Peter Rutledge Koch.
Berkeley, California: Editions Koch, 2022

The Ur-text project, a work in three volumes, is composed from poems, personal writings, and speculations accompanied by quotes, appropriated texts, and images. All have been transformed to suit the concept of a twenty-first century Liber Chronicarum spanning the totality, from Genesis to the Apocalypse.

The texts include the entire Book of Genesis (Jerome’s Latin translation, with the opening verse in Hebrew and Greek), select fragments from Ecclesiastes, The Apocalypse of St. John (The New English Bible translation), William Temple Horniday’s The Extermination of the American Bison (Washington D.C. 1889) and The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Washington, D.C., 1957) together with additional marginalia, commentary, and the entire text of my long poems Magnus Annus, first published by The Aldebaran Review (Berkeley, 1968), and L’Alchimie du Verbe published as Bone Black & Vermillion by The Real Lead Saloon (Berkeley, 2021.) The biblical texts (especially Genesis) are what I have posited as the core-texts of our perception, the lenses through which we interpret our culture and our nature. The sub-text (appropriated from The Effects of Nuclear Weapons) is, in its altered format, not so much a lens through which we perceive as the swamp in which we are mired—an ever-present, existential, war-riven, and increasingly poisoned world.

The majority of my personal observations were written and annotated as I composed each bi-folium, revising and editing at each stage along the way right up to and including the final press run.

The images were collected from divers sources, including: Schedel’s Liber Chronicarum; I Modi by Pietro Aretino (Venice, 1527); Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (Hamburg, 1595); Uranometria by Johann Bayer (Augsberg, 1603); Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi ... metaphysica, physica atque technica Historia, &c. (Oppenheim and Frankfurt, 1617–24); with additional images from the United States Department of Defense, Library of Congress, Montana Historical Society Photographic Archives, my personal collection, etc. All are reconfigured, altered, and collaged to varying degrees to suit my project of a re-envisioned creation story and atrocity exhibition of some of mankind’s more questionable accomplishments.

Book; 128 pp.    11.5 x 17.5 inches    65 copies.       $inquire

Peter Rutledge Koch.
Berkeley: Editions Koch & Stanford University Libraries, 2017

“Letterpress was once a useful craft, like carpentry or thatching. This did not prevent determined and talented people from raising it to an art and enriching the lives of humans for centuries after. In the present world, the vital craft of letterpress has surrendered nearly all its practical functions – but art still runs uphill, as it always has. So letterpress printers continue to sort themselves, inescapably, into the artists and the others. It’s in the nature of the craft.
    Peter Koch is an artist among printers. He knows the tradition, all the way back. He also knows it as far forward as anyone can. As a master practitioner of an ancient art, he has joined forces repeatedly with those who are chipping away at the technological frontier, and with others who persevere in the most demanding manual crafts. He engages, as great printers always have, in collaborations with master papermakers, printmakers, wood engravers, punchcutters, binders, and others who make the book what it is: a rich and varied but private and portable theater that nourishes and unifies the body and the mind.”
    — Robert Bringhurst

Peter Koch Printer: Embodied Language and the Form of the Book: A Descriptive Bibliography [1974–2016]
With critical essays by: Mark Dimunation and Timothy D. Murray, and an interview with Peter Rutledge Koch by Roberto G. Trujillo. Bibliography by Nina M. Schneider.

Hard Words: Memory and Death in the Wild West
Hard Words documents Koch’s “Western Suite,” which consists of three portfolio editions, two books, and two installation/exhibitions dedicated to themes of exploration and the subsequent destruction of the American West. The two volumes, Liber Ignis and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, are fully illustrated in facsimile. Two exhibition portfolios, Hard Words and Nature Morte, are also presented in their entirety. The editions and commentaries are accompanied by a lengthy critical essay by novelist and scholar Aaron Parrett.

Against Design: an Interview with Peter Rutledge Koch
Introduction: Russell Maret. Interview by: Monique Comacchio and Camden Richards. Against Design focuses on the typographic design and letter­press printing that has issued from the Koch studios for more than four decades. Graphic designers and educators Monique Comacchio and Camden Richards interview Koch about his printing practice and thoughts on typography and design. The result is an exploration of ideas related to material literacy and the art of printing as a philosophical practice. Against Design is generously illustrated with examples of Koch’s bibliophilic, typographic, and cowboy surrealist ephemera.

Book; 496 pp.    9 x 12 inches    350 copies.       $225.00

Peter Koch, et al..
Berkeley: Editions Koch & Stanford University Libraries, 2016

Volume 1
Peter Koch Printer: Embodied Language and the Form of the Book, A Descriptive Bibliography [1975–2016]

Contents:

A Printer’s Geography: Peter Rutledge Koch, Printer & Typographer by Mark Dimunation, Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress

Embodied Language and the Form of the Book: An interview with Peter Rutledge Koch by Roberto G. Trujillo, Assistant University Librarian and Director of Special Collections, Stanford University

Maverick Poets and Cowboy Surrealists by Timothy D. Murray, Head, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library

Peter Rutledge Koch | A Descriptive Bibliography of his Works 1975–2016 by Nina M. Schneider, Rare Books Librarian, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

Volume 2
Hard Words: Memory and Death in the Wild West

Contents:

The Minotaur and the River, by Aaron Parrett

Hard Words by Peter Rutledge Koch, Rick Newby, and Griff Williams

Nature Morte by Peter Rutledge Koch, Rick Newby, and Griff Williams

The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling & Peter Koch

Liber Ignis by Peter Rutledge Koch and Adam Cornford

Hard Words: Memory and Death in the Wild West documents Koch’s “Western Suite” consisting of three portfolio editions, two books, and two installation/exhibitions dedicated to themes of exploration and the subsequent destruction of the American West. The two volumes, Liber Ignis and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, are fully illustrated in facsimile. Two exhibition/portfolios, Hard Words and Nature Morte, are presented in their entirety. The editions and commentaries by are accompanied by a lengthy critical essay by novelist and scholar Aaron Parrett.

Volume 3
Against Design: an Interview with Peter Rutledge Koch by Monique Comacchio and Camden Richards

Contents:

Introduction by Russell Maret

Against Design: an interview by Monique Comacchio and Camden Richards

Against Design is an interview conducted by professional graphic designers and educators Monique Comacchio and Camden Richards questioning Koch about his printing practice and thoughts on typography and design. The result is an exploration of ideas related to material literacy and the art of printing as a philosophical practice. This volume focuses on the typographic design and letterpress printing that issued from the Koch studios over a forty-two year span. Generously illustrated with numerous examples of Koch’s bibliophilic, typographic, and cowboy surrealist ephemera.

Volume 4: [edition of 15 copies]
The Musæum Kochianum

The Ur-text Musæum, a suite of studies for a work-in-progress, consists of ten bifolia printed on vintage Fabriano Umbria handmade paper at Peter Koch Printers and Magnolia Editions. The Musaeum, composed of appropriated texts and images, is altered, annotated, and supplemented by Koch’s visual and verbal imagination— a surreal Liber Chronicarum for the 21st Century.

The origin of The Ur-text Musæum is Ur-text Volume 2, begun in 1994 and abandoned in favor of this treatment in 2017. The conceptual forerunners are Koch’s Ur-Text Volume 1, Christopher Plantin’s polyglot Biblia Regia, and Anton Koberger’s Liber Chronicarum. Texts include selections from the Book of Genesis (Jerome translation; also appearing in Hebrew and Greek); The Revelation of St. John from The New English Bible; the Inferno by Dante Alighieri; I Modi by Pietro Aretino; The Effects of Nuclear Weapons by The United States Department of Defense, with additional marginalia, commentary, and Koch’s long poem “Magnus Annus” first published in The Aldebaran Review, Berkeley, 1968.

Images are collected from a number of sources including: Liber Chronicarum by Hartmann Schedel, Nuremburg 1493, I Modi by Pietro Aretino, Venice 1550; Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae, Solius, Verae, Christiano- Kabalisticum, Divino-Magicum, Physico-Chymicum, Tertriunum-Catholicon. Hamburg 1595; The Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi ... metaphysica, physica atque technica Historia, &c., Oppenheim and Frankfort, 1617–24; The Effects of Nuclear Weapons United States Department of Defense and the Energy Research and Development Administration Washington D.C. 1977; with additional images from US Department of Defense; the Library Of Congress; the Montana Historical Society Photographic Archives; random internet captures; etc.

Volume 5: [edition of 15 copies]
Koch Ephemera [selected 1974-2016]

The Koch Ephemera — an assembling of ephemera, original prints, exhibition and lecture announcements, posters, type specimens, etc. — also includes four exhibition catalogues: Peter Koch Printer | Cowboy Surrealists, Maverick Poets & Pre-Socratic Philosophers published jointly by the New York Public and the San Francisco Public Libraries in 1995; Peter Koch Printer | Recent Work published by the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, The Houghton Library, Harvard University [1995]; Hard Words published by Gallery 16 and the University of Montana Art Galeries [2000]; Nature Morte published by the Holter Museum of Art [2004].

Additionally the collection includes original prospectuses for sixteen publications designed and printed by Koch

The Musæum Kochianum
A boxed edition of fifteen copies of the three-volume catalogue accompanied by a fourth volume entitled The Ur-text Musæum and a boxed selection of four exhibition catalogues, printed ephemera, announcements, and a variety of prospectuses issued from the press over the past forty years. $3,500

Book;    9 x 12 inches    15 copies.       $3500.00

Peter Rutledge Koch, Adam Cornford, and Jonathan Gerken.
Berkeley, California: Editions Koch, 2015

Liber Ignis is a collaborative project of appropriations, inventions, and constructs documenting the ongoing war against nature in the American West by Peter Rutledge Koch

Collage poem composed in counterpoint to the images by Adam Cornford

Image manipulation, surface engineering, & binding structure by Jonathan Gerken

In May of 2013, while visiting the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany I unexpectedly found myself in a small gallery saturated with the leaden-grey ashes of war and suffering. I felt as if I had entered into Baudelaires poem “La Beatrice,”

Dans des terrains cendreux, calcinés, sans verdure,
Comme je me plaignais un jour à la nature,
Et que de ma pensée, en vaguant au hasard,
J’aiguisais lentement sur mon coeur le poignard,
Je vis en plein midi descendre sur ma tête
Un nuage funèbre et gros d’une tempête,
Qui portait un troupeau de démons vicieux,
Semblables à des nains cruels et curieux.
–Charles Baudelaire,

“Through ashen fields, burnt to a cinder, where no green thing grew, one day I lamented…”

–I had chanced upon an exhibition of work by Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, and Sebastião Salgado, three artists deeply affected by World War II. I felt close to these men in the presence of their portrayal of the terrible weight of war and the raw emotions called up in the aftermath. We have a generational kinship, Kiefer and Salgado are my own age. After my father died in the invasion of France in 1944, and while growing up in Montana, I saw our own aftermaths and ruins in the ghostly smelters and abandoned mines of Butte and Anaconda. The smooth concrete and marble monuments that were erected in my local cemetery and public parks seemed to me feeble responses to the terrible price paid for that war. Now, seventy years after Omaha Beach, I am again a witness, pursuing my work in the archives of mining and banking – appropriating images and building my own memorials. LIBER IGNIS is the fifth volume of an ongoing series of literary explorations utilizing appropriated photographs as evidence and documenting man’s battle against nature in the American West. The earlier volumes include: Hard Words I and II; Nature Morte; and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea.

LIBER IGNIS consists of six .033” lead sheets printed at Magnolia Editions on a UV cured acrylic flatbed press interleaved with laminated felt and Evolon split microfiber sheets dyed black and printed from polymer plates on the Hacker Test Press at Peter Koch Printers. The binding is constructed with soldered copper tubing and linen thread. The text was composed in Fell Roman and Italic with Rockwell for titling. Box construction executed by John DeMerritt Bookbinding, lettering hand-painted by Christopher Stinehour.

