Moran Press: Handmade and Exquisite by Su Zi

 

Serendipity is still a joy of cyber cruising—there are voices in quiet places that open our worlds. During a search for hand made books, there is a series of videos that show two hands and a voice hand sewing a blank paged pocket notebook. Other posts show choices of handmade, mulberry paper and asks viewers which ones they like. These videos are the product of Moran Press. While many fans of the press’s social media posts might find relief, if not delight, in viewing a diligent craftsman performing an ancient form during their scroll; however, there are actual books to be had.

Intrepid viewers do purchase the journals: we are shown posts of packages being shipped. The skeptic of scammers might cringe at the prospect of online purchasing from independents, and while caution is 

caveat, there are, nonetheless, independent artists who have been painted into a corner by big boxism and have only the abyss of the internet in which to whisper their products. 

The Moran Press website announces its books as “hand sewn, hand cut, hand sanded edges. US shipping only” and then has photographs of the various mulberry paper patterns as covers for pocket journals. There are individual journals and a bundle offering of five with cherry blossom paper. Over time, the availability of books and cover patterns does vary.

A purchase from Moran Press arrives is a poly mailer and a solid box that opens to reveal the journals ordered mindfully packaged in brown paper. Each fits the palm in a warm way. The spines reveal the stitches, and the books open to their contents of a parchment bond paper that melts with the media of the scrivener when used. As a gift, the journals tuck nicely into holiday cards; recipients have testified to a delighted wonder.

Occasionally, the press makes hardbound journals, and these are a lovely to hold: the cloth of the books has a warmth to the hand, the stitching both delicate and durable. The palm-sized physicality enhances portability, and these journals can slip easily into any pocket or bag. However, because they are individually made items of a traditional craft, their availability is a pounce upon opportunity.

And there are the print books, hand sewn chapbooks, and of these there are two categories: classic titles and works by Stephen Moran. The classic titles are reprints of Poe, Mellville, and, rather stunningly, Charlotte Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper –- challenging our notions of what editions we read, what editions we give as gifts. The Melville, being Bartleby, has a black card stock cover sewn to the text with seven drill points and white thread. The text is presented naked—there are no denotations within the text beyond title and author at the top of the first page: this is rather obviously an art endeavor; a readable, portable, homage to a classic of literature with a respectful presentation.

And then there’s Server, also a handsewn book with a black cardstock cover, but with text that features a collection of short stories by the press’s owner-operator, Stephen Moran. 

This edition has a collage cover for title, image, author and back cover that includes the press logo. Also sewn with seven points and white thread, this book features a frontspiece, a copyright page, a table of contents and a preface, as well as end papers that list others of the author’s books. The work hosts some sixty pages but is still visually distinct from fully machine-produced small press titles.

Server, although presented as a collection of short stories, reads as

an episodic novella, with a consistent character named Scott, who works in a restaurant. There are scenes of difficult guests that ought to particularly tickle anyone who has worked in the hospitality and food service industries. Moran’s prose style is compressed: “The music played, people talked and the bartender washed glasses. Scott scanned the bar, wondering what thoughts others might be harboring” (12). The use of simple declaratives in a series is an effective pattern and functions to both allow specific detail while moving the narrative arc at highway speeds. In “Transitory”, the opening line also follows this strategy: “The alarm chirped in Scott’s ear, and he couldn’t stop the incessant sound without rising, as he’s placed the clock on a table across the room” (32). The flow of this sentence is enhanced by the assonance in alarm/ear but is furthered by chirp/incessant/rising and the reader is awakened to the scene with the abruptness experienced by the character. 

If experience with a book, a bookish book, could soothe our soul’s ills, then Moran Press wouldn’t be relying on organic reach; however, respite does allow us to rest, and to rest with a book is one of our greatest cultural traditions—whether writing in one, or reading it. For these small moments of solace we still seek, these handmade books remind us that such small graces still exist.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago. Check out her author page on Amazon.

GAS Featured Poet: Alan Catlin

Alan Catlin has been writing and publishing in the "littles" and not so "littles" since the days of the mimeo revolution. Mimeos are gone and the Internet is here and so is the poet after a demanding, but stimulating, in more ways than he cares to describe, career in the service industry, mostly as a professional barman. His many chapbooks and full length books deal with life experiences, which he considers on the job training, or as an advance degree in life studies. Since bailing from the job, you never retire from The Business, you get out while you can, he has indulged his lifelong interest in Art and Literature, branching out into different forms and subjects. While this departure may seem unusual, it was his barman profession he calls his, unchosen profession, the one that just sort of happened while pursuing his desired career as a scholar and a teacher in Graduate School.In recent years he has been the poetry editor of an online poetry journal: misfitmagazine.net. In keeping with his interest in preserving the obscure, the ephemeral and the unusual written word, he has been collecting and archiving a vast accumulation of rare printed material from well over thirty five years of publishing, with the State University of New York Buffalo.

Still Life Dreaming Five Times

1-
Dream remembered:

Man walking through
walls, outstretched hands
on fire

2-
In deserted hall,
ghost light on
piano keys

3-
Sterile eggs in
hollow nests; shells
for origami birds

4-
Colored sand falling
in inverted hourglass;
pyramids of dreams

5-
Chinese landscape painting
dream; falling water
 

Autumn Evenings on the Island Four Times

1-
Seascape motionless
as moonlight
in a mirror

2-
On the bluffs at sunset,
lighthouse beacon flares
3-
Life guard stands turned
face down; no one saved
today

4-
Gauze of fog covers
the horizon; no sunset
today

 
Static Landscapes Eight Times

1-
Ghost ranch vista;
even the clouds
have windows

2-
Field of white sand,
large black stone off-center;
rising, falling, or standing still?

