The World's Greatest Incredibly Long Telephone Conversation
by Nathan Fleming

Mr Koppa believes that he first showed signs of being a letterpress artist in junior high when he discovered how to draw three-dimensional letters on his folders, notebooks, and book covers. “It was really cool,” he remembers, “…it made me feel pretty good.” Additionally, in high school, Koppa discovered some metal type in a ceramics class. It fascinated him, but he never asked where it came from or what its original purpose was. When he wasn’t in school, Koppa worked at his family’s grocery store, distributing hand-lettered handbills around the neighborhood. He sees this early exposure to graphic design and print rhetoric as being influential, if marginally, on his later work.

As an art major at UW-Madison, Koppa enrolled in a certain Introduction to Typography class because because he was still intrigued by those heavy metal letters. It was there that he met and studied under a particularly influential professor. Koppa told me, “There was more than one Intro to Type class offered at the same time…two different instructors—one with Pagemaker the other with metal type and old printing presses…I took the one that was in the room with all those type drawers I wanted to get my hands on. I learned later that there were people…mostly grad students…in the class that were there specifically to study under this big shot professor of art. Who knew?” Koppa adds, “He grabbed me by the balls.”

After graduating (with minimal computer graphic design experience), Koppa returned home to Milwaukee and took a job as a Compugraphic typesetter. Six months later, he quit, and went back to help his father and his brother with the six-aisle grocery store. “My brother and I always thought it was kinda dorky to be grocers—in a funny way. I mean, wouldn’t it be cooler to work at the record store? So we pushed the envelope a bit. We made it into a wacky place, people liked it, and we eventually became as cool as the guys who worked at the record store.” “My dad used to draw up handbills that we’d deliver door-to-door, on foot, when I was in junior high. And I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but I must have expressed an interest in drawing them for him, and he let me.” When he returned to the store after graduating from college, one of the first things he did was revive the tradition. In an attempt to revitalize the store and himself, he began drawing The Sphere, a “goofy handbill advertisement,” with a kitschy-hip sensibility. Allowed to say whatever he wanted, as long as it as long as it “didn’t hurt anyone,” this exaggerated weekly shopper, advertising Amazing Peanuts and Orange Carrots—The Sphere—soon developed a hardcore cult following, not unlike The Beatles or Elvis Presley, among the burgeoning Milwaukee Gen-X scene. Gradually, The Sphere expanded its page length, as it became more of an art rag and less of an advertiser, and as it expanded it got more expensive to produce. After a year of supporting The Sphere through selling, drawing, and printing ads for neighborhood businesses, and selling the zine out of self-serve potato chip boxes for a “suggested 25 cents,” he dropped all advertisers (except the grocery store), and tried to sell The Sphere as if it was a comic book, for $2.50. That was asking too much. The Sphere folded.

Completely unbelievably, just as The Sphere was ending, Koppa “fell into type.” Suddenly, all of the feelers he had out for presses, type, and workshop space paid off and he found himself able to work as a printer. With an assist from a friendly linotype owner and veteran printer, and lifelong pal Chris MacVane, he published a series of poetry chapbooks titled Crux and Crux 2, respectively, featuring local (Wisconsin) poets, under the imprint Dead Art Limited.

Koppa fell in love with Victoria Hoffmann and married her in November of 1997.

After an abortive attempt at setting up a frame and print shop in the shell of an old liquor store next to the grocery store, Koppa, armed with new foundry type, set up shop their new home in St. Francis and successfully published a small collection of David Steingass poems. Native Son at Home, the first official Heavy Duty Pressbook, was printed in a run of 100 copies. Koppa: “The neat thing about it all was rediscovering that setting type by hand is a wonderful way to pass the time. On top of that, it led to the acquisition of a couple hundred pounds of brand new ATF type...enough to last a lifetime, really...which in turn led to research revealing details about ATF and the Bentons, which led to major pride in ownership and revelations about the history of type casting in the United States, and then meeting the last remaining caster of ATF types, Mr. Theo Rehak of the Dale Guild, in 2001...oh, man...one thing sure does lead to another…it was [fun] to set this book, really digging into language letter by letter, gaining understanding 19th-century-style, and discovering that poetry can be incredibly moving.”