Liber Ignis Prospectus PDF
Liber Ignis PDF

Book; 22 pp.    18 x 12 inches    25 copies.       $13500.00

Matt Pavelich.
Berkeley, CA & Helena, MT: Peter Koch Printers & The Territorial Press, 2015

Himself, Adrift, is a fictional account of the mysterious disappearance of the first governor of Montana Territory, Thomas Francis Meagher [born 1823]. Meagher (pronounced “Marr”) was last seen on the stern-wheel steamboat G. .A. Thompson moored in Fort Benton on the 1st of July 1867.

This disturbing work of short fiction from the pen of novelist Matt Pavelich is the inaugural publication of Last Chance Gulch Editions, a collaborative imprint of Peter Koch Printers & the Territorial Press in Helena, Montana. The images, printed letterpress from photopolymer plates are re-configured photographs from historical sources appropriated and altered by Peter Rutledge Koch with the assistance of Jonathan Gerken. Printing & sewn-board construction binding accomplished by Peter Koch, Jonathan Gerken, Aaron Parrett, and Dina Pollack at Peter Koch Printers. The typefaces are an eclectic amalgam of antique metal & digital facsimiles including Fell Historical, Copperplate Gothic, Delraye, Greco Adornado, Onyx, Gold Rush, Thunderbird Extra Condensed, etc. all from the collection of Peter Koch Printers. The text paper is Zerkal Bütten-Druckpapier imported for this edition from Germany.

The design is reminiscent of the legendary 1866 edition of Montana’s first imprint The Vigilantes of Montana or Popular Justice in the Rocky Mountains by Prof. Thos. J. Dimsdale, Montana Post Press Book and Job Printing Office, Virginia City, Montana Territory.

Book; 36 pp.    4 x 8 inches    100 copies.       $350.00

Michelangelo Buonarroti Simoni; translated by Robert Bringhurst; illustrated by Joseph Goldyne.
Berkeley, California: Peter Koch Printer, 2015

Michelangelo is the most celebrated of all visual artists, and one of the few who are admired in equal measure for sculpture, painting, and architecture. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that he was also a great poet. In fact he was, without much doubt, the greatest lyric poet of his time in the Italian language.

In every field of art, fate supplied him with the best imaginable models. In sculpture, his forebears were Donatello and Ghiberti; in architecture, Brunelleschi, Alberti, Sangallo, and Bramante; in painting, Botticelli, Bellini, Mantegna, and Leonardo; and in poetry, Dante, Cavalcanti, and Petrarch. He knew the work of all these masters at first hand. Yet in each of these arts he also took new risks and followed paths that no one else had taken.

Poetry in Michelangelo’s time was a more private art than painting. Poems circulated mostly in manuscript, often among the members of private clubs devoted to literature and conversation. They were also used to curry favor. Michelangelo was not a clubbish sort of person, nor did he ever write a fawning dedication, seeking the patronage of the wealthy – but he did sometimes enclose handwritten poems with the letters and sketches he sent to a few close friends.

He treated his poems casually – very much like sketches rather than finished works of art – and they remained uncollected and unpublished for seventy years after his death. When they did appear in print, in 1623, they had been heavily censored and bowdlerized by their editor, Michelangelo’s grand-nephew.

Perhaps that too is no surprise. Though he was showered with praise in his lifetime, and has been honored ever since, Michelangelo’s work has always seemed too potent to some observers. Less than a year after his death, drapery was painted over the crotches of the figures in his powerful Last Judgement, in the Sistine Chapel – and much of that drapery was retained, even when the Sistine frescoes received a zealous cleaning beginning in 1984. The genitalia of his sculpture of the risen Christ, in Santa Maria sopra Minerva, have also been covered since the sixteenth century by a heavy bronze loincloth. No uncensored edition of his poems appeared until 1893, three centuries after his death.

About 300 of his poems survive. Many are sonnets, but most are in a more supple form known as the madrigal. Among the best are a group composed when Michelangelo was in his sixties. These are poems written for or about Vittoria Colonna, evidently the only woman whom the adult Michelangelo ever loved. They speak with great strength and tenderness of loneliness and love, of the power of art, and of the hard, high-country stone in which the artist loved to work. Ten of these late, great poems are published here, in the original Italian, with Robert Bringhurst’s exquisite new translations.

They are indeed like sketches – and anyone who has been lucky enough to see Michelangelo’s sketches in the flesh will know that nothing could be better.

***

The Italian texts of Michelangelo’s poems, Bringhurst’s English translations, and his accompanying essay are all set in fonts that are descended from the chancery italics designed in the 1520s by the brilliant but short-lived calligrapher and printer Ludovico degli Arrighi. Michelangelo and Arrighi were not far apart in age. Early in the sixteenth century, they both spent several years in Rome, both working for the Vatican, and may have known one another at that time. In 1517, Arrighi also executed a large and important calligraphic commission for Vittoria Colonna – the woman who became, two decades later, Michelangelo’s closest friend.

Typographic historians routinely mention Arrighi, but few have understood his real importance to the field. Bringhurst makes an excellent case for considering Arrighi to be the world’s first type designer in the modern sense of the word: the first skilled calligrapher who drew letters specifically for punchcutters to cut, just as Baskerville and Van Krimpen, Dwiggins and Zapf would do centuries later. Arrighi was also the first professional calligrapher to become a letterpress printer and publisher, and the only major type designer who devoted himself exclusively to italic.

Several important revivals of Arrighi’s type were produced in England and France between 1923 and 1930. Since that time, the story of these fonts has been told repeatedly, but in many different ways. Stanley Morison and Frederic Warde, who were personally involved, left highly contradictory accounts, and several later writers have muddled the story further. Bringhurst’s 27-page essay peels away layers of misinformation and confusion, setting the record straight at last.

An afterword by Peter Rutledge Koch describes the provenance of the rare typefaces used to print the poems as well as the legendary printing press used to print the books. The essay is illustrated with two tipped-in photo-reproductions of the punches, from photographs by Amelia Hugill-Fontanel.

On the Michelangelo a portrait by Joseph Goldyne:
A publication of poetic works of unquestioned stature and universal appeal certainly requires no accompanying image. Yet, an introductory pictorial ‘exclamation mark’ seemed appropriate for this special edition, given that the poet is also one of the giants of visual art. Michelangelo’s portrait by Joseph Goldyne, executed as a drypoint, intentionally takes its cues from the rare drawing of the artist by his friend and follower, Daniele da Volterra in the collection of the Teylers museum, Haarlem. The drypoint aims for both strength and delicacy, a contemporary graphic homage reflecting qualities that characterize its sixteenth-century subject’s most enduring creations.

Hard High-Country Poems was designed & printed on the Gietz Universal platen press by Peter Koch with the assistance of Jonathan Gerken. The Italian was composed by Michael Bixler in Monotype Arrighi and printed directly from the metal type. Bringhurst’s translation was handset by Mark Livingston from original foundry Vicenza & Arrighi types cut in 1925-26 by Charles Plumet for Frederic Warde. The preface and colophon pages were composed in a custom digital version of Monotype foundry Arrighi and printed from photo-polymer plates. The poems are printed on vintage Amalfi Amatruda handmade paper. The frontispiece, a drypoint portrait of Michelangelo by Joseph Goldyne, was printed by Robert Townsend.
9.5 x 5.75 inches, 32 pages

The Typographic Legacy of Ludovico degli Arrighi, published to accompany Hard High-Country Poems, is set in custom-made digital variants of foundry Monotype Arrighi and Centaur types and printed letterpress from polymer plates on Hahnemühle Biblio paper.
9.5 x 5.75 inches, 36 pages

On the binding: the cover wrappers are derived from photographs of standing type-metal forms used to print the poems. The slipcase is covered in a reproduction of the rare Ludovico degli Arrighi. Type specimen sheet, [Vicenza : Tolomeo Janiculo, 1529] courtesy of the Book Arts Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Slipcase & binding in quarter leather and printed paper over boards by John DeMerritt Bookbinder.
Slipcase and chemise: 6 x 10 x 1 inches

The edition is limited to 126 slipcased sets, 112 of which are numbered, ten artist’s proofs designated A/P 1 - 10 and four printers proofs designated P/P 1 - 4.

Book;    5.75 x 9.5 inches    126 copies.       $1000.00

Richard Wagener.
San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 2013

Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

—John Muir

John Muir reminds us that a life lived without great rocky outcrops and ageless trees as a part of one’s native landscape would be a life deprived of one of the greatest resources of the sublime.… In the Sierra Nevada there live trees as old as Sumerian phonographic script and Egypt’s Bronze Age Middle Kingdom—there for you to lean against and smell … alive … sap oozing from the cores of the oldest living friends we have. Richard Wagener’s engravings capture an essential quality of that friendship—nearness and an austere clarity.

—from the Introduction by Peter Koch

The 31 blocks, including two panorama fold-out prints, in this special edition were hand-engraved on end-grain boxwood and relief-printed by Richard Wagener. The majority were produced between 2010 and 2013. The present work is a companion volume to California in Relief, published by the Book Club in 2009 to wide acclaim, and continues a legacy of ingenuity and beauty.

The Sierra Nevada Suite was designed and produced in an edition of three hundred and eight numbered copies by Peter Rutledge Koch with the assistance of Jonathan Gerken for The Book Club of California. Ten artist’s proofs designated A/P and ten printer’s proofs designated P/P are reserved. The typeface, Dante, designed by Giovanni Mardersteig, was originally hand-cut by Charles Malin and adapted for mechanical composition by Monotype in 1957. The text was cast at the letter foundry of Michael & Winifred Bixler and printed by Max Koch on Zerkall Büttenpapier. John DeMerritt Bookbinding bound and created slipcases for the book, which measures 7¾" x 12½". The Sierra Nevada Suite is Book Club of California publication 231.

Book;    7.75 x 12.5 inches    308 copies.       $2500.00

edited by Peter Rutledge Koch.
Berkeley, CA: Hormone Derange Editions, 2013

The Complete Montana Gothic collects in a single volume all six issues of Montana Gothic: An Independent Journal of Poetry, Literature, and Graphics published from 1974 to 1977 by Peter Rutledge Koch at his Black Stone Press in Missoula, Montana. Original copies of the journal were scanned and are here reproduced in facsimile. Additionally, this edition includes seven illustrations, thirteen photographs, a complete contributors list, and seven new, previously unpublished articles and essays written expressly for this occasion by Adam Cornford, Edwin Dobb, Peter Koch, Milo Miles, Rick Newby, Aaron Parrett, and David E Thomas.

Forty years ago, Koch and his “wild bunch” of cowboy surrealists rode up into the mountains to stir up a bit of excitement and trouble in the dense forests and alpine peaks of the Big Sky Country. Gang members included Montana originals, “expats” in Kathmandu and Tangier, and seekers of the marvelous from San Francisco to New York, Paris, London, Mexico City, and beyond. The world may have changed but these wildly poetic works have retained their freshness in spite of, or perhaps because of, the great grinding-down process of too much information in an age of mechanical reproduction.

“It can be argued that there are two distinct categories of the REAL; that which is common and habitual, which I shall call REALITY, versus that which is suppressed by the first category, which I shall call MARVELOUS. If one can believe the great thinkers of this century— the supressed will return to haunt the bright plaza of low contrasts called ‘reality’ like lava extruded from a fault in the earth’s crust. If Nature abhors a vacuum then the imagination abhors reality (an opposition whereby what can be achieves a clawhold on what is.)”

