For a press to be private a double qualification seems necessary: the books it prints must not be obtainable by any chance purchaser who offers a price for them and the owner must print for his own pleasure and not work for hire for other people.
– Alfred W. Pollard.
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Paysans Sans Peur Press is the private press of Benjamin Jay Levin and Amber Dorko Stopper. It has published two books for sale, Thanksgiving and The Knitting Tarot, and numerous family missives and announcements. The press is about to embark upon it’s largest project yet.
THANKSGIVING (2004)
The cover for Thanksgiving, the first project of Paysans Sans Peur Press, printed in 2004 (and just in time for Thanksgiving). Thanksgiving is a single-signature, 5 x 7” volume printed on Rives Heavyweight, with either a wine-colored cover or a brown one, in Fabriano Tiziano, both featuring this gravy-boat illustration in gold ink, and tied with hand-dyed silk ribbon. It was printed in an edition of twenty numbered copies, and lettered copies A through H. Texts by Amber Dorko Stopper, and illustrations by Lisa Annelouise Tomer Rentz.
The frontispiece for Thanksgiving, a book of six very short vignettes describing the Thanksgiving arrangements in six households — some with family, some with friends, some alone. Each vignette had its own illustration. The day before Thanksgiving of 2004, Amber distributed some copies around the city of Philadelphia (on buses, in gym locker rooms, etc.) hoping that people who needed them would find them.
Thanksgiving was printed in our old apartment, although for most of it, we were not living there. The last month’s rent was paid, we were in the new house, and Amber would go to the apartment during the day, which was empty save for the press, and print. The press was the final thing moved into our house.
Some text from Thanksgiving. The wonderful thing about a first book project is that you can always look at it to see how far you’ve come. As much as we read and studied before we got started, we had never read anything that specifically said “If you live in an apartment full of dogs and cats, you will have to cover your trays of type as you set them, or they will have dog and cat hair all over them.” So we didn’t. Dog and cat hair are a distinguishing feature of Thanksgiving.
THE KNITTING TAROT (2007)
A short article about the Knitting Tarot from Vogue Knitting, Spring/Summer 2005. Note the vastly overestimated print run, and ambitious availability date!
“The book is too gorgeous for words. Even if it were a blank book, it would be too gorgeous for words. And the deck! It’s just plain fabulous. I love the size and feel of the cards, especially the weight. They’re substantial, and they carry a soothing calm about them. I think what I’m trying to say is they’re real, not just in the physical sense because that’s obviously true, but in the emotional sense. They’re not a toy, they’re a tool, and yet they’re very approachable. Thank you.” (A favorite quote from someone who purchased the Knitting Tarot)
The Knitting Tarot deck is a standard, 78-card Tarot deck with many traditional corollaries. The cards were printed on Magnani Pescia, a 300 GSM cotton stock in a pearl-grey color. They are 3.5″ X 5.75 ” in size. (The deck stands about 1.75″ high when stacked.) The cards are printed with images and corresponding titles on one side, and with a traditional card “back” design on the opposite side. These cards are NOT coated or laminated. Two “extra” cards came with the deck, which can be removed for use in doing readings. These cards simply offer information about the printing of the deck and provide a place to number the decks in the edition. The decks came wrapped in Japanese kyoseishi paper — literally translated as “strengthened paper”, it is a fine paper with its clothlike finish.
The Knitting Tarot book was hand-printed on Mohawk Superfine Text, in the typeface Garamond Old Style and Garamond Bold. The book measures 7″ X 9.5″, is 169 pages, and includes five ruled pages in the back of the book, for recording special readings. The books were Smythe-sewn by the Hoster Bindery in Ivyland, PA. Smythe-sewn bindings are of extremely high quality. The pages of the book will lie nice and flat when the book is open, but since they are all sewn in, in signatures, the pages will never tear out the way a glue-bound book will. The books have cloth (“hardcover”) cases with an embossed image under the dust-jacket. The dust jackets were printed digitally by Piccarri Press (our handpress did not accommodate the size of paper necessary for the jackets).
The Knitting Tarot was begun in 2003, and finished in 2007, and was written by Amber Dorko Stopper and illustrated by Megan Leigh Dorko in an edition of 170. It has been purchased by knitters and Tarot aficionados on four continents and is part of the collection of the Museo del Tarot in Madrid, Spain.
