A few words about Barbarian Press By Crispin and Jan Elsted We founded Barbarian Press in Boughton Monchelsea, Kent, in 1977, having conceived a love for beautifully printed books and a determination to see what we could do ourselves in that line. We were trained in letterpress printing by Graham Williams at the Florin Press, and in 1978 we returned to Canada with presses and type and established the press on five wooded acres in Steelhead, British Columbia, near Mission, about 50 miles east of Vancouver in the Fraser Valley. Initially the press occupied an old shed on the property, but in 1988 leaking roofs, collapsing floors and overcrowding forced a change, and the barn was converted into a 1,000 square foot shop containing a pressroom and composing room. Barbarian Press is a full-time operation for both of us. Publication decisions and editing are shared, but generally the design and typesetting are done by Crispin, and the presswork by Jan. The type for the books is set entirely by hand. In 1996 we acquired a hand bindery which is housed in a wing off the main shop, and some of the binding is now done at the press, although much is still contracted out. The first book bound in-house was the 1996 publication Rufinus: The Complete Poems, which won the Alcuin Society Citation for Excellence in Book Design in Canada. Inishbream , a novella by Theresa Kishkan with wood engravings by John DePol, was published in 1999, and the binding of the regular and deluxe states of that edition were both carried out at the press under the direction of the award-winning Québecois binder Hélène Franc œur. Most recently, Rumour of a Shark was bound here. Barbarian Press remains an entirely letterpress operation. Our nine presses include three 19th century handpresses – a super royal Albion (1850), a foolscap folio Barrett Albion (1833), and a foolscap folio Sherwin & Cope Imperial (1854) – two Chandler & Price vertical platens, a Vandercook Universal One horizontal cylinder proof press, a Kelly B horizontal cylinder press, and the two Adana 8 by 5 tabletop presses with which we began the press, and which we still use for labels, cards and envelopes on occasion. The range of typefaces at the press includes a number of favoured text faces – Bembo, Joanna, Van Dijck, Poliphilus & Blado, and Cancelleresca Bastarda – and a good variety of titling and display faces and ornaments. Our aims have not substantially altered since we founded the press: to publish poetry, translations, classics and belles lettres in a style which both glorifies the text and reveals it to the reader with a minimum of interference. To these we have added an important interest in wood engraving, which began in 1984 with our commissioning Edwina Ellis to illustrate A Christmas Carol, or, The Miser ’s Warning , a pirated play based on Dickens ’ story and first produced in 1844. Since then we have issued several books with engravings, and in 1995 published Endgrain: Contemporary Wood Engraving in North America, a survey of 121 engravers, which Simon Brett called ‘a major achievement, a milestone in the documentation of wood engraving ’.
Barbarian Press is Mission-based company (British Columbia, Canada) with a phone number 6048268089. Our data show that the company is located at the address: 12375 Ainsworth St RR 8. The company has a web site: www.barbarianpress.com.
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