Heavenly Monkey ~ Canada
(Rollin Milroy)

El Autobus Azul
By Rollin Milroy
Vancouver, British Columbia: Heavenly Monkey Press 2008. Edition of 50.

2.25 x 3"; 36 pages. Casebound miniature.

Heavenly Monkey Press: "Anniversary Standard Edition follows the text's original setting, reproduced here in digital Centaur and printed from polymer plates by David Clifford at Blace Stone Press. Each copy contains four tipped in samples from the original edition. The book has been sewn and cased at Heavenly Monkey. Handmade papers from Costa Rica."

Rollin Milroy: "This book was my first letterpress book. It was issued almost one year after our vacation in Costa Rica. During that year I'd taken a few months off to learn the basics of setting and printing at Barbarian Press, and got myself set up with a small Kelsey press and some type. El Autobus Azul was appropriate in size and scope for my skills and equipment. For a first effort, and one printed on a tabletop press (which was unfairly maligned in the colophon), I have always been pleased with the presswork. In the decade since the book's publication I printed one more book on the Kelsey, then graduated to a Washington handpress and produced another two dozen titles. Cleaning up the studio last fall, to make room for a second handpress, I discovered the leftover pieces of Lil Mena's paper in a folder. The original edition of El Autobus Azul was just 15 copies, of which five were hors commerce. All ten copies sold in one week, and it has remained one of the most requested of my books. This, and the realization that I'd been moving leftover samples around the studio for almost a decade, gave me the idea to revisit the autobus. The original edition had seven folio samples sewn in — it was very thick, and the heavy papers didn't turn well. The book was cased in kangaroo hyde with paper fore edges. This edition offers fewer and smaller samples but I think it is more aesthetically satisfying overall. It also includes the linocut frontis I created for the original but did not end up using."

$125 Standard (Three copies remaining)
Deluxe, out of print