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ANNOUNCING

Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

We are pleased to announce our latest fine-press book: Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Our text, that of the 1859 First Edition, is supplemented with six additional quatrains FitzGerald added to his later editions. ❖ The two-color printing, on our Albion handpress, on both handmade paper and parchment, is now complete.

News & Events

Finding the Text of the Rubáiyát

In considering our next fine press publication, we looked at suggestions to print Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyát. At first, we were not sure the world needed yet another Rubáiyát on its bookshelves, as hundreds of editions have been produced since they were first printed anonymously…

Creating New Types for Shake-speare’s Sonnets

When we began to visualize our new edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, just a few ideas stood out. We wanted an intimate volume where each sonnet would be presented on its own page and where each verse would stand on one line, regardless of its length. Visually, we wanted our edition to resonate with…

Editing Shake-speare’s Sonnets

Shakespearean English can be problematic for modern readers. Standardisation of the language did not begin in earnest until the late 18th century. Some words had various spellings, all of which were considered normal at the time. Some words had meanings that have changed over the centuries…

Our Typecasting Foundry

In October 2010 the Press acquired its own Monotype Thompson typecasting machine, along with dozens of series of matrices, the small recessed molds for the three-dimensional letterforms that are the essence of letterpress printing.

Publications

Shake-speare’s Sonnets

The Petrarch Press edition of Shake-speare’s Sonnets has been the most significant project in our history — both for the end result and for the new skills and capabilities we developed along the way. The decision to print the original text was itself a journey of discovery, in which we abandoned our initial plan…

Francis of Assisi: Canticle of the Creatures

The Petrarch Press’s Canticle of the Creatures presents a fresh transcription of Francis of Assisi’s original Umbrian text together with a new English translation by John Venerella. The Canticle, sometimes popularly called Canticle of the Sun, is a short song begun in Francis’s early years and completed near the time of his death.

The Gospel According to Philip

The Gospel According to Philip, like the more well-known Gospel According to Thomas, forms part of the extensive Nag Hammadi Library, a group of papyrus codices discovered in 1945 outside the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi, near Abydos and Luxor. Written in Coptic and dating from the first half of the fourth century…

Thoughts from the Letters of Petrarch

Our first publication, Thoughts from the Letters of Petrarch, commemorates the fine-press tradition of Peter Bishop’s original Petrarch Press. Francesco Petrarca is best known as one of the first writers to experiment with the Italian vernacular for poetic expression. For his letters, however, he relied on the lingua franca of Latin…