What we believe

We believe that poetry is vital to living. It provides direct access to our deepest interiors and invites us to imagine beyond. Imagination is crucial to freedom and so we work to make poetry seen and felt by more human hearts. To this end we produce art on paper with letters and distribute it as widely as possible. We fight to make space for the imagination in our everyday visual environment.

Black lives matter. We are working to embed antiracist practices in every aspect of our own (white) lives. This is ongoing work. We prioritize words by Black people, indigenous people, people of color, queer people, and women+ people in the interest of expanding all people’s capacity to imagine. We seek out authors of different backgrounds and experiences from our own in order to bridge gaps, draw communities together, and illuminate the dark places we all hurt from.

We believe that change happens one human heart at a time. What happens small will happen big. We want people to gain a deeper understanding of their own hearts so that they can learn to allow and do the same for others. We believe poetry is essential to this process. We want to live in a world every day more awake, more alive, more equitable, and more just. Poetry aids self-knowledge with sharp blows to the head and speaks from the edge of all that can’t be said. 

In every design deliberation, we begin and end with the text. As poetry distills language to its most essential, our typography aims to create a singular, striking reading experience. We are deeply committed to the craft of letterpress printing because of its capacity to communicate and propagate things that need to be read in an immediate, tangible, beautiful way. We support precision of language with precision of form, from individual letters to book-length texts, from pocket-sized prints to wall-sized paintings.

We conduct business on the basis of warm, real, and respectful human relationships. Our marketing strategy is threefold: to be genuine, generous, and grateful. We live and work in community. Our shop is a home for writers, readers, thinkers, and poets. For authors, editors, publishers, booksellers, and overcommitted literary types of every stripe. For kids after school. For grandparents and neighbors and teachers and artists and engineers. For all who have something to say and struggle with how to say it. We help distill and distribute deeply felt words.

We source our materials as close to home as possible. We shop at the local hardware store and walk across the parking lot to hand packages to our neighborhood mail carrier. We are committed to reducing our impact on the environment and so we make things that last. We buy quality materials and we allow the time for quality craftsmanship. We reuse and recycle and rethink our practices regularly. We work toward sustainable systems for our earth and our bodies. We are committed to education and mentorship and we say yes to people who show up wanting to learn, especially young people. We operate within, and seek to expand, a culture of service and gratitude.

Thank you, dear reader, thank you. We love what we do.