“Beyond the imagination of the academic poets we can envision ourselves, like the Grizzly Bear in Yellowstone Park, sitting upon a veritable magma of faultily supressed potential that once allowed to escape could radically re-organize consciousness and its material attributes. There are and have been in Montana unprecedented extrusions of the marvelous that deserve our attention....”
–Peter Koch from DEADSTART, Montana Gothic 6

“Montana Gothic poets may seem like strapping cowboys chugging absinthe and shooting out streetlights, but they are damned fine shots.”
—William S. Burroughs

With the six issues of Montana Gothic, Peter Koch, like forbears such as Leslie Fiedler, James Welch, and Mary MacLane, opened the field, made room for those of us who take the notion of Montana literature seriously, but who want it always to be something more, something richer and deeply unexpected, a tradition built from hatred and love, rich in ambivalences, innovations, and unprecedented “extrusions of the marvelous.”
—Rick Newby

Book; 654 pp.    6 x 9 inches          $35.00

Print on demand; unlimited edition.

Christopher Carroll.
Berkeley: del Milion editions, 2013

Paris is a delightful alphabet book written and illustrated by fashion designer Christopher Carroll, illustrating his fifty-year love affair with the city of Paris. Carroll has set a sharp eye and wicked sense of humor to work on some of his favorite iconic locations and the charismatic characters that inhabited them. You will encounter Ho Chi Minh in the kitchen of Auguste Escoffier; Oscar Wilde in battle with the wallpaper at the Hotel D’Alsace; and the Surrealist photographer Dora Mar playing a bloody game of “truth or dare” with a kitchen knife.

Paris was designed by Peter Rutledge Koch in collaboration with Christopher Carroll and Susan Filter. Text and images were printed letterpress at Peter Koch Printers for del Milion editions. The typefaces are Nicholas Cochin for the text and Fournier Ornate for display. (How could we resist?) The original drawings in cut-paper and ink, were scanned at 42 Line and digitally re-configured under the direction of the printer. The text and images were printed on Hahnemühle Biblio, presswork from photopolymer-plates by Max Koch. The elegant chartreuse silk-over-flexible-board binding was executed by John DeMerritt Bookbinders.

Book; 56 pp.    7 x 12.5 inches    80 copies.       $450.00

edited by Peter Rutledge Koch.
: Stanford University Libraries, 2011

Published on the occasion of the exhibition: The Art of the Book in California: Five Contemporary Presses at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University.

The works that comprise the exhibition are from Ninja Press, Moving Parts Press, Turkey Press, Foolscap Press, and Editions Koch. In addition to the exhibition checklist and an extensive color plate section, the catalogue contains three contributions by Robert Bringhurst: an erudite essay entitled “What the Ink Sings to the Paper,” a “Chronology of Fine Printing in California” that limns his essay, and a remarkably useful bibliography for further reading.

Book; 132 pp.    9 x 8 inches    1000 copies. O.P.       $inquire

W. S. Merwin; illustrated by Peter Koch.
Berkeley: Editions Koch, 2011

Small Elegies consists of eight poems by W. S. Merwin and six relief prints from wooden type by Peter Rutledge Koch. Fore & aft sections illustrated with antique star maps. Printed in an edition of fifty copies on vintage Carta di Amalfi and hand set in 12d. Romulus Romein & Cursief types cast for the press by Joh. Enschedé & Zonen, Haarlem. Bound at the press in specially painted 100% cotton rag St. Armand paper.

The following poems are printed in the book:
By Dark
Night With No Moon
Good Night
Invisible Trail
At the Bend
Into the Cloud
A Ring
Another Dream of Burial

A special limited edition of 50 broadsides of the poem GOOD NIGHT was printed in 2006 from hand-set Romulus types and signed by the printer and the poet. 8 1/4 x 19 inches printed in three colors.

Book; 40 pp.    5.5 x 9.5 inches    50 copies. O.P.       $inquire

edited by Isaac Masri, Julieta Sarfati, Fernando Ondarza, Peter Rutledge Koch, Roberto G. Trujillo, Alison Roth.
Mexico, D. F.: El Centro Cultural Estación Indianilla, 2011

La exposición Libros de artista está conformada por una importante muestra de volúmenes elaborados a mano en el Estado de California, Estados Unidos de América. Se trata de la obra de grandes maestros impresores que han renovado de manera protagónica la producción artesanal de libros de calidad.

Estos libros excepcionales fueron presentados recientemente en el evento “The Art of the Book in California. Five Contemporary Presses”, celebrado en el Centro de Artes Visuales Iris & B. Gerald Cantor de la Universidad de Stanford. El proyecto fue curado por Robert Bringhurst y Peter Rutledge Koch (Presidente de The Codex Foundation).

Acompañando la muestra californiana, se exhiben algunos bellos libros de artista realizados por impresores mexicanos. Conforman un abanico de opciones y manifiestan la riqueza de posibilidades en la capacitación de nuevas generaciones de impresores, artistas gráficos, diseñadores y escritores que habrán de encontrar en este legado una rica tradición a partir de la cual proponer realizaciones originales. La preparación de la muestra estuvo a cargo de Isaac Masri, Julieta Sarfati y Fernando Ondarza.

Para la impresión de este libro catálogo de la exposición “Libros de artista” se empleó el tipo Espinosa Nova, creado por Cristóbal Henestrosa en el año 2010 por Estudio –CH, México D.F.  El diseño tipográfico está basado en los tipos originales creados por Antonio Espinosa y empleados en el libro de Alonso de la Vera Cruz, Recognitio Symmularum (1554). Estos fueron los primeros tipos romanos cortados e impresos en el Nuevo Mundo.

Libros de artista está disponible directamente de The Codex Foundation.

Book; 66 pp.    9 x 8 inches    1000 copies. O.P.       $inquire

Hardcover.

Paul Bowles; illustrated by Ira Yeager.
Berkeley: Del Milion Editions, 2011

Twenty unpublished letters by Paul Bowles with eight accompanying water­colors and an original oil & acrylic painting on canvas by Ira Yeager .

The young, dashingly handsome artist Ira Yeager arrived on the scene in Tangier, Morocco in the early 1960s. In those days Tangier was an exotic mélange of Berbers, French, Arabs, Spanish, libertine American heiresses, Gurdjieffians, artists, drunks, kif smokers, Russian spies, famous writers, Beat poets, and all sorts of riff raff. Yeager called the expatriate community the “Danger Queens” … (another story and possible book).

Tangier was cheap. You could buy a house for $400 or part of the King’s palace for $1000. Ira and his traveling companion Stuart Church frequented a hedonistic crowd of the demimonde—some truly eccentric characters—and caroused with them in the haunts of the rakish Zoco Chico.

Ira soon became friends with Paul Bowles, and much more so with the eccentric and witty Jane, who lived in apartments one above the other in the Immeuble Itesa. During the next two decades, 1962–1986, Ira exchanged some eighty or so letters with Bowles. Bowles’ letters are peppered with bits of gossip about their friends in Tangier and the writers who briefly lived and passed through there: William Burroughs, Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote. He writes to Ira about Tennessee Williams’ arrival and telephone call, ‘I’m in the Minzah, baby!’, and the beatniks, whose particular clothing and unruly attitudes were coming to the attention of the authorities, of delightful anecdotes of his life and travels in Morocco with a beautiful description of a visit to an oasis, of his up and coming book publications, of Jane and Cherifa, of Amed Yacoubi, the Englishman David Herbert, and of the blind Berber beggar woman with whom Ira became so fascinated.

This selection, edited and introduced by Susan Filter, consists of twenty out of eighty unpublished letters written by Bowles to Yeager and spans over two decades. Yeager’s brilliantly colorful illustrations for 2137 Tanger Socco were inspired by his memories and travels in North Africa. His sketchbooks from that period contains drawings and watercolors that he later used as material for his paintings: The Blind Berber Series and Veiled Fatimas.

2137 Tanger Socco was designed and printed in an edition variée of thirty numbered copies by Peter Rutledge Koch with the assistance of Jonathan Gerken and Erin Fong for Susan Filter and Del Milion Editions. Each copy contains eight relief prints—hand water-colored by the artist. An original oil and acrylic painting on canvas has been set into the cover of each box. The paper is 300 gsm Hahnemühle Copperplate and the typeface is Bitstream Courier Bold. John DeMerritt Bookbinder constructed the elegant red cloth boxes lined with aquamarine Ultrasuede. Each copy is boldly signed by the artist, the printer, and the publisher.

Portfolio; 8 prints,    17 x 19 inches    edition of 30.       $inquire

40 pp (10 bi-folios).

Debra Magpie Earling; illustrated by Peter Rutledge Koch.
Berkeley, CA: Editions Koch, 2010

Complete PDF Prospectus

The Lost Journals of Sacajewea began as a project during the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition. In the Spring of 2005, the Missoula Museum of Art had two exhibitions running simultaneously that were critical responses to the celebratory afflatus that customarily surrounds such events. I was at the museum to open my exhibition Nature Morte when I saw, hanging in the next gallery, a fragment of a poem that accompanied Native Perspectives on the Trail: A Contemporary American Indian Portfolio. I was introduced to the author, Debra Magpie Earling, and based on that fragment, I proposed a collaboration. Over the next few years we met occasionally and worked sporadically on the concept while we each pursued our own busy and demanding schedules. By 2006 Debra had completed the writing, and in 2009 I collected the last photographs that I wished to accompany the text. Printing began in late 2009 and was completed in January 2010.

Debra is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation. She has been published in journals and anthologies and her novel Perma Red received the American Book Award, the Mountains and Plains Bookseller Association Award, and a Spur Award. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.

The typeface is a version of the historic Fell types presumed to be the work of Dutch punchcutter Dirck Voskens and interpreted by Jonathan Hoefler in a conscious attempt to reproduce the imperfect image that the Fell types left on paper when printed in the 18th Century. The Fell types have been described as “retaining a retrogressive old-style irregularity” which somehow seems appropriate given our purpose here in this book.

The text is printed on Twinrocker Da Vinci hand-made paper at Peter Koch Printers and bound at the press by Jonathan Gerken. The smoked buffalo rawhide cover paper was designed and hand-made by Amanda Degener especially for this edition at Cave Papers in Minneapolis, Minnesota.The spine is beaded with trade beads and small caliber cartridge cases.

The images were prepared by Donald Farnsworth at Magnolia Editions and printed on Kozo hand-made paper with the assistance of Jonathan Gerken and Tallulah Terryll.

Book; 80 pp.    10 x 15.5 inches    65 copies. O.P.       $inquire

Hans Peter Gyllembourg Koch; edited by Kim Allen Scott.
Helena, Montana: Bedrock Editions & Drumlummon Institute, 2010

"The editing of [Hans Peter] Koch’s papers provides researchers unprecedented insight into Montana’s early territorial years from an articulate observer of the frontier and one of the molders of Montana society." —Brian Shovers, Montana Historical Society

Jointly published by Drumlummon Institute and Bedrock Editions, Splendid on a Large Scale: The Writings of Hans Peter Gyllembourg Koch, Montana Territory, 1869-1874, presents the diaries and letters of a highly educated Danish immigrant who made significant contributions to the emerging EuroAmerican culture on the Montana frontier.

Known as Peter, the young man quickly grew “enthusiastic on the subject of Montana, her beauties and resources,” and his writings offer a wonderfully articulate account of his first years in a new country—as an unlikely frontiersman, often reluctant businessman, aspiring naturalist, avid bookman, and yearning lover (he wrote the bulk of his letters to his fiancée, Laurentze, whom he would wed in 1874).

Whether he was painting a picture of the home he hoped to build for his bride-to-be, lamenting the absence of good books, chronicling his efforts to trade with the Crow Indians, or describing the lynching of a murderer by vigilantes, Koch brought a sensitivity and astuteness to the task that belies his concern that the frontier might render him “rough and unpolished.”

Peter’s passion for education and book culture led him to start the Bozeman public library, but it was as co-founder of the Agricultural College of the State of Montana (today Montana State University, Bozeman) that he left his most lasting mark.

