
This is a journal issue that celebrates not the publisher Coach House Press that went bankrupt in 1996 but the Coach House printing business that still operates under its founder Stan Bevington. Each copy comes with a loose print of a photo that Bevington took of the small workroom that was the Coach House printshop for its first two years.
The issue begins with a reprint of Dennis Reid’s “The Old Coach House Days,” a short memoir of those years between its founding in November 1964 and its design and printing in late 1967 of bpNichol’s bp, a boxed collection of loose visual poems, a chapbook, a flip book, and a small vinyl recording – together remembered here by Reid by the chapbook’s title, “Journeying and the Returns.” This is followed by a pair of articles by John Maxwell, “The Early ‘Digital’ Period,” on the computerization of Coach House typesetting in the 1970s and 80s, and by printer Tim Inkster, “A Pair of KORDs,” on the evolution of offset printing at the press. Then comes a photo-essay by Sandra Traversy, “A Short Walk around the Perimeter of a Heidelberg KORD,” a