Limited edition broadsides of the Barbara Jane Reyes poem "Polyglot Incantation" are now available for sale through the Zoland Poetry office. Two-color, signed broadsides, lettered A-Z, are available for $125 (including s/h). Single-color editions of the broadside are available for $40. Checks should be made payable to Roland Pease and mailed to: Zoland Poetry 384 Huron Ave Cambridge, MA 02138 Any questions about the two editions should be addressed to: info@zolandpoetry.com Visit Firefly Press to learn more about this exquisite letterpress shop, now located in Allston, MA.

A note from the printer, John Kristensen, on the process behind the broadside:

Polyglot Incantation was letterpress printed directly from English Monotype Bell type. Bell is a late 18th century English typeface first commissioned by London publisher John Bell. Falling soon out of favor as did most pleasant oldstyle types in the early 19th century, it was largely ignored until, its origins by then forgotten, it was rediscovered, admired, and used with great distinction by the great turn of the 20th century Boston printers, Daniel Berkeley Updike and Bruce Rogers. Though an English typeface, Bell has ever since borne a strong New England identity. In the 1920s the origin of the Bell type was rediscovered by Stanley Morison, printing historian and typographic adviser to the English Monotype Company, and it was under his direction that the wonderfully faithful facsimile of Bell type was issued by that company. Our set of matrices was acquired from the Stinehour Press of Lunenburg, Vermont, who had used them with no less distinction than Rogers and Updike.

Monotype is the slower and more painstaking of the two machine typesetting systems that transformed the printing industry at the beginning of the twentieth century, the other machine being the Linotype. Unlike the Linotype, which casts entire lines of text as single slugs of metal, the Monotype casts each letter of a composed text consecutively as individual pieces of type, the caster being controlled in this process by a punched paper tape that works like a player piano. Large display type is set by hand, having been cast as individual sorts in a different kind of Monotype caster. The entire form is then made up on the press bed, the details fine-tuned (as in the letter spacing in the title “POLYGLOT INCANTATION” where different thicknesses of spacing material are inserted between letters to make them look evenly spaced) before the type block is separated into the two forms that print the two different colors of the broadside.

Broadsides of this size and relatively small number are printed on a Vandercook repro proof press. This last generation of the superb Vandercook presses was intended for printing single, exquisitely clear proofs from metal type, proofs that were then photographed for reproduction by offset lithography, which, by the 1960s was increasingly superseding letterpress.

The two-color, signed and lettered copies of Polyglot Incantation are printed on Zerkall Book paper, a German-made rag and alpha cellulose art paper. The one-color copies of the broadside are printed on Strathmore Pastelle, an American-made sheet. Both papers have neutral pH and are archival. The red ink used in printing the broadsides is a special formulation possessing greater light-fastness than conventional red ink to reduce the danger of the color fading in daylight.