3-
In the desert:
long horned steer skulls
replace the clouds

4-
Library copy of Stieglitz’s
late work; nude studies
of his wife torn out

5-
A waking dream
with holes in it;
clouds seeping out

6-
Tarnished mirror
in half-light, shadow
images staring back;
the ghost of a face

7-
Moonrise over the mountains,
drying laundry and prayer flags
in early evening breeze

8-
Valley shadows spread;
how the sun sets

 
Aspects of Rain Four Times

1-
Metal cans and half-
filled glass jars in downpour;
a found tone poem

2-
Rain falling on water-
color village, houses
dissolving into rivers,
rivers dissolving into nothing

3-
Cool rain on evergreen
trees, early morning
light harbors last
night’s shadow

4-
Rain drop poised
on bare branch
about to fall

 
Melancholia Four Times

1-
Dreaming Li Po:
a red moon over
a frozen sea; a drop
of wine falls,
red stain spreads

2-
Your face in
shattered mirror,
all the disconnected pieces,
something else now

3-
Estate settled,
house sold,
our son’s growth chart
still inside

4-
Frigid January night,
signature red beret
balanced slightly askew
on the statue of Robbie
Burns; a memorial for
a gone poet


( for Tom Natell)

GAS Featured Poet: Wim Coleman

Wim Coleman is a playwright, poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer. His book of poetry, I.O.U., was published in 2020. His narrative poem The King and the Beggar Lady was published in 2022. Novels that he has co-authored with his wife, Pat Perrin, include Anna’s World, the Silver Medalist in the 2008 Moonbeam Awards, and The Jamais Vu Papers, a 2011 finalist for the Eric Hoffer/Montaigne Medal. Two collections of his one-act plays are currently in print, and his plays have appeared in anthologies along with works by authors ranging from Molière to David Mamet. blog site: https://playsonideas.com/

Beacon

 

They say you can see 

futility from space—

the flickering 

bioluminescent SOS 

of a solitary storm cloud

bursting over 

an infinite ocean.

 

 

To Look at a Partial Solar Eclipse

 

don’t turn to the sky 

with glasses prudently opaque

but down

with rapt capitulation

and the naked lucidity of eyes 

down

where the silence burgeons and swarms 

in phosphorescent shards

down

where a million little crescent suns

nestle among the shadows of leaves.

 

 

Singularity

 

This is the moment of the Big Bang

no need to look back for it

 

This will be a short-lived universe

a few seconds at most 

 

and the space it takes up is only and fully 

a metaphor

 

What happened a micro-fraction of a nanosecond ago 

is one of the great mysteries of physics 

 

and what happens next is

the inflation of selfhood

 

looking around and scratching its nebulae

and asking What am I but

 

bundles of dying neural

filaments of firmament

 

rattling loose in a light-cone 

too tiny and brief

for angels or apes to get inside

and make themselves at home

 

---

Light Reading: An Essay by Su Zi

 

Light Reading

Once, in a crowded and large room that was an unending school assembly, a girl handed me a water-logged book of some thickness. The arc of the prose was some ridiculous derivative swill with maybe a troll, but the book allowed for the meeting to fade—the joy of light reading.

Although research skills are culturally crucial, there is equal value to a bit of a romp; a reading experience which provokes satisfaction without rigorous concentration.

How such books come to hand is the odyssey of each book—a fascination for authors—a personal favorite being a cabinet at a resort introduced as “for people who like to read” here is found a stumble upon pile of print material of various editions, formats...whatever little leaves the currents have cached there.

Nonetheless, some people who like to read habituate festivals as well and therein find unlikely candidates to read perhaps because of a pleasant exchange.

Thus comes to hand The Pot Thief who Studied D.H. Lawrence by J. Michael Orenduff, a murder mystery, and one of a series of Pot Thief novels. Of the positioning of this particular novel in the series, Orenduff gives three pages to the topic at the end of the book—why this fifth book was written before the third. “Then I went to Italy for the summer because my wife was scheduled to teach art history in Florence” (231). The Pot Thief series then appears as a work of some dedication. 

The running joke is that the pot thief is a ceramicist. The series are his adventures, and Orenduff has the character discuss this fairly swiftly when the character explains of himself, “I’m a treasure hunter” (12).  Later, as the work lavishes the research that drives the adventure, Orenduff has various attributes of the subject highlighted by character discussion.

‘Right. When the Spaniards converted the natives to Christianity, the Indians saw the Virgin Mary as the white man’s Pachamama. The priests didn’t object because it made the conversions easier if you didn’t force the Indians to give up all their former images [...] pre-Columbian renderings of Pachamama show a female-like character in the shape of a mountain. But after the Spanish came, the Indians painted her with a halo and western clothes. And those are the ones that sell today” (57).

The narrative arc involves a snowstorm, an event and murders—and these are handled without splattergore that re-nominates the book as community friendly.

In circumstances where someone who likes to read might find themselves in a situation where the satisfaction of length of achieved, but with a lighter draw upon situational concentration...perhaps even a picnic... The Pot Thief series will certainly entertain.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago. Check out her author page on Amazon.