#dikko faust

It’s Fine Press Friday!

Halloween is just around the corner and in the spirit of all things weird and spooky this Fine Press Friday we present the peculiar Purgatoys letterpress printed by Dikko Faust and Esther K. Smith at their Purgatory Pie Press in an edition of 150 signed copies. The Purgatoys are a collection of interactive paper oddities from five different book artists in collaboration with Smith and Faust. They were printed on a Vandercook-4 press, and they are encased in a black portfolio made by Patricia Clark. The five toys in the set are:

Buggy Night by Judy Hoffman, 1999

Miss Manageability by Harvey Redding, 2000

The Happersett Accordion by Susan Happersett, 2001

The Divine Diviner by Stephanie Brody Lederman, 2001

Transmorgri-Factory by Chris Collicott, 2004

Richard Goodman writes for Fine Books & Collections magazine:

“Purgatory Pie Press is a husband and wife affair, with Dikko Faust the typographer and printer, and Esther Smith, his wife, the designer. The press is located in TriBeCa, in lower New York City, in rather cramped quarters that contain a small Vandercook Press, drawers of type safely tucked away, and everything else very much demonstrating various works in progress in different states of completion. Faust was the first to come to New York, and then Smith followed shortly thereafter. They married in 1980, and their first joint project—Faust had already printed several books of poetry—was their wedding invitation.”

Esther K. Smith and Dikko Faust were the visiting artists in our 2015 Ettinger Book Artist Series. You can read a wonderful article on the Purgatory Pie Press here.

View more Fine Press Friday posts.

Typography Tuesday

Some typographic noodlings by Dikko Faust and Esther K. Smith of Purgatory Pie Press in New York City, including examples of Dikko’s typographic tessellations. 

From top to bottom:

“Typo-Cat,” 2015, from Max’s personal collection.

Two images of the typographic wrapper for Artist Tracts: Five Collaborative Letterpress Triptychs, 1997.

Four pages from Six by Six by Six, typographic poems by Richard Tipping, 1999.

The final tessellation page spread from Dikko Faust’s Dja'de, 2014.

Below: animated gif from the 2013 artists book Pinwheel Pulsar: A Geometric Story.

It’s Fine Press Friday!

This week we present the letterpress-printed artist’s book Reflections on Golda: On the 100th Anniversary of Her Birth, printed in an edition of 125 copies and 10 artist’s proofs in 1998. Our copy is one of the artist’s proofs. The book was conceived, designed, and produced by New York City artist and graphic designer Carol Hamoy who signed the edition. The text was set in Monotype Bembo by Michael and Winifred Bixler, and printed letterpress in gold by Dikko Faust. Esther K. Smith invented the Star of David structure and hand-sewed the coptic binding in Japanese cloth-covered boards with a gold-foil and beaded collage of Golda Meir on the front cover. The text is a compilation of personal reflections on Golda Meir’s character by her women friends and colleagues.

Besides its design, printing, and structure, we present this work for a couple of other reasons. First, we have confirmed in the past week that the binder and printer for this book, Esther K. Smith and Dikko Faust of Purgatory Pie Press in New York City, will be the visiting artists in our annual Ettinger Book Artist Series this fall in the week of November 2. Yay!! (Esther also maintains a pretty nifty Tumblr site, eksmithmuseum.)

Second, here in Milwaukee we claim Golda Meir as a home-town daughter. Although she was born in Kiev in 1898, her family moved to Milwaukee in 1905 where she was raised and educated, attending the Fourth Street Grade School (now the Golda Meir School), graduating from North Division High School, and attending teacher’s college at Milwaukee Normal School, a predecessor institution to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). The building that houses the UWM Libraries is named in her honor, the Golda Meir Library.