In his public spiritedness and as the “compelling, moving, driving force behind the movement for a newer education,” Peter possessed, in the words of the 1919 Bozeman Weekly Exponent, “the intelligence of an aristocrat and the heart of a democrat.”

Koch is often mentioned alongside other major collectors of the literature of western exploration. When Ripley Hitchcock discusses, in his landmark study, The Louisiana Purchase and the exploration, early history and building of the West, "the early memoirs of travelers and hunters, the tales of Indians . . . and the various personal narratives," he cites the "library of the Wisconsin State Historical Society, the Mercantile Library of St. Louis . . . and certain private libraries like those of Edward E. Ayer of Chicago [whose collections formed the backbone of the Newberry Library and the Field Museum], H. H. Bancroft of San Francisco [Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley], and the Hon. Peter Koch of Bozeman, Montana, [as especially] rich in examples of this early literature."

Edited and annotated by historian Kim Allen Scott, Splendid on a Large Scale includes not only Peter’s diaries and letters, but also an extensive introduction and afterword, Peter’s vivid account of his experiences as a trader at Fort Musselshell in 1869-1870, an essay on his extraordinary collection of the literature of western exploration, and an inventory of the most significant titles in that library.

The book is designed by Peter Rutledge Koch, great-grandson of Hans Peter Koch, one of America’s foremost letterpress printers and book artists, and founder of the Codex Foundation.

Book; 386 pp.    6 x 9 inches    300 copies.       $75.00

Peter Rutledge Koch; illustrated by Dirk Lee.
Berkeley: Editions Koch, 2010

Nocturnes was printed in an edition of sixty-five copies at Peter Koch Printers by Monique Comacchio with the assistance of Jonathan Gerken. The poems were hand-set by Deborah Hsu and Jonathan Fetter-Vorm in sixteen point Garamond, cast long ago by the American Type Founders. The paper is vintage Amalfi by Cartiera Fernando Amatruda. The wood engraving is by Dirk Lee.

Book; 14 pp.    6.75 x 13 inches    65 copies.       $75.00

Mickey Spillane; illustrated by Karen Filter.
Berkeley, California: del Milion Editions, 2009

I’ll Die Tomorrow was designed, printed, and bound in an edition of forty-five copies by Peter Rutledge Koch with the assistance of Jonathan Gerken at Peter Koch Printers for del Milion Editions. The text, set in Bookman Old Style, is printed letterpress on Hahnemühle Photo Rag and the cover is printed on Crane’s Cover. The original photographs are printed with a unique color technique created by Karen Filter and based on Carbro prints from the 1930s & 40s and Technicolor from the 1950s. They were selected from her “B-Movie Series” and “Detective Series” shot in the 1980s. The photographs were then scanned and corrected under the direction of the artist and reproduced as digital pigment prints at Magnolia Editions in Oakland, California.

Book; 48 pp.    6.5 x 8 inches    45 copies.       $750.00

Richard Wagener.
San Francisco, California: The Book Club of California, 2009

Working in the demanding medium of wood engraving, artist Richard Wagener has created a visual itinerary of his wanderings throughout California in his brilliant new work, California in Relief. Composed of thirty original prints and Wagener’s short prose pieces describing them, California in Relief begins and ends in Los Angeles, with stops in the San Jacinto Mountains, the Antelope Valley, Sonoma County and the Sierra Nevada. Like John Muir and Gary Snyder, Richard Wagener is a wanderer, explorer and observer of California, creating a poetry of place through both words and images, all born of actual experience.

Not since Paul Landacre mastered the aesthetic and technical challenges of wood engraving in the early twentieth-century has any California artist achieved prominence in the medium until Richard Wagener began to explore it in the 1980s. His previously published illustrated books have won wide acclaim for their ingenuity and beauty, and The Book Club of California is pleased to be the publisher of this magnificent work. Wagener’s images of nature–his stately Sierra trees, stark peaks and rocky crags–and his urban architectural monuments–the Pantages Theater and the Griffith Observatory–combine to make this work a deeply personal record of distinctive California locations. Wagener’s technical skill is such that the images shimmer, jewel-like, concise renditions in black and white of sunlight and shadow, landscape and sky.

Renowned letterpress printer Peter Rutledge Koch designed, and produced the work, and Richard Wagener has printed the wood engravings himself. The edition is limited to 300 copies and each copy is signed and numbered by the artist.

Book; 88 pp.    7.75 x 12.5 inches    300 copies. O.P.       $inquire

Printer's proof copies $750.

Rick Newby.
Berkeley, California: Editions Koch, 2008

Sketches Begun in My Studio on a Sunday Afternoon and Completed the Following Day Near the Noon Hour on the Lower Slopes of the Rocky Mountains was designed and printed by Peter Rutledge Koch with the assistance of Jonathan Gerken. One hundred signed and numbered copies were printed on Hahnemulhe Biblio and twenty-six specially bound copies, signed and lettered A to Z were printed on vintage Robert Serpa handmade paper. The typeface is a hand-tooled digital version of Dante, designed in Verona by Giovanni Mardersteig and cut in steel by Charles Malin.

Copies A–Z were hand-bound at the press by Jonathan Gerken.

Cover wood engraving by Richard Wagener from a 1997 photograph by Fletcher E. Newby.

Book; 52 pp.    5.75 x 10 inches    100 copies.       $inquire

Numbered edition 1 - 100:  $75.00

Lettered edition A - Z:  $350.00

Redundancy in the digital era edition:  o.p.

edited by David Jury.
Berkeley, California: The Codex Foundation, 2008

If you were at the Codex Foundation Book Fair and Symposium in San Francisco in February 2007, you may remember seeing Peter Koch during his inaugural speech, holding a large black book aloft and reminding exhibitors to have examples of their work ready to be photographed for the exhibition ‘catalogue’. You may also remember seeing volunteers scurrying around, collecting and delivering books to three frazzled individuals in a small room nearby. Their job was to photograph every item several times, recording the cover, inner page spreads and any unusual use of materials, processes or structure.

Eighteen months later, the book is almost ready for distribution. It is titled book art object. The book is case-bound, twelve by nine inches (portrait), contains 432 pages and approximately 735 colour images, and presents the work of the artists, designers and printers who came to California from all parts of the world. The work of the exhibitors occupies 200 pages.

There is a preface by Peter Koch and an introduction written by David Jury outlining the historical relationship between art, design, and the book. The following section contains the illustrated transcripts of each of the four speakers: Robert Bringhurst, Felipe Ehrenberg, Sarah Bodman, and Dr Stefan Soltek, all devoted to the book as poets, historians, artists, and publishers.

The book includes five essays written by prominent artists and bookmakers from around the world: Crispen Elsted, Canada; Markus Fahrner, Germany; Martha Hellion, Mexico; Jadwiga Jarvis, Australia; and Gerald Lange, United States of America.

The book contains an index of contact information and historical details for every 2007 CODEX book fair exhibitor, including descriptions of their working methods and current work.

book art object is edited and designed by David Jury and copy-edited by J. O. Bugental. The photographer is Douglas Sandberg.

book art object is available directly from The Codex Foundation.

Book; 450 pp.    9 x 12 inches    O.P.       $inquire

Peter Koch.
Berkeley, CA: Peter Koch, Printer, 2007

A collection from the printing presses of Peter Rutledge Koch with an introductory essay by Timothy D. Murray.

Black Stone Press 1975 – 1982
Peter Koch Printer, 1982 – 2006

This collection includes over 100 pieces of literary, artistic, bibliophile, and business printing weighing 12 pounds (including the box), produced under a number of different imprints including Black Stone Press, Hormone Derange Editions, Editions Koch, and Peter Koch, Printers. The contents range from a flier advertising the maverick literary journal MONTANA GOTHIC (Koch’s first piece of design, circa 1974 ... using lettraset and an AB Dick copy machine!), letterpress printed bookplates and wine labels, to a laser-printed pamphlet, all designed and printed between 1974 and 2007 by master printer, Peter Rutledge Koch at his studios in Missoula, San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley.

The box, reminiscent of a 19th century letterbox, measuring 11.5 by 15 x 5.5 inches wide, was constructed (with splendid craftsmanship) by Taurus Bookbindery in San Francisco of acid free materials and vintage Buckram.

The accompanying essays and the list of contents are included as the 2007 contribution. In addition to the stated contents each box will have several items that are not included on the list due to the fact that we had less than 27 exemplars of certain materials we deemed appropriate to include in this collection.

The edition of 27 boxes are press-numbered on the spine and are available for sale from the printer.

Portfolio; 100 prints,    11.5 x 15 inches    edition of 27.       $1500.00

Stefan Zweig; illustrated by Joseph Goldyne.
New York, NY: Ursus Books, 2007

A handsome new edition of this classic fable about collecting. Zweig's story set in Germany in the aftermath of the First World War is timeless, and eloquently evokes the magic of collecting, the excitement of dealing, and the pleasures and complexities of ownership. Joseph Goldyne the distinguished California artist, who is himself a renowned collector, has thoughtfully produced an illustration which successfully solves the problem of how to illustrate a book, which on first reading would seem to defy the concept of illustration, and Peter Koch has designed and printed as elegant a version of Zweig's story as one could hope for.

Book; 24 pp.    5.5 x 9 inches    50 copies.       $inquire

A.N. Prentiss.
St. Helena, CA: Kylix Press, 2007

Autobiography of a Vine is the endearing story of the life of a grape vine, personally told by the vine himself, and was first published in 1866 as a chapter of My Vineyard at Lakeview by a Western Grape Grower [Albert Nelson Prentiss]. The book has become a scarce record of American grape culture, and it is our privilege to reprint this venerable chapter, embellished with 19th century wine­growing images.

The book was designed and printed letterpress by the internationally acclaimed fine press printer and book designer, Peter Rutledge Koch of Berkeley, California—the first miniature book to come from Peter Koch Printers. The paper is Unicorn, hand made by the Griffen Mill. Of the 185 copies printed, 150 are hand bound by John DeMerritt in burgundy cloth and Nideggen paper, with a Wemyss-Unzelman hand-colored vignette to the front cover, and slipcased. Thirty-five copies are hand bound in full dark green leather, by Klaus Ullrich Rötzscher at the Pettingell Book Bindery.

Kylix press was founded in 2006 by Nina Wemyss and Gail Unzelman to produce finely crafted miniature books about wine. With our shared passion for wine, fine press, and miniature books, we will engage some of America’s foremost craftsmen in the book arts—letterpress printing, book design, hand-binding—and use the highest quality materials for our limited edition books. With a baccate toast from the kylix, an ancient wine cup, we invite you to enjoy the pleasures of our press.

Book; 36 pp.    2 x 2.5 inches    185 copies.       $inquire

Joseph Brodsky; illustrated by Robert Morgan.
Venice: Peter Koch, Printer, 2006

Five hundred years ago Venice was host to the greatest Renaissance scholar-printers, humanists, and artists. Here in 1499, Aldus Manutius printed his most beautiful and enigmatic book, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Today we are participating in that great tradition.

Watermark is a series of lyrical meditations woven from the fabric of Venice in the late 20th century ... meditations on time & beauty ... a looking glass romance of a Russian poet-in-exile with a city that beguiles his eye. Brodsky dedicated Watermark to his friend the American painter, Robert Morgan who has lived in Venice for more than 30 years and the book is illustrated with 14 photo-gravures made from his original photographs.

In early September, we imported a printing press, on loan from the Tipoteca Italiana Fondazione printing museum in Cornuda, near Treviso and floated it down the Grand Canal to the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venezia in the Cannaregio sestiere, where Peter was artist-in-residence for the Fall of 2006.

