Anyone who has ever set type by hand knows it is a labor of love. Meticulously assembling slivers of lead to spell out words, lines, and pages for an imagined book is not for the faint hearted or stumble fingered. It takes patience and pleasure in miniature physical intricacy, driven by desire to send writing out into the world in practical, handsome packages.
Lyn Hejinian started her series of 50 handmade Tuumba Press pamphlets in 1976 as a social literary undertaking. “For poetry to exist,” she wrote, “it has to be given meaning, and for meaning to develop there must be communities of people thinking about it. Publishing books as I did was a way of contributing to such a community—even a way of helping to invent it.”
She made the first 11 Tuumba books in Willits, a northern California timber and cow town where she learned letterpress printing as a cleaning lady volunteer in a local job shop. She printed the rest on an old hand-fed press in a small room off the kitchen in the Berkeley house where she and her partner, musician Larry Ochs, settled in 1977, about the time she became part of the nascent community of poets and writers in the Bay Area and beyond who would later be known as Language writers. From then until the series was complete in 1984, she mostly commissioned manuscripts from that community and its extended network, averaging six titles a year. With editions usually of 450, ranging from a dozen to 40 pages, the amount of work for a solo publisher/maker was prodigious. A local author might be invited to help collate and staple the finished product.
A word from Lyn about staples: “I wanted the Tuumba books to come to people in the mode of ‘news’—in this sense, rather than ‘chapbook’ perhaps one should say ‘pamphlet.’ It is for this reason, by the way, that I didn’t handsew the books; they are all stapled—a transgression in the world of fine printing but highly practical in the world of pamphleteering.” The distinction is worth noticing. Tuumba books were made to be read, not collected. But they were lovely to hold and behold, often with a small linecut cover image or two, using colored ink, sometimes carried over to the title page.
Lyn’s publishing ventures continued, with the Atelos and Nion Editions collaborative imprints, as well as occasional offset-printed Tuumba titles. But I want to locate in the Tuumba series the early expression of Lyn’s overarching generosity and unstinting care for the writers and writing that she believed in.
It was a case of lifelong care and attention that didn’t just border on love, it often crossed over, as anyone who came within her sphere can attest.
Lyn’s quotes are from her Tuumba Press history at Steve Clay’s “From a Secret Location” website.