New Books :: 2011
Now Available: Two new projects have been completed for 2011: A small book from Canadian poet Robert Kroetsch entitled Writer's Block; and a new edition of Jason Dewinetz's long poem Géricault's Severed Limbs Paintings.
Forthcoming:Somewhat behind schedule is a new edition of Stanley Morison's classic essay First Principles of Typography, to be hand-set in Jan van Krimpen's Romanée types and printed on handmade Magnani papers. Stay tuned for details...
2011
Géricault's Severed Limbs Paintings
6.5" × 10.5", 40pp. 2010. $150.
ISBN:
1-894744-31-4 978-1-894744-31-7
A long poem based on the French Romantic artist Theodore
Géricault and the figural studies leading to his famous painting
"The Raft of the Medusa" of the early 19th century. Blending
and drifting between biographical and historical research on the
painter and the present day narrator's own exploration of the
artist's disturbing process, Dewinetz writes an examination of
intimacy and obsession, working towards an understanding of
the conflict between desire and possession, both of beauty and of
knowledge.
Click image for slideshow...
This new edition includes a variety of extracts from art history texts to provide context for the poem, as well as two line-illustrations printed from polymer, and two full colour reproductions of the paintings produced with an archival Epson printer.
“Dewinetz is a scholar as well as an artist, and the intellectual power of his long poem is as evident and as demanding as its expression is deceptively simple. He is concerned here to demonstrate how critical ideas can help shape and support creative insights, as well as being vivified by them. This extended anecdote of the creative process is a knowledgeable exploration of the sources and shape of knowledge itself.”
is a writer, editor, publisher and typographer originally from, and now living back in, the Okanagan Valley. With an academic background in English Literature (BA. UVic, MA, U of Alberta), he is the author of The Gift of a Good Knife (Outlaw Editions), In Theory (above/ground press), Moving to the Clear (NeWest Press), Clench (Gaspereau Press) and co-author of A Bibliography of the Black Sparrow Press (University of Alberta Press).
He is the founding editor, publisher and designer of Greenboathouse Press, and as of 2011 his design and production for Greenboathouse has brought in eight national book design awards. Jason is currently an instructor in English, Creative Writing and Publication Design at Okanagan College.
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Historical front matter (pages i–xvi) set in LTC Garamont Text and printed from polymer, all other pages hand-set in Frederic Goudy's Garamont (cast by Jim Rimmer in New Westminster, BC) and printed on a Vandercook 15-21 at the Greenboathouse Press in Vernon, BC.
Pages [i–viii] printed on Zerkall Book Wove, the rest on Arches Johannot. The endsheets are handmade from India, and the wrapper is St Armand from Montréal. French-sewn into a concertina and wrapped in a stiff paper cover, the binding is by Alanna Simenson.
The edition is limited to 50 copies, all signed by the author.
Writer's Block
7" × 5", 20pp. 2011. $50.
ISBN: 1-894744-30-6 978-1-894744-30-0
Click image for slideshow...
One of the great Canadian poet's last manuscripts, this quirky yet poignant series of 12 poems dances and laughs at the horror of the blank page, exploring through a variety of literary terms (as titles) the ins and outs of pushing through the block.
was, is, well, I don't even know what to write here... Poet and novelist, Governor General's award winning author of The Studhorse Man, Badlands, The Man From the Creeks and, of course, Collected Field Notes, Kroetsch was a figurehead of Canadian writing, not to mention a damn nice guy. If your shelf isn't lined with his books, it should be.
Unfortunately
Out of Print
Set by hand in Jim Rimmer's Hannibal Olstyle, Frederic Goudy's Thirty & Garamont, then printed on a Vandercook 15-21 at the Greenboathouse Press in Vernon, BC. The page stock is Zerkall Book Wove with a wrapper of Japanese Cedar Bark. Limited to 55 numbered copies, all signed by the author.