Committed to publishing a book every two years, Koppa next produced Alchemy in 2002, and then Becoming Flight: The Heavy Duty Guide to Orinthology, by Paul Zarzyski, in 2004. Also in 2004, answering the need to support his growing family, Koppa moved to Viroqua, Wisconsin, to take a job in the art department at CROPP, an organic farmers’ cooperative. Unfortunately, this led to the mothballing of Koppa’s press and the cold-storing of his type due to his new time, space and money constraints. However, Koppa and The Heavy Duty Press continues to produce every two years. Armed with a new used Mac and new developing computer assisted design skills, Koppa published Treehugger, a digitally printed collage/postcard book, in 2006. He plans to return to letterpress, though, as soon as he is able. He estimates that will be in about five years—after his children are a little older, after their new home is sufficiently updated, and after he figures out where the heck to set up shop. In the interim he continues to work on his growing body of collage art, freelance jobs, and his new interest in gardening.

What follows is a conversation about letterpress art and art in general that I shared over the telephone with Mike Koppa in March of 2007. We had spoken once before (that’s where most of his biography came from) and he kindly replied to a written survey/interview (included as an appendix) that touched on some of his more general artistic philosophies. This time I tried to steer us more toward a discussion of composition decisions. Specifically, I aimed to discuss the two earliest books from The Heavy Duty Press—Native Son at Home (2000) and Alchemy (2002)—as well as his hand-lettered zine, The Sphere, and Becoming Flight (2004), as well as Koppa’s penchant for collage. However, as the reader will notice, Mike Koppa is interested in a lot of different things, so while we do eventually get back around to most of the questions, sometimes it takes a little while. It is that eclecticism, though, that makes Mike Koppa’s art so interesting—his willingness to take risks and to arrange subjects, juxtapose them, in such a way that casts new light upon their individual composition. I learned a lot from him.

Enjoy:

Nathan Fleming: Thanks for taking the time again, Mike.

Mister Koppa: Sure.

NF: The first question I have is pretty general, but I think it might be fruitful: What connections do you see between your collage work and your letterpress work?

MK: Well…hmm…maybe we can come back to this later. I need to think about that one.

NF: OK. How about this: you said in your e-mail interview response that you try to create the right vessel for text, but the text and illustrations in Alchemy you call “meaningless.” I guess that’s partly why it’s a concept book, but if this is not a text vessel, what is it?

MK: Jeez, these are harder than last time…If it’s not a text vessel, what is it?

NF: Well, I think you describe it on the jacket flap as the first concept book from HDP.

MK: Ok, sure. It’s certainly not necessarily a text vessel—yes you’re right. I guess it’s more conceptual art—it’s more just art—and the best definition I ever got of the word “art,” which I try to stick to, is “the arrangement of things in space,” and nothing more than that really. And the art that I make—the arrangements of things in spaces that I make—I like to think that they are things that will make people’s minds work in ways that they haven’t worked before, to give people things from my perspective—a perspective that they don’t have—to open their eyes to a different way of looking at things. And that’s what Alchemy is about, or is supposed to do, for people. It’s more about giving a person an awareness of how much we take letters for granted or how comfortable we are with the alphabet. That and the arrangement of things in a space.

You know, the truth is these letters that we’re so used to could really look like lots of different things: why does an A look like and A? They say that O looks the way it does because that’s the shape your mouth makes when you say O. But the rest of the letters I don’t know about. Is an L shaped like an L because of what your tongue does when you say it? I don’t know…it goes back to the Phoenicians and stuff. But the point is, in Alchemy, to twist people’s minds a little bit; to make them see things from a different perspective; to maybe take things less for granted.

NF: Do you think that connects to your M.O. with Alchemy as far as salvaging type and re-using junk—as far as getting people to look at things differently than they normally would?

