Desiree Morales featured in Chaparral

Chaparral is an online poetry journal that doesn't feature hundreds of people at a time or have busy pages with ads galore, or publish just anyone any time. The issues of Chaparral are lean and muscular, featuring an electric group of hand-picked writers whose poems all touch on an evocative theme. The pages are comprised of sparse information on a black background.

Desiree Morales, whose poem, "Negotiating Death in Los Angeles," was featured in the Forest Drive showed up in the Spring issue of Chaparral.

The journal features the striking artwork of southern Californian, Shawna Taklender. The high contrasts and natural shapes of her work suit the journal very well. I'm picking up on a theme of rooting in the landscape and going out in many directions. I'm thinking of poets all spread out around the south land in their little rooms made of drywall and wood, smelling the dry June sage and orange trees on the wind. I'm imagining people huddled together around a fire deep in hallucination, their bodies are still yet they're acting together in other realms. I'm thinking I should get another glass of wine and read more poems from Chaparral.

Vamp & Tramp

Vamp & Tramp Booksellers have an extensive online catalog of fine press editions and artists' books. It's a great place to shop and to see what's being done in studios and print shops around the world. We are honored that they carry our work and have showed and placed it at libraries, museums and in private collections. The world of fine press is a widely dispersed community and Bill and Vicky at Vamp & Tramp do so much to bring us together- even new comers like us.

Our recent project, the Forest Drive was added to the online catalog.

While perusing the catalog I fell in love with this broadside by Red Hydra Press in Alabama.

Cam's fantasy penny farthing

At Lettre Sauvage we pride ourselves on investing long hours of toil on projects that dig us just a few more inches further into the rabbit hole. You never know when you'll turn that dark corner and suddenly find yourself in free fall through the limitless space of a colorful dream-scape. All we know for certain is that we have to keep scraping.

This Saturday Cam woke up, put on his dashing plaid pants and rubber-toed sneakers, plopped down on his black leather perch and began drawing a penny farthing bicycle.

In his words: "When people used to fall off one of these they called it 'catching a cropper" because you fly over the handlebars and go head first into the ground. They have a high center of gravity combined with a very forward seating position. In my design I tried to mitigate this flaw by sweeping the front forks back and curving the rear axle out, pushing the riding position down and back from the front axle."

Don't you want to be Cam's imaginary cyclist?! This is comfort and charm.

Community Studio Graduate!

Bungalow 36 is a place you'll want to visit to fall in love with letterpress all over again. The charming designs will inspire you. We're so happy to say that the mysterious Bungalow 36 creator first ran a letterpress here at our studio. Now she and an antique letterpress are at the bungalow bringing beauty into the world.

Open Studio - May 1

Join us in person or in spirit on May 1st 6-10 pm as we open our studio to celebrate three new letterpress editions.

the Forest Drive, which was completed earlier this year is a collection of poems by Sophia Kidd, Jackson Wheeler, Desiree Morales, Brynn Saito and John Charles Shippey interspersed with typographic images created by Cameron Leggett and printer's blocks of yore.

Windfall which is currently being sewn is an edition of poems by Erin M. Bertram, the winner of our First Lettre Sauvage Poetry Contest. The poems are marvelous and the cover art is a hand-carved wood cut by John Charles Shippey. We are currently folding, collating, sewing by hand. See me dragging a piece of bone over a folded sheet.

The beautiful broadside of Kim Andrews' poem "As in Nowhere, No-One" features an interesting take on the "sandragraph" print process. Genevieve had a geometric concept that I rendered using scraps of waste polymer stuck to a clean linoleum block. Kim was the braodside winner of our poetry contest.

May 1 marks the deadline for entering the Second Lettre Sauvage Poetry Contest. Hopefully a few entries will be hand-delivered. We're looking forward to all the poetry in store for us.