2010
Alphabetum Romanum
5.875" × 7.75", 80pp. 2010. $300.
ISBN:
1-894744-29-2 978-1-894744-29-4
This is a project that's been in the works for over three years: a reproduction of the original drawings of Felice Feliciano's Alphabetum Romanum, an instructional treatise on the correct rendering of Roman capital letters, writtten by Feliciano in c.1460.
I first encountered the drawings in a facimile edition, beautifully produced by the Officina Bodoni (exactly 500 years after the original was created), at a book exhibit at the Buffalo Public Library in 2008. The letterforms simply grabbed me by the throat and I've been unable to catch my breath ever since. As I was, at the time, unable to obtain a copy of the 1960 edition (although I've found one since), I decided simply to publish an edition, if for no other reason than that I would then have a copy myself. From that point began a 2-year process of collecting materials on Feliciano and his alphabet, as well as redrawing his letters from scratch.
A page from the original 1460 manuscript (left), the 1960 Officina Bodoni edition (centre) and a working drawing for the Greenboathouse Press edition (right & below).
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The letterforms are based on the original drawings of Felice Feliciano, c.1460, reproduced by Jason Dewinetz and printed from over 90 polymer plates on a Vandercook 15-21 flatbed cylinder press. The paper is Magnani Biblos, milled in Italy and generously donated by Caryl Peters of the Frog Hollow Press in Victoria, while the cover and endsheets were handmade by Reg Lissel in Vancouver. The text types are ATF Cloister Old Style and Monotype Cloister Italic, designed in 1913 by Morris Fuller Bendon, inspired by the 15th-century types of Nicolas Jenson. The Monotype sorts were generously cast by Jim Rimmer in New Westminster, BC. The type was set, the inks mixed, and pages printed and the book bound during the long, warm days of Okanagan summer. Produced in an edition of 115 copies: 100 numbered copies for sale and 15 ( I - XV ) for private distribution.
While both the original manuscript (held in the collection of the Vatican Library) and the 1960 editions include descriptive passages detailing the construction of the letterforms, I have instead kept the book very simple: the book includes a brief foreword by Paul Gehl (special collections librarian at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and an expert on Renaissance alphabets), and an equally short afterword that I have written detailing the production of the book, printed from hand-set 14pt Cloister Oldstyle. The main body of the book simply showcases the letterforms, one to a spread, printed in 3 colours from polymer plates into Magnani Biblos papers, the same stock used for the 1960 edition. Bound into stiff handmade wrappers (the paper produced by Reg Lissel in Vancouver), the edition is 116 copies, and it appears I'll be binding them for some time to come.
Light & Char
5.75" × 9.75", 28pp. 2010. $100.
ISBN:
1-894744-28-4 978-1-894744-28-7
Light & Char is a series of 15 prose poems, each playing within and without the confines of binaristic thinking to explore the productivities stored in the nexuses of, say, yes-no worldviews, right-wrong logics, abstract-concrete divisions, happy-sad categorizations, life-death paradigms. Much of the umph of the poems is derived from a poetic strategy of what-ifs: what if nails were earthworms, what if skyscrapers grew down from the clouds, what if knives could breathe? The title of the collection – as it invokes both illumination and darkness, whiteness and blackness, growth and decay &c. – necessarily places its emphasis on the cobra-like tension of the ampersand.
was born in the tobacco-land of Woodstock, Ontario and grew up in the big-box-land of Mississauga, Ontario. Now Jake lives and works happily in the Okanagan. Some of Jake’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pissing Ice Anthology: New Canadian Poets, Drunken Boat, Kiss Machine, and The Diagram. His BookThug chapbook entitled Hazard won the 2006 bpnichol Chapbook Award. Jake also helped edit, with his artist friend Paola Poletto, Boredom Fighters: A Graphic Poem Anthology (Tightrope Books) in 2008. Most recently, Jake received the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry for The Lateral, forthcoming from Snare Books. He is working currently on an entirely made-up (but reverent) biography of New York poet-architect Madeline Gins. Jake is also co-compiling, with his great friend kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Death Valley: a Collaborative Community Novel. Finally, Jake considers himself most lucky to be an active member of the GBH Boyz.