MK: Ok, I think this is kinda getting back to your first question about my collage work, especially related to what I’m working on right now. Collage is about using things that have been discarded, and instead of throwing them away or letting them sit in the basement of a dusty old used book store or a garage, actually taking them and doing something creative with them—doing something new that actually does mean something, or represent something, or maybe is just an interesting arrangement of things in a space—actually using all of this stuff that’s all around us, and there’s so much of it…

Really, for me, it means that art is endless. It’s to the point now where anything can be arranged and made to look interesting, or can be fun, at least, to make. For example, in the bathroom of the grocery store, down in the basement, instead of finding a 12-pack of Scott toilet paper on the floor, you might find a toilet paper pyramid with the plunger on top on top of the toilet tank. Why? Because why not? It’s all about having fun, being creative, exploring options and possibilities.

So Alchemy is very much like that. It’s taking all this crap—or what could certainly be considered crap by a fine press printer: you’d never print a fine press book on this crappy card stock, you would never use this worn out and useless 14 pt. Spartan, you wouldn’t use these old useless engravings for anything—and making something out of it. Experimenting for the sake of experimenting just to see what happens. And it turned out to be something equally as interesting as any fine press book, I think. It’s all a bunch of crap, but if you put your mind to it, you can make something interesting out of it. And that was the point, I guess, and that’s what I’m doing with my collage work right now. It’s getting more three-dimensional, more sculptural. I just have a few shoeboxes full of stuff, and maybe a few bigger boxes. I’ve got an old door and a few old chairs. But it’s really neat, it’s satisfying, to finally be able to do something with all this stuff that I’ve acquired over the years. I mean, I could just let it sit around and rot, or throw it away—or I could have some fun with it and, well, play.

NF: I’m noticing, now, a theme, definitely in Alchemy and even earlier in Native Son, of a kind of aversion to waste, a desire to re-use things that are useless, and I remember reading about how Alchemy signals your membership in the “Clean Plate Club.” Where does your sensitivity to waste and excess come from? Was it your parents?

MK: Well, in truth, I was raised to be a member of the Clean Plate Club. I always had to finish my plate of food and I always had to eat a little of everything—

NF: You sound like you were thrilled.

MK: —and I would gag a little over the canned spinach and canned beans, canned vegetables of all kinds—and I never understood why we couldn’t eat fresh vegetables, like I do now, it seems to be cheap enough and it’s delicious—so I was raised that way. But aside from that, I think all artists, well maybe not all artists, have what Pink Floyd called [sings] “amazing powers of observation,” and I do have pretty good powers of observation, and it’s almost like a curse, because I see lots of things and it’s hard not to see all the waste and the excess. I mean the commercial printing industry just in itself…it’s amazing.

We had a tiny grocery store with a small four-foot magazine rack and every week we would get two banana boxes full of new magazines. We sent back almost two banana boxes full of magazines every week, ones that we couldn’t sell. And that’s a four foot rack in a six aisle grocery store in one city in the U.S. Imagine how much shit is printed in this county that doesn’t need to be printed, just for the sake of profit…So thank god for the web, maybe that will help reduce some of this stuff…But walk into any department store and look around. Recognize for a minute that they don’t sell every shirt that’s on the rack. They take a lot of them off before the shirts are sold out and put new shirts up—they must. We just produce so much more stuff than we need, not just the garbage that builds up in my house, it’s the extra production of things. I mean, I can’t say I’ve seen too many landfills, but there must be a lot of them and they must be pretty gross. There’s a lot of waste.

So, I don’t know, I never really thought about how much I hate waste…but mostly I really make art because I get a kick out of it—mostly because it’s fun. I’m not really trying to make any statements about how we should all use our waste to make art. I’m a nostalgic guy, I like old things, and I like the idea of not being super-reverent about old things, like having a houseful of antiques. I’d rather take a box of antiques and put them together and make a sculpture out of them instead of just having twenty antique objects. So, really, my art is more motivated by things that I like—old things—and the act and performance of making art, than it is by things that I hate. Does that answer your question?

NF: Yes, and I like the way you put that about not being super-reverent about old objects. Your work seems to be more about saving things, almost in the Christian sense of giving old objects new life and new purpose, than it is about salvaging or hoarding things. Does that sound about right?

MK: That sounds reasonable.

NF: I did have a few questions about connections between Alchemy and The Sphere. At least I see that, well, first, they have very much the same color—

MK: That’s purely coincidental.

