Purgatory Pie Press
Dikko Faust started Purgatory Pie Press at the University of Wisconsin, Madison when he spilled (or pied) an overfilled case of 8 pt century oldstyle his first day at Walter Hamady’s letterpress class.
Esther K Smith entered Purgatory when they made their wedding invitation in 1980.
The Press has had exhibitions at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harper Collins Gallery, Harvard University and Smith College.
The press has collaborated with 100 artists and handsets real type, not this newfangled virtual eyewash. Faust and Smith teach bookarts, graphic design and letterpress at Center for Book Arts, Cooper Union & City University of New York.
- Address: 19 Hudson St. #403, New York, New York, 10013
- Phone: 212.274.8228
- Website: Purgatory Pie Press
- Email:
- Directions: via Google Maps
→ Bildschöne Bücher
Less is more is the concept for Bildschöne Bücher, a small bookshop in Berlin that has grown out of the highly successful website 25books.com. Proprietor Bodo von Hodenberg, a former sales director of Taschen, takes a curatorial approach to bookselling, highlighting exceptional books in photography, art and design.
→ the not-so-good war @bookforum
From Jonathan Schell’s review of Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke about the social climate leading up to WWII.
The pacifists were equally clear-eyed about strategic bombing, though they could exert very little direct pressure to halt the practice. They also bore witness to what even today is historically obscure—the impact of the blockade of Europe—and, again, acted as they could to counteract its effects. It is striking—and quite out of keeping with the mythology of the “good war”—to learn that former president Herbert Hoover, by no means a pacifist (though he was a Quaker), lobbied tirelessly to find loopholes in the British blockade in order to feed starving people in Poland and other German-invaded powers. “Is the Allied cause any further advanced today as a consequence of this starvation of children?” he demanded to know in October 1941. “Are Hitler’s armies any less victorious than if these children had been saved?” In 1940, the Quakers were feeding thirty thousand children, many of them in concentration camps, in France. It seems there was something about being against the war, whether that position was right or wrong in the larger scheme of things, that enabled these pacifists to see and foresee the suffering the war would bring more clearly than almost any other observers were able to. Baker’s engrossing, bravely contrarian book is dedicated to Pickett’s memory—and to that of his allies in the American and British pacifist cause.