The paper is Twinrocker “Da Vinci” handmade, with our own watermark designed by Christopher Stinehour and Susan Filter. Robert Morgan’s photographs were digitally re-configured by Donald Farnsworth and printed at his Magnolia Editions in Oakland, California from photogravure plates made by Unai San Martin. The printed sheets were shipped to Venice, Italy, where we printed the text in Monotype Dante types cast in lead at the Olivieri Typefoundry in Milano. Once the printing at the Scuola Grafica was completed, the sheets were shipped to our studio in Berkeley where the book will be bound in richly pigmented papers made by hand at Cave Papers in Minneapolis, MN.

The edition is limited to fifty copies Copies numbered 1 to 30 are bound Venetian-red hand made papers and housed in a clamshell box. Copies numbered I to V designate the deluxe edition bound in full vellum, housed in a unique box with a brass plate imbedded on the surface, includes a suite of all 14 photo-gravures signed by the artist. Fifteen copies are designated h/c (hors commerce).

Book; 80 pp.    11 x 16.5 inches    50 copies.       $inquire

Numbered edition 1-15:  o.p.

Numbered edition 16-25:  o.p.

Numbered edition 26-30:  

Deluxe edition:  o.p.

Suite of 7 signed photogravure prints:  

Franco Ferrari Delfino; translated by Dina and Adalberto Viggiano with refinements by Ariel Parkinson; edited by Susan K. Filter; illustrated by Tony Green.
Berkeley, CA: del Milion, 2006

A Ore Perse is a gathering of four poems composed in the Venetian dialect by Franco Ferrari Delfino that express an often humorous view of the world through the eyes of a native Venetian. The linoleum cuts are of familiar Venetian landmarks one of which is a large 12 x 30 inch fold-out view of the Rialto bridge.

The text was edited by Susan K. Filter and translated by Dina and Adalberto Viggiano. The press mark for this first publication under the del Milion imprint was designed in a collaboration between Susan Filter and Christopher Stinehour. It depicts a particular set of Byzantine-Gothic windows in the Corte del Milion in Venice where Marco Polo lived in the 13th century. Del Milion was the sobriquet given to him by the Venetians after the publication of his travel adventures in French, Livre des Merveilles (known as Il Milione in Italian). The Venetians call it the Courtyard of the Million ... lies!

Sixty-five copies were designed, printed on Arches cover, and bound in terracotta Fabriano wrapppers during the summer of 2006 by Peter Koch with the assistance of Jonathan Gerken. Tony Green cut five linoleum blocks in New Orleans and then proofed them at the press. The typefaces are Scala for the text and Rialto Italic for display.

Book; 16 pp.    8 x 12 inches    65 copies.       $350.00

Robert Bringhurst.
Berkeley, CA: Editions Koch, 2005

A sequence of 12 poems and translations based on Presocratic sources. Designed and printed letterpress from photo-polymer plates by Peter Koch. The English text is set in Giovanni Mardersteig’s Dante type, designed in Verona and cut by Charles Malin in Paris in 1954. The Greek source texts, printed on facing pages, are set in Christopher Stinehour’s Diogenes Greek, designed in Berkeley in 1996. 200 numbered copies have been printed on Hahnemühle Biblio paper, Smythe-sewn, and enclosed in letter­press printed wrappers with cover designs by Winifred McNeill. Signed by the author. 26 lettered copies have been printed on Serpa handmade paper, with a typographic cover designed by Bringhurst and printed on Magnolia handmade paper. Hand-bound at the press by Jonathan Gerken. Signed by the author and slipcased.

Book; 48 pp.    5.75 x 10 inches    226 copies.       $75.00

Numbered edition 1 - 200:  $75.00

Lettered edition A - Z:  $350.00

Peter Rutledge Koch.
Berkeley, California: Editions Koch, 2005

A portfolio of digital pigment prints assembled from historic photographs and documents; the manuscript journals and papers of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Elers Koch; and short legends by the artist hand-set in lead type. The prints are accompanied by texts selected from the writings of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Ross Cox, William T. Horniday, L.A. Huffman, Elers Koch and others. A preface by Rick Newby, an introduction by Griff Williams, and a statement (writings) by the artist complete the portfolio.

Nature Morte was originally commissioned in exhibition print format by the Holter Museum in Helena, Montana on the occasion of the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition 1804-1805.

The images are printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag by Urban Digital Color in San Francisco and the title engraving and texts are printed letterpress on Hahnemühle Copperplate by Peter Koch. The portfolio boxes are linen paneled with a stamped quarter leather spine and made by John DeMerritt in Emeryville, California.

The portfolio consists of eleven images printed on 16 by 22 inch sheets in a landscape format and slipped into folios on which are printed the accompanying texts. The title page, documentation, and essays are printed on loose folios and housed with the images in a sturdy clamshell box. A suite of exhibition prints of the entire text may be special ordered in sheets to facilitate wall hanging. The title page collage/engraving was hand-colored at the press by Susan Filter. Each portfolio is signed and numbered by the artist and each image is signed on the reverse.

Please also see the PDF prospectus of Nature Morte.

Portfolio; 11 prints,    22 x 16 inches    edition of 25. O.P.       $inquire

Parmenides; translated by Robert Bringhurst; illustrated by Richard Wagener.
Berkeley, California: Editions Koch, 2004

The text is comprised of all twenty Greek fragments, varying in length from a only few words to 66 hexameters, of a poem composed by Parmenides almost 2,500 years ago in southern Italy. For this project, Peter Koch commissioned Dan Carr to create a new typeface that balanced the lyricism and movement of the handwritten poem and the formality of a carefully-made inscription. Parmenides Greek, the foundry face designed, cut, and cast by Carr at the Golgonooza Letter Foundry, is accompanied by Diogenes Greek, a digital face designed by Christopher Stinehour. Printed in Greek on the left with the translation by Bringhurst on the facing page. Greek text handset in Parmenides Greek at the press by Richard Seibert, Robert Bringhurst, and Peter Koch; English text set in Monotype Dante at the Golgonooza Letter Foundry; cover text, printed in red and black, set in Diogenes Greek. 5 wood engravings that boldly accent the text are hand-printed by Wagener in vibrant red, fiery orange and velvety black on Zerkall mill paper. 120 numbered copies, bound by Peggy Gotthold at Foolscap Press in quarter leather and Hahnemühle Bugra paper, are enclosed in a case covered in gold Japanese silk. 26 lettered copies, bound in full leather by Daniel Kelm and enclosed in a drop-back box, are accompanied by a suite of 10 wood engravings signed by Richard Wagener and a broadside specimen sheet for each of the typefaces made for this edition. Afterword by Bringhurst set in special digital Dante, New Hellenic Greek, and Lazurski Cyrillic, and printed from polymer plates. Signed by Koch, Wagener, and Bringhurst.

Book; 64 pp.    9.75 x 16.25 inches    146 copies.       $inquire

Lettered edition, with additional suite of prints:  $inquire

Numbered edition 1-120:  $inquire

Christian Koch; edited by Richard T. Rhoades.
Berkeley, California: Editions Koch, 2004

A revised second edition of The Diary of Christian Koch, privately published by the Koch family, including the original introduction by Thomasine Lutken in 1947. The diary covers a number of seafaring and river running adventures from the East coast of the United States and Central America, to the Mississippi and upper-Missouri Rivers during the early 19th Century. The new edition contains a second introduction by the editor, footnotes, and appendices. Designed by Peter Koch. Bound using orange quarter cloth and green paper over boards. Gold imprint of leaf on cover.

Book; 109 pp.    5.75 x 8.75 inches    250 copies.       $50.00

Michael North; edited by Eric Holzenberg.
New York, New York: The Grollier Club, 2004

Designed by Peter Koch. Typesetting by Richard Seibert. 450 copies printed by The Stinehour Press in Lunenburg, Vermont, and bound in gray quarter cloth and Fabriano Ingres over boards. 50 copies printed by The Stinehour Press on papier bleu and bound in sepia quarter leather and Fabriano Ingres over boards. Gold insignia printed on cover with black and gold spine label. Prefaced by Holzenberg, with an introduction by North, and an essay by Edmond L. Lincoln. Includes indices.

Book; 305 pp.    8.75 x 11.25 inches    500 copies.       $inquire

John Keats; illustrated by Matt Phillips.
Berkeley, California: Editions Koch, 2004

A reprinting of Keats’ poem in portfolio format accompanied by 11 drypoints hand-watercolored by the artist and one relief print. Text composed in a digital restoration of the historic Fell types and printed letterpress from photo-polymer plates by Peter Koch. Drypoints printed by Kay Bradner. Enclosed in a dark blue cloth clamshell box with stamped quarter leather spine constructed by John DeMerritt. Afterword by Matt Phillips.

Portfolio; 11 prints,    9 x 13.5 inches    edition of 21.       $5000.00

Ismail Kadare; translated by Pirro Dollani; illustrated by Peter Koch.
Las Vegas, Nevada: Rainmaker Editions, 2004

Designed and printed letterpress on Zerkall-Nideggen paper using wooden type and photo-polymer plates by Peter Koch, with the assistance of Jonathan Gerken. Composed in four Renner’s Futura Bold typefaces, three of which were specially made for this edition in progressive states of decay by Christopher Stinehour. Photomontages of Albania by Koch. Inner cover bound by John DeMerritt. Housed in a galvanized steel clam-shell box made by G. and L. Manufacturing with black silk screen printing. Five hand-colored printer's proofs, signed by the author and printer.

Book; 56 pp.    15.75 x 10.75 inches    125 copies.       $1500.00

Robert Bringhurst and Peter Rutledge Koch, et al..
Berkeley, California: Editions Koch, 2004

“This book is ... a guided tour of ... the philosophy of artisanship, in some of its many forms.” A series of essays by master letterpress printer Peter Koch; poet, translator and typographer Robert Bringhurst; punchcutter, type designer, typefounder and poet Dan Carr; master stonecutter and type designer Christopher Stinehour; master bookbinder Daniel Kelm; bookbinder, casemaker and printer Peggy Gotthold; and visual artist and master wood engraver Richard Wagener. These essays, which detail their collaborative efforts in creating The Fragments of Parmenides, include “Philosophy and Printing in the Real West” by Koch; “Finding the Form of an Ancient Text” by Bringhurst; and “Parmenides, Craft and Being” by Carr. This companion text also features a number of photographs that trace the journey of creation, from conception to realization.

Book; 138 pp.    6 x 9 inches    1000 copies.       $30.00

William H. Filter & Roland W. Filter; edited by Susan K. Filter.
Berkeley, California: Peter Koch, Printer, 2004

A pamphlet containing excerpts from the war letters of William H. Filter, WWII, and Roland W. Filter, WWI. Introductions by Susan Filter, W. Jeffrey Filter, and Elise Filter. Cover printed letterpress by Susan Filter and Peter Koch. Text reproduced by copy machine on Mohawk superfine text. Brown Fabriano Ingres wrapper featuring antique wood type.

Pamphlet; 30 pp.    5.5 x 7.5 inches    35 copies.       $35.00

Homer; translated by Richard Seibert; illustrated by Winifred McNeill.
Berkeley, California: Editions Koch, 2003

The Helen Fragments is a collaboration between two contemporary artists who have come together over an ancient text that has fascinated readers for millennia. The poet and printer, Richard Seibert, has selected portions from Homer’s Iliad that tell the tumultuous story of Helen of Troy and has translated them from the original Greek into contemporary lyric.

Winifred McNeill, a New York based artist, working over a period of two years, completed over a hundred drawings for this project. Each of the fifty fragments is accompanied by a drawing that has been reconfigured digitally under the supervision of the artist and printed letterpress from polymer plates.

The text is composed in Monotype Quadraat and the epigraph is in Wilson Greek. Printed from photo-polymer plates on Zerkall Bütten-Karten paper by Max Koch at the Koch Studio. Cover paper made specifically for this edition by David Kimball. Non-adhesive, external, long-stitch binding with leather tabs designed by Victoria Heifner and bound by John DeMerritt. Edition enclosed in a paper-covered slipcase with spine tab plus chemise.

