Human Parts of Me Want to Eat the Flowers off of Trees will be for sale at Colette in Paris in conjunction with the Off Off Bowery exhibit, which opens today and runs until November 1st.

Howard Junker, editor of ZYZZYVA, generously agreed to a brief interview about his letterpress history. 

Jessalyn Wakefield : Describe your experience with letterpress printing and hand composition of type. 

Howard Junker : I think I had a beginner’s printing press when I was about eight. The type was rubber. It took forever to make a word, so I didn’t get very far.

When I was ten, my Cub Scout den visited the NY Journal-American. We saw typesetting by Linotype and were given a few sample letters.

When I was 19, my family moved a half block from the Morgan Library so I began to look at illuminated manuscripts and the great printed texts in that collection.

Jump to 1981, when Ben Sonnenberg started a literary magazine called Grand Street, ostensibly to dissipate his inheritance-he was ashamed of the way his father made his fortune (public relations). Ben had it hand set. It was very beautiful and because he paid writers well and had good taste, it was a pleasure to read.

When I started ZYZZYVA in 1985, the first president of the board was a book collector and for the first couple years he did little profiles of fine printers: Harold Berliner, Robin Heyeck, Ward Ritchie, and Leigh McLellan. Tim Appelo wrote about the Sea Pen Press. Steve Corey, curator of special collections at the at USF, profiled Poltroon Press and Wesley B. Tanner. Eloise Klein Healy wrote on Susan King. Peter Koch wrote about himself.

The Bay Area has always been rich in letterpress, and I’ve visited the presses of Jack Stauffacher et al. And stop by the SF Center for the Book whenever I have a chance.

JW : Did you have an instructor or mentor who guided your typographic education?

HJ : I learned a lot from Sandy Kirschenbaum who was publishing FINE PRINT in town. And from Andrew Hoyem, who, when I had just started ZYZZYVA, had begun raising the bar for letterpress with the $1,000 edition of Moby-Dick.

JW : Do you feel that your experiences with older methods of printing have impacted the way ZYZZYVA is approached (or has been approached in the past), as compared with younger literary magazines? 

HJ : Sure. I care about the texture of type. I have it in mind as an ideal.

I love the way letterpress bites into the page. I wish our offset words didn’t sit on the surface as they do.

I love the way letterpress books are usually so lavishly empty, with such care taken in every dimension of the layout.

I try, rather clumsily, to be inspired by them.

I instructed our original designer, Tom Ingalls, to give us a classic look: no postmodern pull quotes, no text submerged in color, no huge illustrations illustrating nothing.

Generous margins. Footers. A customized Bembo. Bios as a postscript at the end of each text, not segregated in the back of the book as Contributors’ Notes. Lots of ads (all in the front of the book, right after the table of contents), as many as we can sell-and the last page devoted to a list of our advertisers: “ZYZZYVA is backed by:”

At first, we used just a few pages of art, originally in b&w (so the loss in translation to our b&w page would be minimized). The art is not illustration, but has been gathered from galleries, mostly, independently and stands on its own. (Of course, when a story describes a horse and we have an image of a horse….)

Now we have at least one page of art before and after every text. This has become a litmag standard. We include 20 or so artists per issue, about a third of whom do not have gallery representation.

JW : How was the first issue of ZYZZYVA printed in 1985? How is it printed today?

HJ : Unfortunately, we’ve always been offset. But in the early days we did a few letterpress blow-ins by Eric Johnson, Susan King, Gerald Lange & Robin Price, and Emily McVarish.

The copies of Human Parts of Me Want to Eat the Flowers off of Trees have arrived! You can purchase them from the am i human website. The book is $12, shipping is $3 in the United States and Canada and $5 overseas. You may send checks or cash - a total of $15 for domestic and Canadian orders and $17 international - to:

Jessalyn Wakefield
1628 Bellevue Avenue
Apartment B2
Seattle WA 98122

This is a collection of stories I’ve been working on over the past year, centering on themes of God and women.

Special thanks to everyone who preordered, your financial support has been invaluable

Your anger is a gift.

Raoul was in town last week (or the week before? I’m a mess these days!) and it was delightful to see him. I asked him a couple of months ago if he would be interested in allowing me to print a chapbook of his poetry. He sweetly agreed. He tells me that that the work is nearing completion and I’m hoping to have the book done by the end of the year, but we’ll see! I don’t want to rush it and I’m currently studio-less.

I’ve been packing like mad and ran across two business cards from The Regional Assembly of Text that I picked up when I went to visit Raoul earlier in the summer. This little shop was so charming! They have an amazing zine and self published book collection. My favorite piece was an original handmade copy of Jordan Crane’s The Last Lonely Saturday. But I adored their button-making station. You can type up your own buttons on their typewriter, or color them with pencils and markers, and you see all those drawers on the front page? I was over the moon when the woman helping me opened a drawer and just pulled out the button maker and all the supplies. It seemed almost wizardly. I would love to know what wonders are hiding in the rest of the cabinet. If you’re ever in Vancouver you should absolutely add this place to your list of things to do.

Also, the San Francisco Center for the Book’s steamroller print making event is next week. Rich and I have volunteered the past two years as part of the inky hands crew (mixing, application and clean up). I’m sad to be missing out this time around, it’s always been a blast. Last year we also participated by carving smaller linoleum blocks which were printed with the steam roller and offered for sale as part of the fundraiser. don’t go small god was my contribution. If you’re in the Bay Area I highly recommend this event.

Rich inking in 2006

I was very ill last week and this week I’m just in over my head: moving and a new job on top of a wildly exciting and achingly sad personal life. I’ve got so much to say and no time to say it. I hope things will settle down into a routine within a few weeks so I’ll have time to use this journal more. There are new projects in the air and I really really really want to talk about Eric Gill.

For a quick update, Rich told me about this great residency at the Penland School of Crafts. It’s aimed at giving people with little no or letterpress experience a chance to work with master printers. It sounds phenomenal, and Penland’s facilities are incredible! If you’re driven, it’s not too late to apply, but the application needs to be mailed in soon soon soon.