"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...