Book; 120 pp.    5.5 x 11 inches    150 copies.       $600.00

Peter Rutledge Koch.
Berkeley, California: Editions Koch, 2002

A set of seven typographic prints composed of found engravings and antique wood type. Designed and printed by Peter Koch. The prints pair images of war with the traditional seven liberal arts of the Renaissance. Includes a title page. Housed loose in a dark blue cloth box with quarter leather constructed by John DeMerritt. Each print signed by the artist.

Portfolio; 8 prints,    17.25 x 23 inches    edition of 15.       $1500.00

.
Berkeley, California: Editions Koch, 2002

A humorous typographic specimen book designed to imitate the style of a fictional 19th century printing business on the Montana frontier. Printed by Hannah Berman, Karen Eng, Max Koch, Marina Luz, and Chadwick Bidwell, under the direction of Peter Koch. Hand-bound by Victoria Heifner using quarter cloth over Davey board with hand woven headbands and an extra spine lable tipped in. Cover board features a rodeo engraving printed in terra cotta, and text printed in green and marigold.

Book; 128 pp.    5 x 10.25 inches    125 copies.       $250.00

Toni Morrison; illustrated by Kara Walker.
Las Vegas, Nevada: Rainmaker Editions, 2002

Designed and printed letterpress from digital imaging and photo-polymer plates by Peter Koch. Printed on Rives paper using Rialto Piccolo type. 399 numbered copies bound using red quarter cloth and yellow Fabriano paper over boards. Housed in a slipcase constructed by Jace Graf in Austin, Texas. 26 lettered copies bound in black quarter leather and red cloth over boards. Printed yellow inlay on front cover with gold lettering on spine. Housed in a red cloth drop-back box with printed yellow spine label also constructed by Graf. Signed by the author, artist, and printer. Nine copies have been reserved from the original numbered edition and are available with a suite of exhibition prints from the book.

Book; 24 pp.    8.5 x 12.75 inches    425 copies. O.P.       $inquire

edited by Roger K. Larson.
San Francisco, California: The Book Club of California, 2002

Designed, composed, and printed by Peter Koch, with the assistance of Richard Seibert and Max Koch, using Minion for text and Greco Adornado for display. Bound by Cardoza-James Binding Company using red quarter cloth and covered boards. Enclosed in a slipcase.

Book; 255 pp.    7.75 x 11.25 inches    350 copies.       $inquire

Mary Julia Klimenko; illustrated by Manuel Neri, painter, and M. Lee Fatherree, photographer.
Berkeley, California: Editions Koch, 2002

A collaboration between poet Mary Julia Klimenko, artist Manuel Neri, and photographer M. Lee Fatherree. The portfolio is comprised of ten poems written in English by Klimenko and translated into French by Armelle Vanazzi Futterman; a unique painting on printed paper by Neri; and 13 silver-gelatin prints from photographs of Mary Julia taken by Fatherree, 11 of which are hand-painted by Neri. Introduced in French by writer and journalist Paul Van Melle and English by Futterman. The text was designed and printed on Rives BFK paper by Peter Koch, using Centaur and Arrighi types cast by M & H Type. The binding structure was designed by Daniel Kelm and executed by Kelm, Kylin Lee, and other mechanics at the Wide Awake Garage. Numbered and proof editions are bound in goatskin leather, with leather onlay, hand-tooling, and stamping in palladium leaf. The book, plus one hand-painted photograph, is housed in a clamshell box covered in Japanese book cloth constructed by Linda Lembke at Green River Bindery. The deluxe edition, like the other editions, is bound in goatskin leather, with leather onlay, hand-tooling, and stamping in palladium leaf. Included with the book is a suite of three silver-gelatin prints, one of which is uniquely hand-painted by Neri. The book and suite are housed in a leather-covered drop-wall box that echoes the palladium design of the book cover. Limited to 25 numbered copies, 10 deluxe copies, 2 printer’s proof copies, and 3 artist’s proof copies.

Book; 60 pp.    17 x 14.5 inches    40 copies.       $22000.00

Numbered edition:  $22000.00

Deluxe edition:  $28000.00

Various authors.
Berkeley, California: Hormone Derange Editions, 2001

Over a period of ten years beginning in 1991 I designed and printed from hand-set type, found-engravings and original artwork, a series of literary broadsides on various papers under the imprint of “Hormone Derange Editions, Last Chance Gulch,” an imprint invented for this series and for the joy of cowboy humour. The authors and artists include maverick poets, barflies, and cowboy surrealists among several well-known names in American literature. This collection was made purely for the fun of it all and friendship with the printer was the driving editorial criterion. The broadsides were printed in editions of 100 and 26 signed copies were reserved for this lettered edition.

The portfolio includes 16 signed broadsides by writers Victor Charlo, Barry Gifford, Greg Keeler, William Kitteredge, Peter Koch, Ed Lahey, Milo Miles, Rick Newby, Paul Piper, Thomas Sanchez, David Thomas, Philip Whalen, John Yao, and an additional broadside featuring a poem by Robert Bringhurst. Original wood engravings by Dirk Lee. The broadsides and a lettered title page are laid in an oblong clamshell box covered in German linen with a spine label printed on Fabriano Ingres. Broadsides may also be purchased individually.

Portfolio; 18 prints,    8.5 x 17 inches    edition of 126.       $inquire

Franco Ferrari Delfino; translated by Diana and Adalberto Viggiano.
Berkeley, California: Peter Koch, Printer, 2000

A poem celebrating Venice and the complaints of its inhabitants written in Venetian dialect with an English translation on facing pages. Franco Ferrari, a life-long inhabitant of Venice, pokes gentile fun at his fellow citizens of the Serenissima. Tall, narrow, pamphlet printed letterpress on Rives paper by Susan Filter under the direction of Peter Koch. Two text illustrations of the Venetian neighborhood osteria, Già Schiavi, printed in blue. The pamphlet is enclosed in an Aragosto red Fabriano Ingres printed wrapper.

Pamphlet; 12 pp.    5.5 x 11.5 inches    50 copies.       $75.00

Peter Rutledge Koch.
Berkeley, California: Editions Koch, 2000

These one word picture poems were first begun in 1991 in an attempt to reformulate the custom of issuing wanted posters. I was searching for a new language form to express what was wanting (wanted) in my own vocabulary of symbols. The lead and wood types, copper electroplated and zinc photo-engravings were collected from such various sources as a newspaper office near Freezout, Montana and a printer’s junkyard in San Francisco.

A portfolio of eight Iris prints generated from the original photo-engravings and handset types of Portfolio One and digitally re-configured to produge these striking and densely pigment saturated prints in a limited edition of 20 copies. The prints, measuring 15 x 19 inches are printed on 500 gr. Somerset Radiant White. The box, fabricated by John De Merritt, is covered with German Iris Cloth and hinged in foil stamped terra cotta leather. Signed.

Portfolio; 8 prints,    16 x 20 inches    edition of 20.       $2500.00

Peter Rutledge Koch.
Berkeley, California: Editions Koch, 2000

These one word picture poems were first begun in 1991 in an attempt to reformulate the custom of issuing wanted posters. I was searching for a new language form to express what was wanting (wanted) in my own vocabulary of symbols. The lead and wood types, copper electroplated and zinc photo-engravings were collected from such various sources as a newspaper office near Freezout, Montana and a printer’s junkyard in San Francisco.

A portfolio of nine letterpress prints in a limited edition of 20 copies, was generated from photoengravings, lead and wood types. The prints, measuring 10 x 13.5 inches are printed on Fabriano Rosapina. The box, fabricated by John De Merritt, is covered with German Iris Cloth and hinged in foil stamped terra cotta leather.

Portfolio; 9 prints,    10 x 13.5 inches    edition of 20.       $1000.00

.
Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Libraries, 1999

Designed by Peter Koch. Typeset in Scala by Richard Seibert. Printed by Publishers Press in Salt Lake City, Utah. Lunar cover and celestial end-sheets printed by Koch. Bound using gray quarter cloth and orange paper over boards. 60 copies bound in full leather.

Book; 382 pp.    8.75 x 11.25 inches    1060 copies.       $inquire

Drew Sparks and Sally Kellman.
Oakland California: The Mills College Center for the Book, 1999

Designed in a large square format and printed letterpress in three colors by Peter Koch, with the assistance of Richard Seibert. Composed in Quadraat and Libra and printed on Mohawk superfine text and Cranes Distaff Linen for inserts. Illustrated with 48 duotone reproductions of nineteenth century photographs and four-color ephemeral pieces printed by Phelps-Schaefer Litho-Graphics Company. Bound in quarter cloth and printed Fabriano Ingres paper over boards by Peggy Gotthold. Enclosed in slipcases constructed by Arnold Martinez. Includes facsimile inserts and appendices.

Book; 144 pp.    10 x 8.5 inches    144 copies.       $275.00

Richard Wagener.
Berkeley, California: Peter Koch, Printer, 1998

This abcdarium and bestiary was commissiond by Peter Koch from the artist Richard Wagener in 1991. It came to completion seven years later in what has been hailed a tour de force of wood engraving by a modern master. Designed and printed on Zerkall paper by Peter Koch and Richard Wagener. The text, twenty-six short fictions written by Wagener that evoke the American West, is composed in Monotype Ehrhardt cast by the Golgonooza Letter Foundry. Accompanying the text are twenty-six wood engravings in black that follow the artist’s zoological alphabet, from the armadillo, Tolypeutes tricinctus, to the meadow jumping mouse, Zapus hudsonius. In addition to the zoological alphabet blocks, there are twelve engravings in red that serve as backgrounds for the initial letters used to indicate a new section. Bound by Peggy Gotthold using quarter leather and printed gray Fabriano Roma paper over boards, with gold lettering on the spine. Housed in a red cloth slipcase plus gray chemise. Signed and numbered by the artist.

Book; 110 pp.    9 x 15 inches    70 copies. O.P.       $inquire

Robert Creeley; illustrated by John Millei.
Berkeley, California: Peter Koch, Printer, 1998

A selection of sixteen poems by Robert Creeley. Text composed in Monotype Gill Sans by the Golgonooza Letter Foundry, Ashuelot, New Hampshire, and printed on Zerkall paper by Peter Koch. Nine linoleum cuts by the Los Angeles painter, John Millei, were proofed, printed, and then canceled at the press. The books are bound in quarter cloth with Fabriano paper sides, labeled and housed in a slipcase. The edition, limited to seventy-five numbered and twenty-five lettered copies, is signed by the author, artist, and printer.

Book; 56 pp.    5.5 x 7.5 inches    100 copies.       $250.00

Lettered edition:  $500.00

Numbered edition:  $250.00

Pablo Neruda; translated by Stephen Kessler; illustrated by Joseph Goldyne.
Berkeley, California: Peter Koch, Printer, 1998

Spanish with English translation by Stephen Kessler on facing pages. Six aquatints that capture the spirit of typography printed on Zerkall-Frankfurt paper by Kay Bradner. Text composed in Van Dijck by M & H Type and printed on Zerkall-Nideggen paper by Peter Koch. Printed Hahnemühle Bugra cover with black quarter leather bound by Peggy Gotthold.

Book; 56 pp.    4.75 x 9.25 inches    120 copies. O.P.       $inquire

Elers Koch; edited by Peter Koch.
Missoula, Montana: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1998

A memoir in the form of fireside yarns by Elers Koch covering the more colorful aspects of his career in the United States Forest Service from its founding until his retirement 40 years later. Introduced by his son Peter Koch, a prominent American scientist and wood machining engineer. Designed by his grandson, Peter Rutledge Koch. Maps drawn by Mark Livingston. Cover photograph by Stanley Heiberg Koch. Foreward by Jack Ward Thomas, former head of the United States Forest Service. Includes appendix, bibliography, and index. Hardcover.

