Peter Koch, Printers ~ California

Peter Koch: "In pursuit of my art, I am deeply committed to the crafts of typography, papermaking, printing, bookbinding and the design of books and I support these crafts as intensely as I can. A duality of commitment defines my art. I firmly stand on the side of the argument that there is no art without craft. Art without craft denies the difficult beauty of a thing well made, the elegant simplicity of an idea. Through craft and the precision of design, I seek to bring the rich civilization of the printed book with me to the forge of meaning."

Edition Koch imprints
Collaborations with Richard Wagener

Watermark
By Joseph Brodsky
Photographs by Robert Morgan
Venice: Peter Koch Printer, 2006. Edition of 50.

11 x 16.5 "; 80 pages. Printed on Twinrocker Da Vinci handmade, with watermark designed by Christopher Stinehour and Susan Filter. Photographs by Robert Morgan digitally re-configured by Donald Farnsworth and printed at his Magnolia Editions in Oakland, California, from photogravure plates made by Unai San Martin. Text printed in Monotype Dante types cast in lead at the Olivieri Typefoundry in Milano. Bound in pigmented papers made by hand at Cave Papers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Of the edition of 50: 1 to 30 bound in Venetian-red hand made papers and housed in a hand painted wooden enclosure; 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; 15 copies hors commerce.

Peter Koch, Printers: "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."

Peter Koch, "Printing in the Shadow of Aldus," Parenthesis: "This adventure began when my wife, Susan Filter, began pressing me to consider printing Watermark, a series of essays in memoir form, by the poet and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky. Watermark is a series of lyrical meditations woven from the fabric of late twentieth-century Venice, and a meditation on time and beauty and love - a looking glass romance of a Russian poet-in-exile with a city that beguiled his eye.

"Venice - where it is said the mirror was perfected - is a city in which one contemplates beauty by merely opening one's eyes. . . .

"Susan met Joseph in Venice in the mid-1980s while he was writing Watermark and she was studying paper conservation. She and Brodsky became great friends and remained so until his death in 1996. Susan and I met in 2001, and by 2005, she was determined to see a work from his hand fall under the imprint I had established to publish works of art and literature in hand-made editions.

"Early on in our planning we invited Susan's friend Robert Morgan, a painter and longtime friend of Brodsky's, to illustrate the work with his photographs. (Brodsky dedicated Watermark to Morgan in 1986). The real challenge that confronted Susan was how to persuade me to print it in Venice. Admittedly, I was pre-disposed to the idea. I had already dedicated a considerable portion of my life to re-inventing the renaissance ideal of the scholar-artist-printer in a post-modern context. ..."
$6,000

Real Lead
By Peter Koch, Printers
Berkeley, California: Peter Koch Printers / Hormone Derange Editions, 2002. Edition of 125.

5 x 10.25"; 128 pages. Hand-bound by Victoria Heifner in quarter-cloth over Davey board with hand woven headbands and an extra spine label tipped in. Cover board features a rodeo engraving printed in terra cotta, and text printed in green and marigold.

Peter Koch, Printers: "A humorous typographic specimen book designed and printed by Hannah Berman, Karen Eng, Max Koch, Marina Luz, and Chadwick Bidwell, under the direction of Peter Koch. A sampling of rare and antique metal and wood types as well as a selection of electrotypes and wood engravings belonging to Peter Koch Printers designed as if issued from a frontier print shop."

Introduction: "The primary sources of our collection are geographically distant but similar in nature. The most distant – newspaper and job shops in or near the Montana towns of Dillon, Freezeout, Fort Enton, Hamilton, and Phillipsburg - were rapidly disappearing in the 1970's. This selection represents the very end of letterpress job shops in the state. Small newspaper and printing shops in Chinatown and North Beach dominate our San Francisco collection; and twenty-five years of visits to the various garages and warehouse of James Heaghy have inevitably proven fruitful."
$250

California in Relief
Thirty Wood Engravings
By Richard Wagener
San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 2009. Edition of 300.

