as told by co-founder julia Ferrari
Shaping our inner life in the digital age, with letterpress and other hand crafts. The challenges, roadblocks and rewards… The importance of the use of our hands through true crafts such as letterpress, pottery, woodworking … in shaping our inner life in the digital age can’t be underestimated. In detailing the history of Golgonooza Letter Foundry & Press and my first encounter with poet Dan Carr, let’s start in the fall of 1977. I’d responded to an ad in Boston’s Real Paper, offering apprenticeships. “…print your own poems” it said. I was intrigued. At that time I’d begun writing poetry even though I had considered myself a visual artist. After calling the phone number listed, poet Dan Carr answered the phone. He politely asked introspective questions related to my interest. Eventually, I made an appointment for about 2 weeks away (which may have surprised Dan because of its specific distance). Regardless, I then filed the number away in my art pencil case. Still, when the time period had arrived, I had almost forgotten about the date. Yet a nagging inner voice kept asking if I’d remembered to call the number and proceed. I finally responded to my inner cue and searched for the number in the Real Paper but the ad had disappeared. I searched in my pencil bag and there it was on a small slip of paper, the numbers almost worn away having been written in soft pencil. I called and made the appointment and arrived at the 7 Sherman Street address, an old industrial wood frame building beside a railroad track, at the Charlestown and Somerville, MA line. This was the eastern location of the Four Zoas Press, an alternative press, part of the Small Press Movement… a movement where poets took to printing their own work, often by hand, using metal type and equipment, when the big publishing houses refused to consider unknown writers/poets…. (to be continued)
