Press on Scroll Road ~ Ohio
( Robert Baris)

Bob Baris: "Down a winding gravel lane, on a small hillside farm in Appalachia, lies the Press on Scroll Road. We raise sheep here, keep a large market garden, and hope to make a book a year. ...

"Our books, I suppose, reflect our interests in good writing, intelligent authors, books, farming. But categories are always difficult. Perhaps their best description and the one we prefer is eclectic. ...

"We try to live and farm here in ways that are at once simple, quiet and elegant. Our books, we hope, also reflect these qualities."

Mad Farmer Poems
By Wendell Berry
Carrollton, Ohio: Press on Scroll Road, 2008. Edition of 60.

8.25 x 13.25"; 60 pages. Text printed from handset type. Title page lettering by Jerry Kelly. Engravings by Abigail Rorer. Printed on handmade Twinrocker paper with an iron handpress. Bound in marbled paper-covered board with leather spine by Priscilla Spitler. Marbled papers by Pamela Smith.

Press on Scroll Road: "With contents chosen by Mr Berry, this book forms the definitive collection of his Mad Farmer family of poems. It includes a Foreword by Ed McClanahan, an Introduction by James Baker Hall, an Afterword by William Kloefkorn."

Wendell Berry, author's note: "The joke of the Mad Farmer Poems is that in a society gone insane with industrial greed and insecurity, a man exuberantly sane will appear to be 'mad'. ...

"These poems ... embody a vision of sanity breaking forth into a world driven crazy by dreams of wealth, power, and ease and so by fear. One of our most astute critics has written that 'the Mad Farmer, according to the highest precedents, is a lover of women and the other blessed creatures, and of the world's abounding and bringing forth.'"
$400

Twenty-Four Old Regulars
By Maurice Manning
Carrollton, Ohio: Press on Scroll Road, 2008. Edition of 48.

6 x 9"; 44 pages. Letterpress printed from handset DeRoos types on Rives paper. Wood engravings by Gaylord Schanilec. Bound in cloth covered boards by Campbell-Logan. Paper title label on spine.

Twenty-four 8-line poems in a mountain dialect:

They's gone, my grannies, ever one
a mountain woman pore as God
and gone up yonder with him whar
they aint nobody pity pore.
but never oncet bent down nor broke.
I'd give my eye to lay my face
against a powdered cheek oncet more.

Press on Scroll Road: "Maurice Manning's first book of poems, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions, was selected in 2000 as the year's winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition and was published in 2001. This was followed by A Companion for Owls, published in 2004, and Bucolics in 2007. ... When not teaching at Indiana University and Warren Wilson College, you'll find the author on his farm near Springfield, Kentucky."
$125

Airs and Angels
By Peter Fallon
Foreword by Wendell Berry
Illustrated by Carol J. Blinn
Carrollton, Ohio: Press on Scroll Road, 2007. Edition of 60.

7.5 x 12.5"; 52 pages. Printed from handset Cloister Lightface type on Zerkall paper with an iron handpress. Handcolored illustrations. Bound by Priscilla Spitler in quarter-cloth, the boards covered with paper marbled by Pamela Smith.

Wendell Berry, foreword: "In these poems Peter Fallon writes with an acute particularity of eye and ear, recording ordinary events made extraordinary by the amplitude of his care and the precision of his notice. The poems of the 1998 volume are poems of observation and experience, sometimes emotionally intense, but presented as reports, declarative and forthright. They are written in a strong and flexible prose syntax, usually in stanzas of a set number of unmetered lines, often rhyming strictly at, say, lines two and four or two and five. The rhymes, and the poet's sustained attentiveness to sound make a music that seems to suggest itself into the air around the poems and around us as we read. The technique is insistent but not intrusive; it involves a kind of propriety, a kind of modesty, by which the subject is granted a precedence over the poet."
$250 (Last Copy)

In Time and Place
By Hayden Carruth, John Berger, and W S Merwin
Carrollton, Ohio: Press on Scroll Road, 2006. Edition of 54.

8 x 12"; 70 pages. Letterpress printed on an Ostrander-Seymour iron handpress. Typeface: handset Cloister Lightface. Printed on Twinrocker paper. Bound in cloth-covered boards by Priscilla Spitler. Paper title label on spine.

A collection of two poems ("Marshall Washer" by Hayden Carruth and "Green Fields" by W S Merwin) and a short story ('The Value of Money' by John Berger) with wood engravings by Wesley Bates.
$345

Three Essays
By David Kline
Carrollton, Ohio: Press on Scroll Road, 2006. Edition of 60.

6.5 x 10.5"; 44 pages. Printed from handset Cloister Lightface type on Twinrocker papers with an Ostrander-Seymour iron handpress. Two engravings by Abigail Rorer. Bound in cloth-covered boards by Priscilla Spitler.

Three essays – "Community," "Sharing Work with Children," and "The Value of Love" – reprinted here from Scratching the Woodchuck: "Nature on an Amish Farm by David Kline (University of Georgia Press)."

Robert Baris: "David Kline is an old order Amish farmer in Ohio. He has had two books of essays published: Great Possessions and Scratching the Woodchuck."
$225

SOME RULES OF THE GAME
Essays on Garden Design
By Sir Francis Bacon, Henry Mitchell, and Roger Swain
Carrollton, Ohio: Press on Scroll Road, 2004. Edition of 54.

8 x 11"; 58 pages. Printed from handset Cloister Lightface type in two colors. Printed on dampened Twinrocker handmade paper with an iron handpress. Engraving by Abigail Rorer. Bound by Priscilla Spitler at Hands on Bookbinding.

SOME RULES OF THE GAME includes “Of Gardens” by Sir Francis Bacon, “Up and Down the Garden Path – Or, Designs for Gardening” by Henry Mitchell, and the first printing of “A Light Touch” by Roger Swain.

Scott Baris: "This is the first printing of Roger Swain's essay. Roger Swain is a long time gardener on Victory Gardener, WGBH's television show."
$240