Heavenly Monkey :: small press, cool books.

The final sweep-up and -out from HM's first ten years. Despite our best efforts with the detritus of over two dozen projects, some remained; miscellaneous leaves from books, ephemera, etc etc. Meanwhile, the requests for "a sample of your printing, whatever bits you might have lying around" continue to trickle in. And so, we put all the remaining flotsam in a pile & started sorting. There was enough to make up three uniform sets of what we have called the HM Drop Box. Each set, contained within a clamshell box made in the bindery of our friend Adele Shaak, contains four complete publications; one bogus publication; sample sheets from five books; and an additional 14 pieces of printed ephemera. In all, a collection of 25 pieces, most of them printed at HM with the handpress, between 2000 and 2011.

Although the boxes are uniform in their number of pieces and the source projects, the actual samples vary. To make some sense of it all, each set includes a detailed description of the contents written out by the publisher, specific to the samples in the box. These notes are written inside a bifolium sheet, on the outside of which has been printed a title page and press-numbered colophon.

Each box includes the following ephemeral and extracted items (listed in approximate chronological order):

1. Publication announcement card for Charles van Sandwyk - An Interim Bibliography.

2. Reid's Leaves publication announcement card.

3. Reid's Leaves broadside prospectus; one of the first items printed at HM on the handpress (and it shows!).

4. Small broadside distributed at a talk by Good & Evil in the Garden's author & artist.

5. Extract from The Girl With the Mask of a Crow.

6. Copy of Robert Reid's two-page preface to Kuthan's Menagerie Completed, set in 18-pt Perpetua and printed in two colors.

7. Reduced facsimile reprint of the title page and introduction to Kuthan's Menagerie Completed, edition of 75 printed at Black Stone Press on Arches Cover & issued by the Alcuin Society at a talk by Kuthan publisher Robert R. Reid.

8. Small broadside with facsimile images taken from Kuthan's Menagerie, printed for the first Codex book fair.

9. Original setting (metal; different from the one published) of an introductory essay from An Invitation to British Columbia, printed in two colors on handmade paper.

10. A small publication notice for The Shadow Over Innsmouth, a few dozen copies of which were issued at the Seattle Book Fair, 2005.

11. Copy of the Alcuin Society's journal Amphora #148, an issue devoted to the work of Robert Reid, and edited by HM publisher Rollin Milroy.

12. New Books 2009; an envelope (8 x 8 in.) containing seven color cards describing upcoming publications.

13. Colorful Fortune publication party promotional card.

14. Proof of Andrea Taylor's linocut portrait of papermaker Reg Lissel, taken from Elements in Correlation, tipped into a decorated paper wrap. The proof is printed on gampi made by Reg.

15. A sample sheet from Elements in Correlation, and one of the four type specimen pages from the book.

16. A small, 8-page pamphlet displaying off cuts of Claudia Cohen's paste papers, with a printed title page.

17. Title sheet for the samples included in HM=X, with a sheet from Good & Evil in the Garden tipped in.

18. Proof of the title page printed for Jim Westergard's suite of prints, Beasts of New York.

19. Proof of the 4-page prospectus for Oddballs (without the tipped-in engraving), and one of the biography (i.e. text) pages from the book.

The publications included in each box are:

1. A Letter from Carl Dair (the only time we've printed an edition of more than 50 copies; what were we thinking?).

2. HM 1998-2003 Catalogue, set in various types and printed on the handpress in an edition of 100 copies, with color prints of each title tipped in. 12 pages plus printed handmade paper wrap.

3. A Collection of Letters Written by Important Publishers 1450-1425 (the last Xmas booklet we issued, 2005).

4. In The Press, an 8-page color pamphlet of upcoming projects (with the original title page printed on the handpress in two colors), plus a checklist of publications for 1998-2008 (including HM Editions), sewn in a printed wrap.

5. The Monkey & The Doves, an off-the-books variant of You Can't Choose Your Progeny. The number of good text sheets printed for this project exceeded the number of original Doves samples we had (we allowed for lots of wastage, and ended up doing better than anticipated). A special half-title/limitation page was printed (see image below), and eight copies were cased at HM in Claudia Cohen's paste paper. Some of these were given to colleagues, and now we get rid of the remainders in the Drop Boxes.

And finally, each box contains a 25th item, unique to that box & described in the contents listing. Something of which we don't have even three copies...

The boxes are covered in Japanese cloth (each box a different color), and measure 9.25 x 13.75 x 2 inches. They were made with room to accommodate a few additional samples that might come the owner's way in the future.

In their randomness and lack of any curation, these boxes probably give as fair & accurate an overview as possible of (or introduction to) HM's work with the handpress over the past decade. Therefore, we think these three collections might be of most interest to people or places who are not already following HM's progress; those who are collectors of printing samples, handpress printing, or general press ephemera. The price is $925.

HEAVENLY MONKEY