NF: And there’s a lot of illustration cuts from old advertisements—

MK: Yeah, the advertising stuff. That’s also the stuff that just happened to be around, and it’s also just a part of printing. By nature, if you have type, then you have a lot of old useless advertising cuts. With The Sphere, the advertising thing was part of growing up in a grocery store and being aware of how ridiculous marketing can be—everything is frickin’ excellent, everything is great, everything—you gotta have it. And now we live around a lot of Amish folks. It’s much simpler out here. We—people, that is—we don’t hardly need anything. We need food, we need water, and we need shelter. That’s what we need. Just like birds.

NF: For some reason that reminds me of a question I had after looking at the bird atlas in Becoming Flight, the “you are here” map in Native Son, and especially after you sent along those cds wrapped in topographical maps. That question: do you like maps?

MK: Yeah! Maps are good. Again, it’s printed matter so I like it, and usually they’re old. An easy thing to find in an antique store is an old map because few people really want to buy them. They make for great collage material. They have texture and they resonate with a lot of people. So, yeah, I like maps. I could see having done that as a profession. That would have been a cool thing to do. I didn’t, maybe because I just wanted to be an artist, but I find cartography and maps fascinating.

NF: Well, back on track, you say on your website that when you were making Native Son you re-discovered the joy of setting type by hand. How did you feel while you were making Alchemy? What did you discover then?

MK: One thing I discovered—it’s not that much of a revelation—but one thing was discovering how used to letters I am. They represent things and I can read them because I grew up with them. But once I got into it, it didn’t take me long to get used to the idea of an upside-down comma being E. The alphabet is this amazing set of 26 different shapes that make up a code—it’s like a secret code that we all know—and re-discovering that was, well, neat.

NF: Like you said, though, the letters become more about their shape. You start seeing the letter’s shapes and it becomes less about a code, or more about remaking a code from the old one.

MK: Yeah, sure—right.

NF: And that reminds me about something that I noticed in The Sphere, that the text, the content of the text, seems to be almost incidental to the visual rhetoric of the page.

MK: Sure, that’s true. The text is more of a shape. It’s more about a look. In so much of that text there’s nothing to really read into that closely. I mean, I would sit down and think, “Well, I have to make another page, what am I going to do?” And so much of that was just seat-of-the-pants, un-crafted language. Nothing in there went through an editor or saw a draft. It went from my head to my hand through my marker and onto the page that got printed. It was like barfing out all of this stuff automatically, really, and not giving it a second thought. And that was because it was never meant to be the focus of the work, like, “really important information you must read.” And sometimes I had a tendency to make it weird or interesting to make people want to look but…well there were some things that were more substantial…but, frankly, I was smoking dope…and at that point anything goes. I could entertain myself with the most ridiculous things.

NF: I really liked “Guy and him’s pail,” your cartoon strip in The Sphere.

MK: Yeah, there’s a bit of a lemonade-out-of-lemons theme in that strip, too. There’s some substance there. And that was that part of me that wanted to be a cartoonist. I always thought that would be neat to do, even though I never put enough time into developing that skill. I think that shows in the drawings there. I wanted to try to do it, though. I had to, because I couldn’t get my friends to do it, and The Sphere needed a comic strip. I could get someone to work on an issue or two—actually, that’s not true. There was a core group of about five of us that contributed to just about every issue—but eventually it seemed like more and more I was just making The Sphere by myself, and eventually I couldn’t keep up.

NF: But The Sphere was constantly evolving and becoming more of a high quality publication at that point. It seems to have ended, at least, at a really high point.

MK: Yeah, it evolved. That was the great thing about that experience. It was two years of starting from what was a pretty crude exaggerated handbill to—hey, guess what, Mike’s an artist and he has to push this every time, it has to get more interesting, better every time—what I thought was something that was pretty damn good. And I had it printed at the neighborhood printer, and they enjoyed it as much as I did. It was more adventurous than your standard business printer job. The onion skin fly sheets may have seemed extravagant, but I’d say, “Why not? Why shouldn’t we be doing this?”

NF: Because it takes too much time?

