It’s Fine Press Friday!
This week we present Journeys in Sunlight, with poems by Dana Gioia and etchings by Fulvio Testa. Printed in an edition of 90 copies by Richard-Gabriel Rummonds on an 1884 Luigi Ghisi Albion handpress for his Ex Ophidia imprint in Cottondale, Alabama in 1986. Rummonds was assisted by Antony O’Hara and Cary Wilkins. The book is signed by the poet and the artist. The type is handset Dante from Harold Berliner’s Type Foundry in Nevada City, California. Richard Brough did the title-page lettering. The paper, printed damp, was handmade at the Cartiere Enrico Magnani in Pescia, Italy. The book was bound by Craig Jensen in a dark brown morocco spine, with boards covered with gray Zerkall Amora mouldmade paper marbled by Paula M. Gourley in olive-brown, dark blue, and umber with gold fleck. It is housed in a drop-spine box covered and lined with medium brown Bamberger Iris cloth and a paper label printed in black with “EX OPHIDIA” and pressmark no. 3.
Richard-Gabriel Rummonds is considered to be one of the finest handpress printers of the late twentieth century. He was born in Long Beach, California in 1931. He founded his Plain Wrapper Press in Quito, Ecuador in 1966 printing Eight Parting Poems, a keepsake for his friends. He later moved the press to Verona, Italy in 1970. Rummonds became well-known for his private-press edition of Seven Saxon Poems by Jorge Luis Borges in 1974. Rummonds printed 38 titles under the Plain Wrapper Press imprint from 1966-1988 (UWM Special Collections holds five). He founded the Ex Ophidia press in the early 1980s when he was appointed the director of the book arts program at the University of Alabama. Rummonds printed four fine press books under the Ex Ophidia imprint, with Journeys in Sunlight being the last. Rummonds switched his focus to authoring books about working with handpresses, such as Printing on the Iron Handpress (1998), Nineteen-Printing Practices and the Iron Handpress (2004), and the memoir Fantasies & Hard Knocks: My Life as a Printer (2015). In 2014, Rummonds started using the imprint Ex Ophidia Press as a fine literary press.
Journeys in Sunlight is another wonderful gift from our friend and benefactor, Jerry Buff.
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–Sarah, Special Collections Graduate Intern