Our open studio parties are opportunities to show our work, demonstrate our presses and provide a backdrop for creative friends. In the past, our backyard has been transformed into a theater, our living room into a disco and our basement into an experimental noise happening. The photo below of our tarp/screen taken by John Nichols of the local gallery conjures memorable parties past.

Visit to Horn Press

Another beacon of book arts in Southern California, the Horn Press at UCLA, has been revived by Johanna Drucker in the School of Information Studies. We had the pleasure of visiting the press with members of the Southern California chapter of the American Printing History Association (APHA). In a little room on the fourth floor of the Broad Arts Center, one lovely old Vandercook SP15 sits in front of a window flanked by cases of type that fill the rest of the small space.

The press room is like a tiny berry bursting with the energy and brilliance of Johanna Drucker and her dedicated students. Johanna and her press just moved in last summer. They're energized and open to new ideas. Students have been crowding into the little press room creating exquisite corpse poems based on randomly selected themes. This is something we've enjoyed here at Lettre Sauvage along with the question and answer game in which half the printers set a questions and the other half answers to be randomly paired. Both of these are long-standing surrealist practices.


The image above is an amazing metal die- an uncatalogued item from the collection of the founder, Andrew Harlis Horn. This is clearly about an animal and a man caught in a primal relationship. The sheep (or goat) seems to see the man, while the man walks with his staff, his hood too low to watch the mountains and see the sheep. The water and air are impossibly one. Both figures -man and beast- absolutely dwarf civilization in a most romantic way.

Book Arts Gypsy Wagon

I am inspired by Peter and Donna Thomas, who are traveling the country on a book arts tour in a gypsy wagon they built together. I've heard of dream vacations, but this really appeals to my love of cohesion since it combines so many facets of their lives as they'll be working, living, touring, making friends and sharing this treasure they built together. Read about their journey. There's still time to catch them along the way.

Windfall Cover

The newly completed cover of Windfall has been the object of much musing. After spending so long with the poems, it's satisfying to see this book come together in a cover that, to me, really covers it. The cuts in the wood seem like little portraits of inexplicable sensations and the reference to a landscape with its struggles and flows is a fitting companion to the poems.

Windfall, the collection of poems by Erin Bertram, won first prize in our first poetry contest. The woodblock print is the work of another entrant, John Charles Shippey.

We first became acquainted with Mr. Shippey when he sent an unusual entry to our contest. The large manila envelope was full of fragrant old papers of faded typewriter and hand lettering. A drawing of the construction plans for a wooden deck and a shopping list added to the appeal of the refreshing, almost hallucinatory quality of the poems. Little notes about life, art and time filled the margins. There was also a conspicuous absence: the entry fee.

Cameron and I savored the perusal of the package over wine with a house guest named Chance. The next day I hauled out my favorite typewriter and answered John's letter assuring him that we would undoubtedly work together soon. It turned out that he was a friend of regular Sauvage contributor, Sophia Kidd. In her company we made a trip to neighboring Ventura to meet John. To our delight, he loaded us up with exquisite woodblocks and played guitar with us at his beautiful apartment one of the most cohesive residences I've visited. Shown below is the wood-working bench in the corner of the kitchen. In the other room were a bed and typewriter.

This is hopefully only the first of many collaborations with this beautiful soul and a cover that will live well wrapped around Windfall, words as sharp and subtle. The book will be bound and available in April 2010.

How to Make a Valentine.

Lettre Sauvage was featured in video on the website of our hometown paper the Ventura County Star.

Tegan was kind enough to come by and help out with the demonstration.

Thanks to Anthony Plascencia for the production.

sliding titles

Another gem: the cover of Lloyd C. Douglas's 1929 novel Magnificent Obsession, which was later adapted for two films. For an intro to cinema course, I recently assigned the 1954 Douglas Sirk version as part of a study on "surgical melodrama" (the other film was Kim Ki-Duk's Time, from 2006). I think the steep incline of the letters in this title design points to how quickly things can come undone in that sharp-edged subgenre. It's like a door half-open, words spilling out before the story's even begun.