i’ve seen nearly thirty of my short stories published in my life so far, and honestly, i like very few of them.
but, the few i like, i really like. and, out of the twice-as-many short stories on my computer that have not been published, there are indeed one or two that i would include in a collection of my own work, whether any other editor ever would or not.
i love the idea — eventually — of having available a single volume of my short stories. just one collection, written, vetted, vetted again, and chosen — over a lifetime. i would love it to be illustrated. but it’s far away, and again, right now, it would be pretty slim.
so — what does a writer like myself — one who owns her own iron hand printing press — do? i gave it some mulling over time (a few years). and then decided to handset the type for a single story — a favorite — and then print that story, by hand, with a few illustrations, and have the story bound. and then, do another.
this project will unfold at a pace commensurate with the pace at which i seem to write the stories i think are my best. it will allow me to look at those “best” stories very closely, as there’s no way to look at something more closely than to set it by hand in lead type. it will allow me to work with illustrations i admire greatly, and it will, we can hope, make ben and i better printers.
we don’t have any plan for how many books will be in each edition of a story, but are sure it will be two hundred or fewer. we know we will make some available for sale, but perhaps only very few.
someday, maybe — and i hope i’m either really old or already dead — there will be a collection of my short stories published. the stories that come forth as small letterpressed books in this project will be those stories i hope to see collected. how marvelous it would be to think of that collection printed as a facsimile edition of these little letterpressed books — where one could (hopefully) see the improvement in our presswork. we will always be amateurs when it comes to our press. we accept that happily.