MK: And too much money. But when you’re twenty-five years old and your buddies aren’t married and you spend a lot of free time in the bar or hanging around in a living room playing Nintendo…well I couldn’t really do that as well as my friends could. I had to say, “No, I can’t hang out tonight. I have to go and sit in my attic and work on The Sphere,” instead. It was my idea of having a good time.

NF: Oh, I did have one more question about Alchemy. Who is Augustine Maxwell Jones?

MK: That’s me. That’s the pen name I gave myself. I’ve used it a couple times, not that much. It was just one of those things where I didn’t want to say it was “by Mike Koppa.” I wanted to have it written by somebody else, and that’s all.

NF: Why would you want to defer like that, though?

MK: I don’t know. Maybe just to add mystique. Maybe just so someone like you would ask a question like that. Maybe just to make somebody wonder about something for a few minutes. Maybe because I’m self-conscious about having a healthy ego. But if you read it, it’s pretty obvious that I wrote it. I mean, the whole thing is improvised as I’m standing there, letter by letter, on the spot. I don’t know what the next sentence is going to be, I don’t even know what the sentence I’m working on is going to be. The sentence changes in mid-sentence because it takes so long to write a sentence when you’re writing it one letter at a time. So it became what it was very organically, spontaneously. Augustine, by the way, is St. Augustine of Hippo. I was going to St. Augustine’s of Hippo at the time and the priest there was a friend of mine from childhood who is important to me. And Jones was the most common name I could think of outside of Smith…and I’ve been a big fan of The Smiths for a long time…

NF: Yes, everything has a reason, it’s all so clear to me now.

MK: [Laughs] Yeah, and the Maxwell part—I have no idea where that comes from.

NF: Maxwell sounds cool.

MK: It makes for a good middle name. Maxwell does-well…

NF: This next question might bridge the gap for us here, going backwards in time, I guess, from Alchemy to Native Son at Home. This dedication here on the back of the final page of Native Son, “Let this book be a quiet symbol of patience/in these reckless Times, and a testimony for human craftsmanship in a robotic World,”—

MK: Yeah…

NF: That dedication seems—or…Dedication? Epigraph? What would you call that exactly? It’s after the main body of text and the colophon…

MK: I don’t know exactly what you’d call that. We we’re taught to refer back to the Chicago Manual of Style as The Oracle. We were taught to follow the rules—or to be aware of them anyway—and that there is a certain order of things in all books. And in the best Perishable Press books you will find that a very silly man had lots of fun playing not by the rules, but with the rules. All of the elements of the traditional book may be there, but they are employed in a very creative way…a new way. So, I am aware that these things have names. I’ll bet it’s an epigraph.

NF: Ok, well, my question about that epigraph was that its emphasis on patience and craftsmanship is interesting considering your next project, Alchemy, which you describe within that text as “furious and nonchalant.” It seems like there’s a kind of opposition—

MK: Yes, it’s the antithesis-of.

NF: But I couldn’t help but notice that 2001 was the year between the publications of Native Son and Alchemy. 9-11 happened between the two, and then Alchemy seems to be a lot more chaotic, of course, than Native Son. I guess what I want to know is how you were affected by 9-11.

MK: OK, 9-11 was a big day for me. It was for a lot of people. It was an interesting day for me. I sent you one print that I made that day. That was the short story of my friend calling me and me not knowing what was going on. That was a true thing. And I happened to, at that time, have just quit working at the grocery store, August 31 was my lat day, and I was officially going to become an Artist. I was going to put all of my energy into it. I took a big trip out East for three weeks by myself. I left my wife in St. Francis for those weeks, which probably wasn’t the best thing for our relationship at that time—thank God it’s all okay now…

But I spent that whole day in the shop printing and setting type for things dedicated to or dated, “9-11.” And one thing I remember writing in my journal is that it was the most significant event that I had ever experienced, and likely a huge turning point in history. I mean, look at what’s happened since then. Nothing is the same. It used to be so much lighter before, more carefree. After that, everything became so serious and real. Nothing was funny anymore. It was, “I can’t watch a sitcom now. This isn’t funny. Nothing is funny. We’ve got a fucking problem here—a big problem—how’s this going to be solved?” Carefree was gone. And it’ll never be the same. And here we are four years into this war, and it doesn’t look good.