Book; 206 pp.    6.5 x 10 inches    2000 copies.       $75.00

William Saroyan; illustrated by Joseph Goldyne.
Berkeley, California: Bluewater Books, 1996

Designed by Peter Koch in collaboration with Joseph Goldyne and printed letterpress on handmade Moravia paper from the Velke Losny Mill. The text, a short story by Saroyan that first appeared in The Yale Review, was composed at the press in Poliphilus and Blado, with Delphian, Libra, and Trajan for display. Paired with the text are ten etchings by Golydne, which were proofed and editioned by Kay Bradner. The cover is printed on custom handmade paper from the Magnolia Mill. Bound in a hand-sewn paper case and housed in a quarter leather clamshell box constructed by the Taurus Bindery. Leather spine features gold lettering and hand-tooling of a repeated pear designed by the artist. The edition, which originally numbered fifty copies, was reduced down to forty copies in the final stages due to foxing. Each plate is signed by the artist.

Four copies are currently available.

Book; 56 pp.    22.5 x 22.5 inches    40 copies.       $12000.00

Peter Rutledge Koch.
Berkeley, California: Peter Koch, Printer, 1994

A hyper-modernist edition of the concrete poem wordswords is "Koch's final disarticulation" and ironicallly symbolizes the devaluation and loss of faith in the Word. Ur-Text is an extreme example of a metaphor and an icon of the "book as object." Text composed in Monotype Reproducing Bold type and printed on Mohawk Superfine paper. Hand-bound by Daniel Kelm in various metals. Covers are acid-etched zinc lined with doublures of oxidized brass. Primary sewing is braided dacron thread holding each signature to an external brass spine rod covered by aluminum tube segments, leaving space for a weaving of braided silk thread which connects the covers and signatures. Housed in a black and red Japanese-cloth-covered portfolio with magnetic fore-edge flap. Page edges tinted black. Special copper-bound edition.

Book; 92 pp.    10.5 x 16 inches    26 copies.       $7500.00

Peter Rutledge Koch.
Berkeley, California: Peter Koch, Printer, 1994

Ur-text, the concrete poem “wordswords,” is an icon in the form of a sacred medieval manuscript book translated into a typographic form and printed by Peter Koch. The text is composed in Monotype Goudy Text and printed on Serpa hand-made paper watermarked with the press logo. The pages are hand-sewn onto alum-tawed goatskin thongs and covered in calfskin vellum, with twisted calfskin and Tibetan bone bead clasps. Various binders have contributed to the design and execution of the vellum treatment.

Book; 248 pp.    4.25 x 6.5 inches    26 copies.       $2500.00

Thomas McEvilley.
Berkeley, California: Peter Koch, Printer, 1994

This "text transmission object" is a collaborative sculpture designed as a "forgery" of a hypothetical object discovered by archeologists in the dump of ancient Corinth. Mixed media, ceramic and lead multiple. Designed by Peter Koch and hand-lettered by Christopher Stinehour. Printed letterpress from zinc engravings onto soft lead plates by Koch. Housed loose in a glazed ceramic box created by the sculptor Stephen Braun, each box unique in color and shape. Contains a selection of twenty-one selected short, philosophical performance pieces by Thomas McEvilley composed from the lore surrounding Diogenes of Sinope. As the plates are loose and unpaginated, they can be read in a random order.

Transmission object; 11 pp.    5 x 7 inches    edition of 50.       $inquire

Thomas McEvilley.
Berkeley, California: Peter Koch, Printer, 1994

A "cheap paperback" edition designed and printed letterpress on chipboard by Peter Koch from the same plates used in the lead edition. Housed loose in a cardboard box with terra cotta and black printing. Includes an essay by the author reprinted from ARTFORUM magazine in orange and black, laid in. An image taken from Raphael’s “School of Athens” [1509-1510] is printed in solarized detail on the essay title page and in half-tone detail on the box top.

Transmission object; 11 pp.    5 x 7 inches    edition of 500.       $50.00

Thomas McEvilley.
Berkeley, California: Peter Koch, Printer, 1994

The "book about the object" issued to accompany and explain the mysteries surrounding the arch-cynic Diogenes and the "forged" archeological discovery of the lead tablets. Designed and printed letterpress from photo-polymer plates by Peter Koch, using Adobe Caslon for text, and Monotype Gill Sans and Deberny & Peignot Bifur for display. Lead tablet illustrations printed in two colors from linoleum blocks and photo-polymer plates. Color reproduction of the ceramic box and plates tipped in. An image taken from Raphael’s “School of Athens” [1509-1510] is printed in solarized detail on the title page and in half-tone detail on the cover. Bound by Arnold Martinez using chipboard and a black cloth spine. Features an introduction by Robert Bringhurst, a lengthy essay by McEvilley entitled “Diogenes of Sinope,” and notes “On lead as a text transmission object” by Koch.

Book; 64 pp.    7 x 8 inches    500 copies.       $75.00

Thom Gunn; illustrated by Theophilus Brown.
Berkeley, California: Peter Koch, Printer, 1993

Unsought Intimacies includes a small collection of very touching poems of love and friendship and a suite of 3 etchings. The entire edition was printed on paper made especially by Robert Serpa. The etchings were printed by Brian Shure at Smalltree Press in San Francisco. The text type, hand-set at the press, is 16 point Monotype Van Dijck roman and italic. The edition is bound in boards covered with Timothy Barrett’s blue-grey paper-case paper by Priscilla Spitler at BookLab, in Austin, Texas and is enclosed in a cloth covered slipcase. Signed by the author, artist and printer.

Book; 40 pp.    8.5 x 12.5 inches    126 copies.       $750.00

William Everson; edited by Peter Koch.
San Francisco, California: The Book Club of California, 1992

Designed and printed by Peter Koch on Mohawk superfine text using Linotype Janson for the text and Monotype Van Dijck and Goudy Thirty for display. Photographic portrait frontispiece of Brother Antoninus (Everson) by Harry Redel. Bound in brick red cloth cover with printed spine by Klaus-Ullrich Roetzscher. A collection of essays written by Everson on the topic of printing. Contains an Equinox Press announcement broadside facsimile tipped onto the back cover with a block print by Mary Fabilli. Introduction by Koch.

While the edition was limited to 400 copies, a number of them were lost in shipping, making it a very sought after Book Club publication.

Book; 115 pp.    4.75 x 7.5 inches    400 copies.       $inquire

Robert Duncan; edited by Robert Bertoff; illustrated by Jess.
San Francisco, California: The Press in Tuscany Alley, 1991

A collaboration between The Poetry Center, the Department of Art at San Francisco State University, and the Press in Tuscany Alley. Designed, printed, and bound by Peter Koch, with the assistance of Janet Bogardus, Gabriel Ella, Dale Going, Ian Hass, Susan Maney, Russell Maret, Jeff Miliken, and Sigrum Torinus, Scott Walker, and Rhonda Winter, students and apprentices at the press. Handset in Eric Gill’s Perpetua for text and Klingspor Shaded Roman for display. Terra cotta wrapper, text, and binding papers handmade for this edition by Robert Serpa, Oakland Paper Foundry. Standard editions numbered 1-90. Deluxe editions lettered A-J and include an original ink drawing by Jess extra-bound into each copy.

Book; 32 pp.    9.75 x 12.25 inches    100 copies.       $350.00

Philip Kuznicki.
Berkeley, California: Peter Koch, Printer, 1991

Twenty-six letters printed on Masa paper by Peter Koch. Each letter began as an original papercut and was photo-engraved on zinc plates for printing. Bound by Kuznicki using black cloth over boards with a cover label printed in red and black, and a visible stab-sewn binding. Red paste papers with alphabet motif also made by Kuznicki. Copies lettered A-Z include one of the original papercut letters in its own portfolio. Remaining copies numbered 27-126. Signed by the artist.

Book; 34 pp.    6 x 6.5 inches    126 copies. O.P.       $inquire

Herakleitos; translated by Guy Davenport.
Berkeley, California: Peter Koch, Printer, 1990

The entire surviving fragments of Herakleitos printed in a bilingual edition, celebrated by Robert Bringhurst in his book, A Short History of the Printed Word. Designed and printed letterpress by Peter Koch with Greek and English texts on facing pages. Greek text hand-set by Mark Livingston in Monotype Gill Sans; Latin fragments and English text composed in Bembo Roman and Fairbanks Italic. Cover paper hand-painted in a rich brown by Shelley Hoyt-Koch and features a printed label. Visible stab-sewn binding based on a third-century A.D. Coptic sewing structure designed and executed by Hoyt-Koch. 100 copies printed on Zerkall-Nideggen paper and 13 copies printed on Serpa handmade paper with a handmade paper wrap-around case. 33 unbound copies were discovered 15 years later and bound in paper over boards by Jane Kim. The first fragment of Herakleitos is composed in Kabel Greek type and printed on the cover in two colors. English translation of the fragments of Herakleitos reprinted with minor variations from Grey Fox Books. Signed by the translator.

Book; 48 pp.    6.25 x 12 inches    33 copies.       $1500.00

Various Authors; edited by Nina Wemyss; illustrated by Margrit Biever.
Oakville, California: Robert Mondavi Winery, 1988

Designed and printed by Peter Koch. Composed in Monotype Bembo by the Mackenzie-Harris Corporation. 1000 copies have been printed on Mohawk superfine text and bound by the Cardoza-James Binding Company using quarter cloth, and Fabriano Ingres over boards. 100 copies have been printed on Arches text, of which 50 have been bound by Shelley Hoyt using a non-adhesive, visible long-stitch binding of handmade paper with a velum spine. First edition contains red end-sheets. Second and third editions marked by different colored end-sheets.

Book; 65 pp.    10.75 x 7.75 inches    1100 copies.       $50.00

Robinson Jeffers; illustrated by Wolf von dem Bussche.
Oakland, California: Peter and the Wolf Editions, 1987

Hailed as a masterwork and one of the great printed works of the late 20th century, Point Lobos was published as a collaboration between the typographer and printer, Peter Rutledge Koch and the photographer, Wolf von dem Bussche. The text is comprised of fifteen poems by Jeffers, chosen for their various reverberations of the spirit and beauty of Point Lobos, and a lengthy introduction by the poet, printer and Jeffers scholar, William Everson. The poems were handset in Albertus and Pegasus types; introduction and colophon set in Monotype Van Dijck. Printed by Peter Koch on Rives BFK White. Title page printed in terra cotta and black. Publisher’s device embossed on the lower right-hand corner of each leaf. Fifteen original photographs by von dem Bussche dramatically mirror the text and document the site of Jeffers’ inspiration; they are archivally printed and individually mounted on Rives BFK White. The pages are housed loose in a special folding case covered in German linen made by Klaus-Ullrich Rötzscher. Custom slipcase handcrafted from three-quarter inch black walnut by Shigoto Ya, Inc. Introduction by William Everson. Signed by both printer and photographer.

Poems reprinted from Timothy Hunt’s critical edition published by the Stanford University Press. Issued on the 100th anniversary year of the birth of Robinson Jeffers.

Though the edition was limited to 125 copies, 53 were destroyed in the Oakland Hills fire of 1991, paring the number of the edition down to seventy-two copies.

Portfolio; 42 prints,    18 x 22 inches    edition of 125. O.P.       $inquire

Michael Poage.
San Francisco, California: Black Stone Press, 1979

Handbook of Ornament is a suite of poems written in a sparse language that verges on the surreal. When issued, the book won several design awards and is a delight to hold and to read. Designed, handset in Romulus types imported from the Netherlands just for this edition, and printed letterpress by Peter Koch on Mohawk Superfine paper. Includes geometric typographic designs arranged by Koch and printed in yellow. 474 copies Smythe-sewn into ivory paper covers with an embossed typographic design. 26 copies hand-bound by Shelley Hoyt-Koch in yellow quarter cloth and ivory Fabriano Roma paper over boards with embossed design and printed spine label. Numbered and signed by the author.

