The Petrarch Press

A Recent Commission

LAST YEAR, THE PRESS RECEIVED a commission to produce a small letterpress edition of poetry: a personal volume of 50 sonnets for the author’s own distribution. The author had heard of the Press from a colleague who had seen our fine-press publications, and preferred the handmade quality of our letterpress editions over a plain paperback, print-on-demand booklet.

The format and margins of the book were designed to gracefully frame the author’s poems on the page, instead of forcing them into a page of standardized dimensions. A deckle-edge all-cotton mouldmade paper was chosen, and one hundred copies of each page were printed sheet-by-sheet on our foot-powered Chandler & Price platen press. The sheets were folded, gathered into signatures, and carefully sewn by hand. Then the text block was cased in a luminous blue cloth binding with the title impressed on the cover in gold. What better way to adorn and preserve the fruits of literary labors.

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