About Us
About
Theory. Practice. Tradition. Innovation. That’s the foundation of our approach to book building. Cuneiform is committed to publishing enduring (and occasionally ephemeral) works that negotiate critical and creative thinking, merging modern technology with historically-informed typographic practices to foreground the state of the book in our contemporary cultural climate.
The Board of Directors consists of: Steve Clay; Johanna Drucker; Buzz Spector; and Steve Woodall.
History
Plainfield, VT 1998: I interviewed professor Will Hamlin about living and learning at Black Mountain College and he told me about the print shop where he had studied typesetting from Joseph Albers. He recalled, “Albers hated periods after abbreviations because they called attention to themselves and were always too black.” He retrieved a pamphlet he had printed by hand for a student production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard shortly after the College moved to the Lake Eden Campus in the late ’30s.
A few weeks later I bought a George Prouty & Sons platen press (manufactured in Boston in 1889). With a light snow falling, some friends and I strapped the press down to a flatbed truck owned by our sculpture professor Jon Battdorf (also a former resident of BMC) and made our way home through the Green Mountains. Our early experiments in printing were full of wonder and blunders—broken chases, inky fingers and dropped cases. We printed the literary review for Goddard College, instructions for using a compost toilet, Gertrude Stein stationery, and a few short poems. I remember building up the letters of William Carlos Williams’ “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words” early on.
But that was all pre-Cuneiform. The first book to bear the name of the Press was Patrick Durgin’s Color Music, handset in Palatino with silkscreen illustrations.
More than a quarter-century later, Cuneiform Press has returned to the heart of the Green Mountains where we continue to make the best books we can.
Kyle Schlesinger
Proprietor, Cuneiform Press
Submissions: Cuneiform Press does not read unsolicited manuscripts.