7.75 x 12.5"; 88 pages. Letterpress printed by Peter Koch. Wood engravings printed by Richard Wagener. Typeface, DTL Elzevir, designed by Gerard Daniels. Printed on Zerkall Buttenpapier. Paper covered boards with cloth spine. Paper title label on spine. Laid in paper wrapper with engraving on front . Slipcased.

Peter Koch, Printer: "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."
$750 (standard edition Proof copy)

The Fragments of Parmenides
& an English translation by Robert Bringhurst
Wood engravings by RichardWagener
Berkeley, California: Editions Koch, 2004. Edition of 146.

10 x 17"; 64 pages. Text letterpress printed on Zerkall paper by Peter Koch Printers. Wood engravings printed by the artist. Main text set by hand in Parmenides Greek. Translation set in Monotype Dante at the Golgoonoza Letter Foundry. Afterword set in special digital Dante, New Hellenic Greek, and Lazurski Cyrillic, and printed from polymer plates. Greek type on the cover is Diogenes. Bound by Peggy Gotthold at Foolscap Press in quarter leather and Hahnemühle Bugra paper. Enclosed in a case covered in gold Japanese silk. Signed by Koch, Wagener, and Bringhurst.

Peter Koch, Printers: "The text is comprised of all twenty Greek fragments, varying in length from only a 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."

Peter Koch, Carving the Elements: A Companion to the Fragments of Parmenides: "Winter in Montana is a time for reflection and also for deep reading. I read Plato's dialogue Parmenides while a student of Henry Bugbee in the University of Montana's Department of Philosophy. I was attracted to that most obscure of the dialogues because it was a difficult and enigmatic text and I was determined to break my head. But the Parmenides of Plato and the Parmenides of Professor Henry Bugbee were two entirely different studies. Plato portrayed him as a powerful but ultimately confusing and contradictory dialectician, the perfect foil for the Socratic interrogative and clarifying methods he preferred. Bugbee presented him (through Kirk & Raven's edition of the fragments) as one of the two most original thinkers in the Greek tradition, standing in the river of thought at the fork where one branch leads to the Many and the other leads to the One. Parmenides fished at the source of the One, Herakleitos at the source of the Many. Thinking at the source, I concluded, was simple and clear and worth the trek upstream.

"Parmenides stands at a stillpoint in the chaos of thinking, at the source of Being. The river of thought runs past him but he cuts the current with the blade of his cunning, Parmenides reveals little but withstands everything."
$2,000

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Zebra Noise
with a flatted 7th
By Richard Wagener
Berkeley, California: Peter Koch Printer, 1998. Edition of 70.

9 x 15" : 110 pages. Designed and printed on Zerkall paper by Peter Koch and Richard Wagener. Text composed in Monotype Ehrhardt cast by the Golgonooza Letter Foundry. 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.

Peter Koch, Printer: "This abecedarium and bestiary was commissioned 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. ... The text, twenty-six short fictions written by Wagener that evoke the American West, ... 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."
$3,000

The Helen Fragments:
from books three & six of Homer's Iliad
Translated by Richard Seibert
Drawings by Winifred McNeill
Berkeley: Editions Koch, 2003. Edition of 150.

5.5 x 11"; 120 pages. Text composed in Monotype Quadraat. Epigraph composed in Wilson Greek. Printed from photo-polymer plates on Zerkall Bütten-Karten paper by Max Koch at the Koch Studio. Cover paper 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.

Peter Koch, Printers: "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 plate."

Winifred McNeill, web site: "The protagonists, drawn by [me] in the nude save for helmets and one surprising pair of high heels, act out their destiny on a narrow stage framed above and below by classical friezes. The quivering stroke of the pen sustains the tension of battle, the tempest of passion."
$450

• The Fragments of Parmenides
• All That Jazz
• Song of Solomon