Lettre Sauvage - Editions

Editions...

Riffs on a couplet. The happenstance of a brushstroke. This is the alchemy of words and images. A playground for experimentation with ideas and methods, chance and intention, literary and artistic traditions. Lettre Sauvage collaborates with artists and writers to create new, often surprising combinations which frequently arrive by accident, late in the evening.

Lettre Sauvage editions are currently part of the following collections: Getty Research Institute, UCLA Library Department of Special Collections, Electio Editions, The Library of Michigan, and the Mutanabbi Street Starts Here — Broadside Suite. The press also creates broadsides for visiting poets at the University of Southern California. The Annual Lettre Sauvage Poetry Contest (PDF) commences in 2008 with an edition of chapbooks for first place and broadsides for second.

Anne Carson “4th Choral Ode” from Euripides’ HIPPOLYTOS	Stephen Dunn “In the Open Field” broadside	Fiona Spring & Cameron Leggett WINE POETRY VIRTUE book	Erin Bertram WINDFALL chapbook contest winner	Kim Andrews “As in Nowhere, No-One” broadside contest winner
Lettre Sauvage “the Forest Drive” chapbook	Genevieve Yue NEGATIVE SKY book	Mark Irwin LONG PORTRAIT chapbook	Mark Irwin “When I Died” broadside	Ben Jackson COQUI, COQUI folio

Community Studio

Lettre Sauvage studio offers personalized lessons in the craft of letterpress printing for individuals and groups of up to four. Use of the press is available to experienced printers.

Printing Lesson

By appointment

Learn to operate the press. Basics of typesetting, inking, preparing paper and making the press ready to print will be covered.

Taught by Fiona Spring

$35 per hour per person

$50 per hour for a group of 2-4 working on the same project.

Studio Rental

By appointment

After one or two lessons, students may wish to work on a solo project. Lettre Sauvage staff will be available to help with services like ordering and cutting paper and advising on printing and design issues. There is also a small library in the studio of books about books, printing, design and poetry.

Equipment includes:
Vandercook SP15
Pilot table-top press
Chandler and Price 10x15
Challenge 23" paper cutter

$20 the first hour, $10 each additional hour

	Windfall, a book of poems by Erin Bertram, is the winner of the first Lettre Sauvage Poetry Contest. "Spring-blown & ecstatic, the avid speech of Erin Bertram's poems awakens spirit to its core..." -Mark Irwin, contest judge 12 poems letterpressed and hand-sewn together on Crane’s Lettra #32 cotton paper. The cover art, printed on Stonehenge paper, is an original three-color woodblock print by John Charles Shippey.
$20
Limited edition of 102; designed and printed at Lettre Sauvage. 2010.

	The poem "As in Nowhere, No-One" by Kim Andrews was selected by Mark Irwin for the broadside award. From the Poem: "...Leap over the railing, into deep waters, reverse vertigo. / Swim towards the bottom. Away from the air." For the design of this broadside, hand-cut pieces of polymer were applied to a clean linoleum block and printed in multiple, overlapping colors.
$10.00
Limited edition of 75; designed and printed at Lettre Sauvage and signed by the author. 2010. 10" x 13"

	A limited edition broadside featuring the 4th Choral Ode from Euripides' Hippolytos (1268-1281), translated by Anne Carson. Hippolytos was published as a part of Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (NYRB Classics, 2006). It was also the inaugural play directed by Stephen Sachs at the reopened Getty Villa in September 2006. Anne Carson is a poet, essayist, and translator, as well as a professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of Michigan. She remarks in her preface to the book, “There is in Euripides some kind of learning that is always at the boiling point. It breaks experiences open and they waste themselves, run through your fingers. Phrases don't catch them, theories don't hold them, they have no use. It is a theater of sacrifice in the true sense. Violence occurs; through violence we are intimate with some characters on stage in an exorbitant way for a brief time; that's all it is.”
$35
Limited edition of 150. The dimensions are 7” x 10”. Using an antique letterpress, the broadsides were printed from copper plates on Twinrocker handmade papers in two colors, Cripple Creek and Sagebrush. They were then scorched with smoldering tea leaves and a butane torch.

	An original broadside by Stephen Dunn. Dunn won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for Different Hours, and is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey. “In The Open Field” was published in The Insistence of Beauty by Norton in 2004. On the collection, The Literary Review remarks, “Dunn's poems reveal a mind alive within its own inner-circlings, the transforming power of loss, the fictions that lead to the core of our truths, the possibility and reality of loving another again.”
$35
Limited edition of 176. The dimensions are 7" x 13". Using an antique letterpress, it was printed from copper dies and a linoleum block onto Ingres printmaking papers. Each broadside varies slightly. All broadsides were printed by Lettre Sauvage in March 2007. Each is signed and numbered by Dunn.