Carnglass Press = Jim Zimmermann of Newark, NJ

 I am going to play this out detective style here - each of the gentlemen I have communicated with about Carnglass Press have mentioned a linchpin, a spider at the middle of the web, and that person was named Jim Zimmermann who ran the Press from the basement of this house. The mystery is a little less dense but still exists. 

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. 

Harvest by Demetrios Kassolas (1971)

Harvest

Demetrios Kassolas 

Carnglass Press

Newark, NJ

(c)1971

Continuing the mystery in hopes of it unspooling - one of the translators of both this and the previous book was Michael Redmond. 

I am posting this in a very incomplete manner because I might have found this Michael Redmond person on Facebook. 

UPDATE #1

I did in fact make contact with a Michael Redmond - and it's the right one! Hoping to have a more detailed interaction with him soon. 

UPDATE #2

It is the same gentleman and I will share what I can since our conversation is mostly private. But Michael Redmond was the translator of book chapbooks. 

Poems by Dan Mutascu (1970)

 Poems

Dan Mutascu

Carnglass Press

Newark, NJ

(c)1970

Translated by Mircea Bucurescu and Michael Redmond

I love a good mystery, as any of you who have been following these postings can tell and in this case the seller of this chapbook actually knew more about the chapbook than the Net. In fact, the Net has almost nothing on this small press and the writer is Romanian. This collection itself is a trimmed down version of poems published in a larger edition by The Joycian Court Publishers. 

I wrote to the person who sold me this (along with another chapbook from the same Press) one and he wrote back : 

Hello,

Back in the late 1960s, I had worked with someone at the Newark Public Library who ran (or was in some way connected to) the Carnglass Press in Newark. I was asked to do a cover illustration for another one of their chapbooks, and in return received the 2 that you have.

All the Best,

XXXXX

followed then by : 

Hello,

The information that I included in the post for the 2 poetry chapbooks was all that I could find on the internet. I don't recall the website sources that it came from. There didn't seem to be anything in Wikipedia on them. I think that Carnglass Press was a small-scale, private effort, probably short-lived. A more thorough (and time-consuming!) internet search would likely turn up more information.

Cheers,

XXXXXXX

Now, I have a multiple mystery on my hands. The writer is better known for books that we published later in the 1970s and the Press seems to have disappeared sometime in the 1970s. I will keep researching. It's something I like to so. 

It's a staple bound chapbook. The drawing on the cover might be of the author. Or a random guy on a train, or in a coffee shop, who knows? (I don't) The person I dealt with got this - and the other - book from the publisher in exchange for cover illustration work. And had a connection to the Newark library in the late 1960s. 

That's my starting point -