I just wish for my children that they could have the same feelings that I had, or the freedoms that I had growing up. I didn’t think about this kind of stuff, I didn’t have to think about this kind of stuff. Maybe we had the cold war going on and we were “afraid” of a nuclear holocaust or something, but not fear to this degree—where, any day, anything can happen. Just imagine, what happens if a dirty bomb goes off in New York or D.C….or Chicago? Nothing says that it couldn’t happen tomorrow no matter how they try to pacify us. Like, “We’re fighting the war on terror and we’re making progress.” Bull-SHIT! How could you say something like that? It’s not even close to being true. As if the terrorists are going to surrender…hel-LO? It could all blow up at any moment and it’s probably always going to be like that. It’s just fucked up. I don’t know…

Alchemy might have come out of that attitude, and maybe it was some kind of a relief from those fears—getting that out of my head and doing something fun, something not so serious.

NF: But, yes, in both that epigraph and in what you just said I think we can see both books as acting as kinds of places of refuge from a too-serious or a too-robotic world.

MK: Agreed. But the impetus for making Alchemy was completely independent of those thoughts. It was in a completely spontaneous minute or two that I decided to make a book with type that I was in the process of throwing away. And I made that decision in part because it was exactly the opposite of how I had been working with the press, and I felt that I needed to do that to break the monotony or challenge myself or discover something new. Come to think of it, it was a return to the days of The Sphere, when spontaneity was king. Once upon a time, I thought that all the books I would make would be pristine, finely crafted, pure beauty. But this time I decided to make something out of my crap, and in the end it worked out great—it looks great. It was a good experience to go through.

NF: But back to Native Son, I was wondering about your use of paper, especially your use of colors and about those little tabs of paper in the binding. How functional are those tabs?

MK: With that kettle stitch technique, those tabs are referred to as tapes. The tapes are glued to the covers. We cut those tabs from proofs of the pages—we were using some of the waste, actually, from the printing of the book—and in this case, they aren’t glued to the covers so that you can see the construction of the book. In this case they hold the book together, and they look pretty. Also, they make every copy of the book unique—they’re all different. But at the same time, because the tapes across all of the copies have the same source, those different tapes create a kind of unity throughout the entire print run. In Becoming Flight the same thing happens with the flysheets. That was one big bird atlas that was cut apart, and each book has two different flysheets at the beginning and the end. So…every copy is unique, but part of a unified edition, because of the same source material.

NF: What about your decisions about paper color and order?

MK: That was largely influenced by my experience in room 6541, I think. The professor made his own paper, and through that he made us aware that books don’t have to be printed on white paper. It shouldn’t seem too random or chaotic—there should be some thought put into it—but you should always be considering your options when you design a book. Are there any pages in this book that could be a different color? How can I take advantage of my option to use colored pages? As far as the paper for Native Son…that paper was available in about 12 different colors, so I just chose three or four of them that I thought worked well together.

NF: I liked how you used the darker blue sheets at the beginning and end of the poem cycle. They suggested to me a kind of dawn and dusk for Native Son’s summer day.

MK: I don’t remember thinking about that consciously, but I like your interpretation.

NF: Thanks. I like following the border pattern throughout the book, it provides a nice eye-guide, a sense of forward motion, and allows for subtle indications of episode breaks. I also like how it fragments and disappears before the final page with the lonely sunburst—

MK: [Laughs] Thank you for noticing.

NF: —but I wonder why you chose those patterns. They seem very ornate, almost Victorian, in contrast to the simplicity of the rest of the piece. Was that contrast a conscious decision?

MK: Well, I chose those ornaments specifically for Native Son—the pineapple is a symbol of hospitality, which seemed appropriate, somehow—and the contrast between the ornament and the earthy tone of the work…I think it links back with the collage mentality of juxtaposing unlike objects to create a new meaning by way of a new spatial relationship. But when you comment about the ornament that runs through the book as an “eye-guide,” that’s also something that I was taught. It’s called the aquifer, like an aqueduct: this thing that carries you through the book. Usually it’s in the header or the footer, where there’s a consistent design element, but it does just what you say—it helps you see the book as a long continuous line, not just a six-inch page.

