Outlying Districts by Anselm Hollo (1987)

 Outlying Districts

Anselm Hollo

Smithereens Press

Bolinas, CA

(c) 1987

Yes, this copy has a coffee stain on the front. I knew that before I got it. But it's hand-painted by Hollo's wife, Jane Dalrymple-Hollo. And the seller said that this copy was signed and inscribed to "Allan and Cinda" - and my brain stopped me right there and said "The only Allan and Cinda you know of are the Kornblums; Toothpaste Press and Coffee House Press. You know? You met him!" 

Yes, I had. I have been incredibly inspired by Allan's letterpress work with and on Toothpaste Press. 

Smithereens Press appears to have been Hollo's imprint. It's a staple-bound mimeo. (late in the game for mimeos but that's what it looks like). Single page poems. 

Each book printed was painted differently. Making each book (250 printed, 10 were signed by poet and artist) unique. 

Happy New Year. 

Telephone Company Repairman Poems by Barbara Moraff (1983)

Telephone Company Repairman Poems
Barbara Moraff
Toothpaste Press
Iowa
(c) 1983

#294 of 400 printed. Signed by poet. Another incredibly handsome book by this inventive and influential press. Unpaginated. Letter pressed. Hand sewn.

One can see the effort and can imagine the frustration at the same time. Frustration in the sense that these delicate books were never going to make their way onto a bookstore shelf and be properly displayed. This book is thick enough to have a spine with text but doesn't because it was hand sewn without any spine cover at all. So beautiful, so delicate. It's not surprising that the following year, 1984, is when Toothpaste transitioned into Coffee House Press. Ironically, on the CHP website there is no mention of Toothpaste Press whatsoever. Even though they say the press started in 1972 in Iowa as a letterpress operation. Well, yes, that is true. To a point. But give credit where it was due. Coffee House began in Iowa AS Toothpaste Press. They moved to the Twin Cities and rebooted as Coffee House Press to make books with spines that could get onto book shelves across the country! At least be honest about it!!

I happen to like the efforts of Toothpaste much more than Coffee House. While I do understand who Allan Kornblum made the decision that he did, I still mourn the loss of the special quality that the chapbooks lost in the transition to perfect bound books. sigh

it bears repeating....

It bears repeating: I am not a cheerleader. I am a publisher as well as a poet. I write this blog to acknowledge the work of publishers and poets and "one-time" presses that bubble to the surface through the existence of the work. If someone thinks I should only focus on the poems, they miss my point. Or rather, they are not aware of the quote by El Lissitsky that is a guiding principle of mine:

The book must be the unified work of the author and the designer. As long as this is not the case, splendid exteriors will constantly be produced for unimportant contents, and visa-versa.
El Lissitzky
from Do Not Separate Form from Content!(1931)

If a chapbook visually sucks but the words are good, I will say so. If the chapbook is stunning but the words are god-awful, I will also say so. No tree should ever be felled for tripe or self-serving navel-worshipping. If you have a friend whose work you like a lot and it doesn't matter to you what their chapbook looks like: that fine, but that's not my "job". I respect the people who have taken the time and considerable effort to make a thing of beauty. Putting out a book on the cheapest photo-copy paper available with the grainiest picture imaginable and touting it as your "work of art", I will decline climbing on your bandwagon.

Certain publishers from the past, say from the late 1970s through today, deserve to be recognized as establishing the structure by which "the bar" is placed, let alone raised. The truth is that they publishers cared what their chapbooks LOOKED LIKE as much as the words or images, or both, were INSIDE. I have listed some of these presses before but it is worth mentioning again: Toothpaste Press (Allan Kornblum), Perishable Press Limited (Walter Hamady), The Fathom Press (Robie Liscomb), The Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs (Brenda Iljima), Pentagram Press (Michael Tarachow), and many others.

I would urge lovers of the chapbook form to image that there is a history to this all, that you are part of it, and that you haven't created the wheel. It's been done. Dozens of times over. Hundreds of times over and then some. There is a historical element to my blog that I perhaps haven't overtly presented but I think it's time that I did. We are all part of something that dates back to the 1940s. If you wish to consider the chap(ter) books that were published in England earlier, then we are talking about the 1600s.

My particular focus is poetry chapbooks of the second half of the 20th century and now into the 21st.

The Mad Shoemaker by John Batki (1973)

The Mad Shoemaker
John Batki
The Toothpaste Press
West Branch, Iowa
(c)1973

In the history of Toothpaste Press, this is one of the earlier mimeograph chapbooks that were made. 1973 was early, this is among the earliest chapbooks made by Toothpaste Press. Staple-bound which indicates the age of the book itself as they quickly went to hand-sewn books. It's size, 8" X 10", is another indication. The cover image came from a linoleum block by Dave Morice who went on to create Poetry Comics and co-found the Actualist Poetry Movement.

Unpaginated pages, mimeographed. This book was John Batki's first book. 300 copies were printed.

updating chap*book blog

The following comes from an email exchange I recently had with Allan Kornblum, founder of Toothpaste Press and later Coffee House Press :

“Many thanks for your kind words. Actually our last Toothpaste book, Makeup on Empty Space, came out in January 84, and our first Coffee House season was fall 84. We opened with a book of stories by Keith Abbott, a novel by Bobbie Louise Hawkins, and a poetry/art collaboration by Ntozake Shange and her friend, Wopo Hollup.

With regard to the last chapbook printed under the Toothpaste imprint (emphasis his)—that’s an interesting question. I’ll have to do a little research on that one to check it out.

When we began Coffee House, I was hoping to continue printing chapbooks in addition to trade books, and we published about fifteen or twenty chapbooks under the Morning Coffee imprint, before the trade book side of things became so overwhelming that I had to drop the letterpress books entirely. I was sad about it, but proud to see the attention our trade books were getting, and the difference those books made in the lives of our authors.”

I did not know that Coffee House had a chapbook imprint in the beginning and after Googling it, no one else seems to know much about it either. More research will be needed.