hotel in the book, but lots of winter--crisp, snowy-white paper in a cover that looks like a starry winter night. (I knew from pretty early on that I wanted to use Cave Paper's "Galaxy" for the cover--a beautiful black flax paper with flakes of mica or silver leaf.) And it seemed only right to take the "image" on the would-be title page from the language of the poem itself, which transforms the word "zero" in beautiful ways. (Hence the drying rack full of zeroes, from the biggest wood type I could find.) Presto! While I was taking proofs of the book, I folded one down and trimmed it to the actual size the final pamphlet will be, and just about melted at how sweet it looks. More pictures to come...

Single Sheet Series: Printing

Some shots from the current printing bonanza. Above, I go by Edgar Huntly now; below, the sweet Vandercook Universal 1 press at MCBA (mid-Edgar Huntly) and the type from Hotel Winter's title. As of right now, I have 2 runs left on each book. Well, maybe 3 on Hotel Winter. But they're getting there.



ps- I've been spending a lot of time with these poems lately, and they are both amazing. Like, I keep finding new things in them. You're going to love them. Yes: you.