NF: So it would be safe to say, that between the paper and ornament, Native Son is definitely where you put into practice what you learned in school.

MK: Yeah, all the things I was taught to practice. This was definitely my attempt to show what I knew about books. The greatest thing, though, was following it up with Alchemy. That comment in there about the professor who once said that you can bake bread out of shit, but it won’t taste too good—that was the same guy I’ve been referring to all along. So I was saying, “I’ve done what I was supposed to do with Native Son, and now I’m not going to do any of those things and show that I can make that work, too.

NF: From Native Son, though, between your book design and illustrations and Steingass’ poems, I got the feeling that you really connected with the poetry.

MK: There was a connection there. There are those that say that if you are following what God wants you to do then these things will happen—where you do fall into the right situation—this is good! I can identify with this. How lucky could I be? I mean, all I did was hear some guy named Paul Zarzyski on the radio, liked his poems, wrote him a letter, and he hooked me up with David [Steingass] and then David sends me poetry that makes me realize that I actually really did like. And then reading his poems about bringing junk and discards back to life, I felt, “Yeah, I could make this into cool book. This is what I’m about.” I was happy about that.

NF: What about the shifts in the typeface, to a different font? Are these places where you are interpreting the original manuscript?

MK: The line spacing and placement were Steingass’ decisions, but the words in different type—that was my decision. I mostly did it for emphasis. I checked with him before I ran with it, but it was my decision…however, within the last three lines of the last poem in Native Son, there is a change in the line breaks that I suggested and David agreed to. So I actually influenced the poet a little, which was an exciting exchange in a sort of symbiotic way.

NF: Well, a question about colophons might be a fitting finale to this interview. What do you think a colophon should do? In both Alchemy and Native Son, both of the colophons seem to be a little obscure, hard to find. Is this something that you picked up from that professor as well?

MK: Yes. That was the Netherthroat School again. I always like reading his colophons—how they tell you something obscure or interesting about the artist through his own voice. He lets you into his head. I’d like to throw a little bit of that in my colophons. It’s a really sheepish place for an artist to speak to his audience, and that may be what’s great about it. It’s for fans only. It might be a rip-off, but I think those kinds of colophons are great. I see mimicry as complimentary. It’s not so much copying someone as it is giving a nod and saying, “I like the way you did that—and now I’m going to put my spin on it.” As far as their being hard to find, I disagree.

NF: Fair enough.

Appendix

Oregon State University Questionnaire
February 27, 2007

1. Can you sketch out a time line of the labor involved and the different materials/processes/stages of the Becoming Flight project? What was the most costly component?

Becoming Flight timeline:

a. Attend University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1987 to 1991. While attending school, maintain part-time employment as picture framer, linotype operator, and commercial letterpress printer. Meet and introduce self to soon-to-retire commercial letterpress printers. 4 years

b. Manage family grocery store near small liquor store in metro area and publish grocery fanzine for 4 years

c. Acquire letterpress hardware and software as a result of snooping in old print shops, having introduced self to soon-to-retiring commercial letterpress printer, and having a classified ad addict of a brother-in-law. 1 day

d. Rent warehouse studio space and publish two hardcover anthologies with friends using recently acquired letterpress technology and line-casting machine at nearby commercial letterpress shop owned and operated by soon-to-retire proprietor. 2 years

e. Open fancy frame and print shop in vacated liquor store next door to family grocery store. Listen to public radio while working in frame and print shop and hear cowboy poet Paul Zarzyski interview. Contact radio station to get contact info for cowboy poet. Close fancy frame and print shop due to its function as money pit. Purchase new home with potential studio space and create printing/collaging/framing studio. (This is far and away the most costly component.) 4 years

f. Contact Paul Zarzyski and request manuscript for publication by Heavy Duty Press. Receive options, agree to publish book of bird poems. Contact former employee of family grocery store to create bird illustrations for book of bird poems. Contact paper companies, request and receive paper samples. Study options considering number of poems, line length of poems, and line numbers in poems. Order paper, create mock-up. 4 months

g. Set type for book of bird poems on line casting machines at soon-to-retire commercial letterpress printer’s soon to close doors print shop. Pull proofs, submit to Paul Zarzyski for proofreading, make revisions to type, pull proofs, submit to Paul Zarzyski for proofreading, (repeat?), send illustrations to engraver for printing “cuts.” 1 year

h. Print book in home studio. 1 year

i. Pack it all up and move to small town in rural Wisconsin. 2 months

j. Bind 25 books. 2 weeks

Total time invested: apx 17 years. In all seriousness, I have always kept a record of how many hours are invested in typesetting, printing, and binding. I don’t have that number handy and I’m not going to review journals to find it. But it is of importance because I use this figure to calculate the price of any book I make.

