Naming the Press

The Hermetic Press is named after one of the Troyer ornaments cast by American Type Foundry. A scarab. The device embodied my vision of the private press: individual, self-contained, impenetrable. It also suggested my interest in visual poetry and semiotics. Settling on it was like setting a line of type and finding that the last character made for a perfect fit.

I only used the device once, as a printer’s mark on a title page; but now some forty years later, these divagations on printing and poetry seem the ideal place for it to reappear.