`Though an angel should write, still 'tis devils must print.'
    -- Thomas Moore, 1779-1852, Irish musician and songwriter

Number 59, Fall / Winter 2006

Laurentian:
A Typographer's Account
Andrew Steeves

An Interview
with Rod McDonald
Andrew Steeves

What I Know
about Women: Publishing
with Pas de chance
Derek McCormack

A Preliminary Checklist
of Pas de chance,
1990--2005
Don McLeod

In Praise of the Newly Retired:
Caryl Peters and Frog Hollow Press
Dan Wells

A Checklist:
Frog Hollow Press,
2001--06
Dan Wells

More Dingbats, Ornaments
and Fanciful Initials
Tim Inkster

A Rogue's Gallery
of the Canadian Book
and Printing Arts
featuring Jan and Crispin Elsted

Includes a letterpress
keepsake of a design
by Ian Phillips
printed by Stan Bevington
at Coach House Press
in Toronto

Other Rogues
in the series

Will Rueter

Stan Bevington

Margaret and Fred Lock

George A Walker

William Lyon Mackenzie

A Rogue's Gallery
of the Canadian Book and Printing Arts

Jan and Crispin Elsted

    (Photo: David Evans.)

    (Photo: David Evans.)

Our aims have not substantially altered since we began Barbarian Press in 1977: to publish poetry, translations, classics, and belles lettres in a style that both glorifies the text and reveals it to the reader with the least interference. We also have an important interest in wood engraving. Most of the press's books now include engraved illustrations.

Barbarian Press is also a teaching press, reflecting our determination to help keep the crafts of hand setting and printing alive. Several people have worked with us as apprentices, and every summer we offer a six-day intensive workshop introducing participants to the basics of letterpress design and printing and the history of the book. Some participants have gone on to set up their own presses, or to become binders or papermakers. This sharing of experience has always been important to us.

The press's style is relatively conservative. Unlike those of many fine press printers, our backgrounds are in literature and writing rather than graphic and studio arts, and we make our books to be read, not only looked at. We have won several awards for design, including Alcuin awards and the Oxford Judge's Award. We believe that nothing should come between the text and the reader; it is our view that typography should have, in Robert Bringhurst's phrase, `a statuesque transparency'. Like good film music, the best typography is effective to the degree that it is unobtrusive -- supporting, not supplanting, the principal experience of the reader. Fine printing is a craft, not an art. The design and making of beautiful books is only secondarily a matter of self-expression: its first excellence is to serve the author and the reader.

Barbarian Press -- http://www.barbarianpress.com