2. The limited edition and more costly nature of letterpress books necessarily affect how accessible they are. What impact does this have on the power and influence of letterpress?

Who cares? There is nothing I can do about the cost of labor and materials. Nor is there anything I can do about the physical limitations of both the technology and myself. Perhaps we could all charge just a little bit more for our books, pool our resources, and purchase advertising on television to run a public service message reminding the general public that there are public libraries in most communities.

3. Can you describe a specific influence in terms of a contemporary or earlier twentieth century (or even earlier) printer/artist?

I blame Walter Hamady. As a result of his influence, I own a lot of very heavy things that I have had to pack up and move several times. I have also been inspired to research typography, typographers, and type. Historical men who come to mind include Edward Johnston, Jan Tschichold, Eric Gill, Linn Boyd and Morris Fuller Benton. Many other typographers’ type has influenced us all. These men include but are not limited to Jenson, Garamond, and Baskerville.

4. What aesthetics or philosophy of printing distinguishes your press from others?

I tend to stick with American type, and type designed by Morris Fuller Benton for American Type Founders. More specifically, I rely heavily upon the Century and News Gothic type families. This is a direct result of ATF types being the hardest and therefore best for handsetting and redistributing in the case for repeated use. Longevity is key for a guy like me who enjoys all aspects of setting type by hand, from composing to redistributing. It is a fortunate practicality for me, because these types happen to be the most familiar types in the United States (if you read the New York Times,* were raised with Dr. Seuss, and are exposed to trade publications) and for good reason. They are very practical, non-ornamental typefaces, designed with simplicity and clarity of form in mind.

The rest we’ll leave to the audience to hash out. I’m sure there are more common threads in my work, but that could get into seriously long-winded, egocentric, and subjective detail. I prefer an objective analysis by a third party.

5. Is letterpress printing an art form or an applied art, in your opinion? Do you consider yourself an artist or an interpreter, or a combination of the two? If a combination, how do you enter, exit, and inhabit these roles during design and production?

That’s not my kind of queston(s). I’m an artist and I like to make books. As the designer of a book, my job is to create the most appropriate and best possible vessel for the words it will hold. It is a combination of artist and interpreter, but I cannot say how I enter, exit, or inhabit these roles during design and production. (Always include the question in your answer.)

6. What value do you assign to the modern commercial press with its swift, cheap production? What aspect of book function or aesthetics does letterpress book making fulfill, by contrast?

The modern commercial press is only as valuable as the matter it prints. Some of it is valuable and it is very good that it can be inexpensive, especially for small business owners. Magazines and books, however…holy shit. What a fucking waste of time and energy. I haven’t done a lick of research on the topic, but I can say with some confidence that more printed matter exists than is necessary. Way more. It’s all about profit.

Letterpress books, on the other hand, are all about books. They sure as hell ain’t about profit. And because of that simple truism, they immediately offer some relief, some shelter from the noise. They are also unique in their generosity. They are driven by passion and love and honest work, willfully. They could just as easily, actually much more easily, not exist at all. But they do.

7. Where do you position yourself on the scale from austere (i.e. text is supreme consideration, typography “invisible,”) to highly ornamented and visual (i.e. the artists book or bookwork)?

I walk the line.

By the nature of the typefaces I generally use, mentioned in my answer to question number four, one could easily argue that I believe the type should be “invisible.” However, in today’s schizophrenic world of typography, these very clean, readable, conservative, and subtle typefaces may ironically be noted for their beauty and therefore it is also arguable that I am calling attention to the type itself. I have, after all, always loved the alphabet.