9 February 2024

Since about ten days ago, I am a 17 year-old kid in a 55 year-old body, with the life experience to go with it. I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1969, raised in a pretty stable middle-class Catholic household, the fourth of five children (all boys save for the eldest), and grew up with the luxury of being an employee in my parents’ grocery store. I was also lucky to be enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in the late ’80s, where I majored in art and met a very inspiring and maybe more importantly, validating professor. That was critically important. You wouldn’t be receiving this email if that didn’t happen. In college, I learned that I loved letterpress printing and the very possibility that I could make books.

After graduation in 1991, I went back to Milwaukee and resumed working at my parents’ grocery store, because that’s what you do with a B.S. in Art. Shortly after assuming the role of Manager in 1993 (that’s how I arrived at “technically it’s thirty-one”), in an effort to draw some attention to what we were doing at the grocery store, I created a grocery fanzine. Maybe you’ve heard of it by now. If not, you can thank Max Yela (Special Collections Librarian, Golda Meir Library, UW-Milwaukee) and his team for digitizing the entire run of The Sphere (published on full moons), which you can peruse online. Obviously I’m still very proud of it. It was an important time in my life. Two years into The Sphere, much to my surprise and great delight, I acquired my first press (and about a ton of old metal type) from three different sources within one month. The Sphere was put to bed, and Crux was published under the Dead Art Limited imprint in 1996.

The Heavy Duty Press imprint was adopted in 2000 with Native Son at Home, a book of poems by David Steingass. Two more titles, Alchemy (2002) and Becoming Flight, poems by Paul Zarzyski (2004), were published before the press went into ten years of cold storage, as my wife and I moved to Viroqua, Wisconsin, and began raising two wonderful little girls. The press was resurrected in its new home, Der Klubhaus, in the Town of Liberty, in 2016, where I very gratefully enjoyed patiently producing Typesetting on a Winter’s Afternoon, by Raymond S. Nelson, Jr. (2019).

The Heavy Duty Press now resides comfortably within the 256 square foot, unplumbed Klubhaus in the Township of Liberty, in the driftless region of rural southwest Wisconsin, nestled in a quiet hollow, below an ongoing restoration of native prairie, at the base of a woodland hillside with managed walking paths. The minimalist shop includes 76 fonts of metal type, a manual slug cutter, a Vandercook SP 15 flatbed cylinder press with electric motor removed, a 36-inch paper cutter, a work table, desk, typewriter, and sink with gravity-fed water supply. Electricity powers air conditioning in the summer, heat in the winter, and lights when necessary. The modest size of the studio lends itself to small scale work and small editions.

As set forth in The Declaration of Orientation, The Heavy Duty Press shall heretofore focus, albeit loosely, on themes “related (but not limited) to thoughtful and sustainable living in the driftless region and beyond.” Nature and the cosmic energy of life shall be the guiding light.

The first installment of The New Moon Monitor:

https://mailchi.mp/caccd93212e6/news-from-the-heavy-duty-press