Friday, February 02, 2024

Updating the Carnglass Press mystery

 Indeed I have been blogging about chapbooks since 2006. 

Somewhere along the way I have also been sketching elements within my subject matter for expansion because to paraphrase Rod Stewart every chapbook tells a story. So, I will start with the one I am in currently in an see where the ripples go. 

Carnglass Press was a publishing concern in Newark, NJ at the beginning of the 1970s. Michael Redmond was one of the translators of the two chapbooks that I have. I got the chapbooks from an artist named Harry Bartnick. Bartnick did some cover illustration work for the Press and they paid him in chapbooks, these two. Neither of these gentlemen know each other. 

It seems that the bubbling poetic activities from Greenwich Village had traveled the 12 miles (in this case) to Newark. Michael was at Rutgers/Newark and Harry was working at the Newark library. Apparently there was a guy who was so into printing that he had a printing operation in the basement of his house that that was the hub for all these young dudes to be creatively crazy. Both men believe that Carnglass was a short term project. Neither believed that it produced more than these two books, maybe others they weren't sure of ever having been printed, like the project that Harry's cover art was meant for - A Single Shot to Kill a Bear - reenforcing the reality that not every project does come to fruition. 




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