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2009
Anatomy for the Artist
5.75" × 9.75", 28pp. 2009.
$75.
ISBN:
1-894744-27-6 978-1-894744-27-0
Jessica Hiemstra-van der Horst's Anatomy for the Artist is many
things at once. A suite of poems with accompanying illustrations,
it follows the tradition of ut pictura poesis. As meditations on
the relationship between art and poetry, they are sophisticated and
yet these poems do much more as well. They consider the ingredients
of our lives: phone calls to mothers, a love affair, line-ups,
cooking. The suppleness of bodies, how we imagine them, how we
depict them, how we desire others, how this becomes an art: this
is the meat of Hiemstra-van der Horst's suite.
Photos: Images of the book in production here...
is
a visual artist and writer who lives in Surrey, British Columbia. Her poems have appeared in several Canadian
journals including The Antigonish Review, The Malahat Review and
Carousel. Her first collection of poems, Excerpts from
Gerald, God and the Chickens (Frog Hollow Press) was published in 2008. Her artwork has been
exhibited across Canada, and can be viewed at www.hiemstra-vanderhorst.com
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Against the Hard Angle
6.75" × 9.75", 20pp. 2009. $65.
ISBN:
1-894744-26-8 978-1-894744-26-3
It could be said of Matt Robinson’s Against the Hard Angle that
truth bends around its object. The poems are direct but leave the
reader with a sense that something is unspoken. Spoiled milk,
congealed blood from an injury, a workbench. Just when you might
think these poems are parochial, Robinson writes of a delay in an
airport. There is a range of subject-matter and a range of
experience in these poems. And in their understatement, Robinson’s
poems feel contemporary. Objects are used to hint at human
relationships, relationships perhaps difficult to discuss, haunted
by an unspoken pessimism. Everything in here is more than it
seems.
Photos: Images of the book in production here...
lives in Halifax, NS, and works as a Residence Life Manager with Dalhousie University. His most recent previous collection is no cage contains a stare that well (ECW, 2005), a full-length volume of hockey poems. Other collections include A Ruckus of Awkward Stacking, which was nominated for the Lampert and ReLit awards, how we play at it: a list, and tracery & interplay. His poems have appeared in anthologies such as The New Canon, Breathing Fire 2, Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada, Exact Fare Only 2, and Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Canadian Poetry of the Land. Most recently, Matt has received the Malahat Review Long Poem prize for an earlier version of Against the Hard Angle.
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This (And That Was That)
3.125" × 4.875", 32pp. 2009. $50.
ISBN:
1-894744-25-X 978-1-894744-25-6
This (And That Was That) has just brought in our 5th citation from the Alcuin Society's Annual Awards for Excellence in Book Design.
JonArno Lawson’s poem And That Was That is reminiscent of Robert
Creeley's early poetry. In terse and playful lines, a speaker
describes a conversation, the subject of which is never stated.
Instead the subject is only described as “this” or “that.” The
poem’s power lies in the fact that we assume we know what the
conversation is about (it’s pretty obvious...“Let’s / give this /
another / chance”). Of course, we can all guess, but in the end
the only thing that matters is that the conversation happened.
That lingering ambiguity is what makes the poem.
Photos: Images of the book in production here...
has seven books to his credit, including Black Stars in a White Night Sky, which received the 2007 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry, and a 2008 Moonbeam bronze medal for his book A Voweller’s Bestiary. Lawson’s books for adults include Inklings and Love is an Observant Traveller, as well as his contributions to an ethnography of the Chechen people, The Chechens: A Handbook. He has a book of poetry forthcoming from Kids Can Press in 2010. He lives in Toronto with his wife and three children.
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