Book; 54 pp.    4.75 x 9 inches    500 copies.       $100.00

Numbered edition 1-26 with hand-binding:  o.p.

Regular numbered edition:  $100.00

Opal L. Nations; illustrated by Peter Koch.
Missoula, Montana: Black Stone Press, 1978

Opal Nations has written a very sarcastic short piece of alchemical prose and invited the artist to illustrate it sight unseen and unread. The result is surreal chance formed in the somnambulist tradition.... a perfect match. Designed, handset in Linotype and foundry Garamond, and printed letterpress by Peter Koch on Curtis Utopian paper. Includes six full-page surreal anatomical collage illustrations created by Peter Koch and printed in dark terra cotta. 474 copies sewn into blue Strathmore wrappers printed in dark blue and black over black boards. 26 copies hand-bound by Shelley Hoyt-Koch in original marbled paper over boards with a printed spine label.

Book; 40 pp.    4.25 x 6.5 inches    500 copies.       $75.00

Lettered edition A-Z with hand-binding:  o.p.

Regular numbered edition:  $75.00

Adam Conford; illustrated by Ludwig Zeller.
Missoula, Montana: Black Stone Press, 1978

A suite of poems written in the finest tradition of rebellion and the surreal. Adam Cornford's first book of poems. Designed by Peter Koch and Shelley Hoyt-Koch and handset in Gill Sans types specially imported for this edition from England. Printed letterpress by Koch on Mohawk Superfine paper. Includes four full-page and title-page collage illustrations by the artist-in-exile Ludwig Zeller. 500 copies bound into red paper covers printed with an anatomical collage illustration. 50 copies hand-bound by Hoyt-Koch in black cloth over boards with printed cover and spine labels. Signed by the author.

Book; 60 pp.    7.5 x 9.5 inches    550 copies.       $75.00

Numbered edition 1-50 with hand-binding:  o.p.

Regular numbered edition:  $75.00

Various Authors; edited by Peter Koch.
Missoula, Montana: Black Stone Press, 1977

A tri-quarterly publication featuring cowboy surrealists, maverick poets, writers, and artists. The publication was published and edited by Peter Koch and ran for six issues, spanning from 1974 to 1977. Shelley Hoyt-Koch collaborated on graphics and design for the last three issues.

Number Six, Fall 1977
Offset Lithography. Features poems and prose by a number of writers, including Sky Garner, Ludwig Zeller, Adam Cornford, and Michael Poage. Closing essay by Peter Koch symmetrically entitled “Deadstart.” Text accompanied by a variety of graphics, including collages by Philip Kuznicki. Also includes two folding collage illustrations on Warrens Old Style paper by Ludwig Zeller and Susana Wald. Letterpress blue cover designed and printed in red and black by Shelley Hoyt-Koch.

Complete list of contributors: Sky Garner, Ken Waino, David Thomas, George Hitchcock, Michael Fiedler, Joyce Mansour, Peter Koch, Jerry Estrin, Edwin Charles Dobb, George Evans, Abdal Wahhab al-Bayati, Ira Cohen, Ludwig Zeller (ill., fold-outs), Paul Brown, Carolann Russell Nord, Derek Pell, Fernando Alegria, Adam Cornford, Christine Zawadiwsky, Larry R. Smith, Richard Kostelanetz, Rene Daumal, John Digby, Gabriel Weisz, Shoshana Wechsler, William Gammil, Janine Pommy Vega, Michael Poage, Mark Lecard, Milo Miles, Paul Kuznicki (ill.), Susana Wald (ill., fold-out 2), Shelley Hoyt-Koch (cover)

Pamphlet; 96 pp.    6 x 9 inches    200 copies. O.P.       $inquire

Various Authors; edited by Peter Koch.
Missoula, Montana: Black Stone Press, 1977

A tri-quarterly publication featuring cowboy surrealists, maverick poets, writers, and artists. The publication was published and edited by Peter Koch and ran for six issues, spanning from 1974 to 1977. Shelley Hoyt-Koch collaborated on graphics and design for the last three issues.

Number Five, Winter 1977
Offset lithography. Features poems and prose by Douglas Blazek, Patricia Geary, Daniel Lusk, Jane Bailey, Nancy Steele, and many others. Text accompanied by a variety of graphics, including paper-cuts by John Digby. Cover features an illustration by Bill Yenne. Co-edited by Jane Bailey.

Complete list of contributors: Derek Pell (ill.), Douglas Blazek, Tom Rea, Michael Poage, James Penzi, Craig Churry, Daniel Lusk, Whitson (ill.), Tom Montag, Opal L. Nations, John Digby (paper cuts), T. E. Jay, Patricia Geary, William Pillin, Patrick Todd, Bill Mayer, Jim Heynen, Dirk Lee (ill.), Kathleen McCullen, John Bennett, David Thomas, Frank Dugan (ill.), David Chevin, W. M. Ransom, K. E. Roney, Paul S. Ziegler, Charles Webb, Carol Jane Bangs, David Long, Ken Gerner, Jane Bailey, William Pitt Root, Mark Vinz, Cheryl Van Dyke, Kim Robert Stafford, Robert Long, Wilbur Wood, Marjorie Hawksworth, Sam Hamill, Bruce Lee (ill.), Nancy Steele, Eliott Brody, James Majorian, Terry M. Brown, Jane Miller, Mahlon Hubenthal, Bill Yenne (cover)

Pamphlet; 76 pp.    5.5 x 8.5 inches    200 copies. O.P.       $inquire

Various Authors; edited by Peter Koch.
Missoula, Montana: Black Stone Press, 1976

A tri-quarterly publication featuring cowboy surrealists, maverick poets, writers, and artists. The publication was published and edited by Peter Koch and ran for six issues, spanning from 1974 to 1977. Shelley Hoyt-Koch collaborated on graphics and design for the last three issues.

Number Four, Spring 1976
Offset lithography. Features poems and prose from a number of writers, including Gabriel Weisz Carrington, John Digby, Janine Pommy Vega, Gary Young, Henri Michaux, and many others. Text accompanied by graphics by Frank Dugan, Bruce Lee, Dirk Lee, and Pablo Weisz. Letterpress red cover features an illustration by Russell Smith.

Complete list of contributors: Michael Poage, Peter Koch, Gabriel Weisz Carrington, Steve Attkinson, John Digby, William Harrold, B. C. Leale, Janine Pommy Vega, Ed Dobb, Harold Norse, Paul Brown, Paul Grillo, Andrei Codrescu, Craig Churry, Gary Young, Albert Stainton, Louis Hammer, Joyce Mansour, Hillary Russell Jr., Doren Robbins, Clifford Saunders, Cecil Helman, Charles Plymell, David Thomas, Ira Cohen, Milo Miles, Carla Hoffman, Henri Michaux, Nanos Valaoritis, Frank Dugan (ill.), Dirk Lee (ill.), Bruce Lee (ill.), Pablo Weisz (ill.), Russell Smith (cover)

Pamphlet; 98 pp.    5.5 x 8.5 inches    200 copies. O.P.       $inquire

Various Authors; edited by Peter Koch.
Missoula, Montana: Black Stone Press, 1975

A tri-quarterly publication featuring cowboy surrealists, maverick poets, writers, and artists. The publication was published and edited by Peter Koch and ran for six issues, spanning from 1974 to 1977. Shelley Hoyt-Koch collaborated on graphics and design for the last three issues.

Number Three, Fall 1975
Offset lithography. Features poems by Adam Cornford, Michael Poage, Albert Goldbarth, Michele Birch, and many others. Text accompanied by graphics by Bruce Lee, Dirk Lee, Sir Quaxalot, and Peter Whitson. Frontispiece by Lee. Letterpress yellow cover printed in red and black and features an illustration by Dana Johnson. Co-edited by Jane Bailey.

Complete list of contributors: Albert Goldbarth, Michele Birch, Tess Gallagher, Elizabeth Libbey, Michael Poage, Adam Cornford, Judson Crews, Peter Koch, Siv Cederling Fox, Jane Bailey, Christine Zawadiwsky, Patricia Geary, Leslie Ullman, Stephen Lewandowski, Carolann Russell Nord, Edward Harkness, David Thomas, David Dayton, Patrick Todd, Merritt Clifton, J. Denison, Charles Fishman, Thomas Johnson, Tom Eagle, Luci Huhn, Lynn Lifshin, Tony Petrosky, Sandra Schor, Gary Young, Douglas Blazek, Quinton Duval, Heather Tosteson Reich, Robert Bly, Andrew Grossbart, Milo Miles, Bruce Lee (ill., frontispiece), Dirk Lee (ill.), Sir Quaxalot (ill.), Peter Whitson (ill.), Dana Johnson (cover)

Pamphlet; 84 pp.    5.5 x 8.5 inches    200 copies. O.P.       $inquire

Various Authors; edited by Peter Koch.
Missoula, Montana: Black Stone Press, 1975

A tri-quarterly publication featuring cowboy surrealists, maverick poets, writers, and artists. The publication was published and edited by Peter Koch and ran for six issues, spanning from 1974 to 1977. Shelley Hoyt-Koch collaborated on graphics and design for the last three issues.

Number Two, Spring 1975
Offset lithography. Features poems, prose, and psalms from a number of writers, including Robert Bly, Keith Abbott, James Magorian, Milo Miles, and Steven Flick. Text accompanied by graphics by Bruce Lee, Dana Johnson, and Sir Quaxalot. Cover illustration by Lee.

Complete list of contributors: Robert Bly, Adam Cornford, Anselm Parlatore, Jane Bailey, Keith Abbott, Tim Kyle, G. Sharits, Steven Flick, Eileen Shukofsky, Howard Hart, David Long, Opal L. Nations, Stuart Peterfreund, Wilbur Wood, Barbara Holland, James Magorian, Will Hochman, Charles Plymell, David Thomas, Sheryl McKinsey, Milo Miles, Ed Meek, Merritt Clifton, Jim Brook, Claud Peleiu, Ann Weisman, Bruce Kennison, Bob Bingham, Patrick Todd, Ed Dobb, Bruce Lee (cover, ill.), Dana Johnson (ill.), Sir Quaxalot (ill.)

Pamphlet; 89 pp.    5.5 x 8.5 inches    200 copies. O.P.       $inquire

Various Authors; edited by Peter Koch.
Missoula, Montana: Black Stone Press, 1974

A tri-quarterly publication featuring cowboy surrealists, maverick poets, writers, and artists. The publication was published and edited by Peter Koch and ran for six issues, spanning from 1974 to 1977. Shelley Hoyt-Koch collaborated on graphics and design for the last three issues.

Number One, Fall 1974
Offset lithography. Features poems and prose by Peter Koch, Adam Cornford, Jane Bailey, Robert Bly, Will Hochman, and many others. Opening essay by Koch entitled “Deadstart.” Text accompanied by illustrations and collages from artists such as Bruce Lee, Marie Wilson, Sir Quaxalot, and Nanos Valaoritis. Centerfold illustration by Jay Rummel. Cover and logo by Bill Yenne.

Complete list of contributors: Peter Koch, Adam Cornford, Louis Hammer, Merritt Clifton, Bruce Lee (ill.), Jane Bailey, Robert Bly, Jacquelyn McElroy, Steven Christenson, Will Hochman, Sir Quaxalot (ill.), Opal L. Nations, J. Izzo Jr., Carolann Russell Nord, Bob Behr, G. Karl Marcus, Jay Rummel (centerfold), Soshana Wechsler, Marie Wilson (ill.), Nanos Valaoritis (ill.), Ira Cohen, Dana Young, Charles Henri Ford, Harold Norse, Cynthia White, Milo Miles, Steven Flick, Bill Yenne (cover)

Pamphlet; 117 pp.    5.5 x 8.5 inches    200 copies. O.P.       $inquire