Fragments Surreal

Jeff Mueller

Kerri Sancomb

It’s the indentation of the paper, the feel of where the pressure of metal leaves its mark, that makes letterpress printing so clearly a work of the hand, for the hand.

The owners of the Dexterity Press, recently moved here from Chicago, are not interested in some retro exercise in Victorian preciousness. Their work is in and of the moment, with a precise surrealism to their inventive images and design, particularly when applied to the model of the matchbook they use for CD envelopes and poetry broadsides.

Their work reminds us that there was once a printed history to recorded music with its catalog of record jacket vibrancy. iTunes have no container but the hard drive. There is no ground or frame for an accompaniment of text and picture. (The band Arcade Fire has attempted a digital equivalent in the ​“synchronized artwork” of its most recent album, but this offers a dream of the object, not the object itself).

The work here is towards an interplay among artists. A performer himself, Mueller is particularly conscious of the ways in which his press and his guitar provide different voices, yet serve the same music. In the same way, there is a mutually supportive relationship between writer and printer in the fashioning of a chapbook like the one pictured here, designed by Sancomb for the work of a poet friend. Perfectly concise in form, it invites poems of similarly focused clarity. The surface of a Kindle screen with its illusory pages is legible, but it erases itself with each turning. The printed book puts its entire past and future into the hand.

There is the work of wedding invitations and concert tickets, as well, but this commerce is not different in its art. No anachronisms here, as the printers reimagine their craft for even the smallest commission. But also no small thing to make keepsakes out of things we might have thought we could throw away.

Contact the artists at [email protected]. Additional images are at