Introduction
Mesopotamian scribes, some 4,000 years ago, used reeds to write on clay tablets shaped like eggs, prisms, and animal paws. Ancient Egyptians wrote and illustrated papyrus scrolls, rolled them in linen, and sealed them in earthenware jars. It was common for Chinese scrolls to be folded into fan or accordian-style books. Medieval manuscripts were written with organic inks and illuminated with gold hammered as thin as a butterfly wing.
Books today are gray, lifeless things in comparison. Uniform, rectangular stacks of generic paper, mechanically printed and bound in cheap, cardboard covers, they are designed to accommodate the bookstore’s shelf more than the author’s intention. The book’s legacy of sculptural richness and textural complexity has been betrayed.
While the books of Brighton Press seem radically sensual next to the mass-produced volumes churned out by big publishing houses each year, they are actually extensions of some of the oldest and most fundamental traditions in bookmaking. Whether one-of-a-kind or printed in small editions, they are crafted individually, their materials purposefully resonant with the images and ideas within. Brighton Press books embody a peculiarly tight fusion of intentions, content, form, and design, a democratic union of words, images, and structure, sculpture and literature.
The books may be linked to tradition but never are they bound by convention. Bill Kelly, founder and co-director of the Press, speaks of a desire to “break the square.” The results are intensely tactile: small aqua folios that evoke the fluid undulations of 
water (“Poem Made of Water ”), or torn edges of a print that, like tense caresses, define the contours of the model’s neck (“She Said: I Tell You It Doesn’t Hurt Me”). If the books begin with the human touch in mind, so do they become fully realized only in the hands of the reader. The reader—viewer, user, or more accurately, reveling collaborator—completes each work through a rhythmic ritual of opening, uncovering, turning, and unfolding. It is a dance of sorts, a performance that cannot be passive, for in touching these pages, the reader confronts the passion of their makers.
Mallarmé once compared the typographical arrangement of a poem to a musical score, for we hear it as we read. Just as words become sounds, so too do they become images, and the images, sensations. Aspiring toward an art that engages hand, eye, and mind with equal fervor, Brighton Press encourages the components of a book to shift and share roles freely. Words and images transcend their presumed boundaries to spawn verbal sculpture, visual poetry, “syllables that are rattles that are seeds” (Octavio Paz, Convergences [San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987], p. 8), images that echo sounds, pages that embrace as they are embraced.
Brighton Press books are difficult to categorize. They belong, albeit as rebellious offshoots, to the family tree that William Morris planted in England in 1890, when he started the Kelmscott Press. Aiming to reprise the dignity of craft in an era overtaken by vulgar, anonymous industrial production, Morris wrote, “I began printing books with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty.” Kelly and the Press’s co-director Michele Burgess certainly value a fine product as well, but they also have a profound commitment to the exploratory process itself, the intuitive tumble into unfamiliar terrain. Questions and tangents guide them more than formulas, assumptions, and patterns as they continually push to reinvent and redefine the book. They choose artists [and writers] to work with, according to Burgess, “based on their ability to help us expand how we see.”
The Press’s products could just as easily be labeled “artist’s books,” for the privileged access they grant the reader to the maker’s unmediated expression. They are intimate and immediate. They nurture a new kind of literacy, a sensual literacy beyond the direct reading of words and images. In the variety of their materials and approaches, Brighton Press books undermine assumptions about what a book is supposed to be, even as they celebrate the bookmaking tradition.
Broadly defined, books are “a collection of surfaces to receive writing for the purpose of communicating ideas” (Leila Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books [Chicago: American Library Association and London: The British Library, 1991], p. 1). But it takes two to communicate, and the creations of Brighton Press propose that a book is, fundamentally, a confluence of relationships—between text and image, type and the page, form and function, writer/artist and reader, space and time, poetry and music, prints and passion, potential and actuality.
—Leah Ollman, January 16, 1993, Brighton Press Catalog for Palomar College Retrospective Exhibition
What follows here is by way of dealing with the questions raised about my relationship with Bill Kelly and Brighton Press when we were putting together our artist’s book. We worked on this project over a long period of time—several years, off and on—and in various places. It’s difficult to speak in a few sentences about the nature of what was, for me, an extraordinary period of time, but here goes:
I have never had a more rewarding experience than the days I spent working with the people at Brighton Press. The physical work of putting together our book often seemed quite secondary to our conversations as we explored ideas of what we might want in such a book. Bill, who actually bore the burden of the physical labor, might disagree, but I found this absolutely exciting.
Sending a manuscript to a commercial publisher usually ends a process that begins with the solitary but intimate act of writing poems. Except for a few choices, perhaps, left to the poet, his poems move off into the opacity of the publisher’s house; they become invisible and no longer “at hand.”
The purpose of Brighton Press seems, quite literally, to keep every facet of the creative process continually “at hand.” What was once solitary becomes rich with the continual give and take of shared work; what was intimate grows deeper in the mutual desire to envision the whole.
The book we produced together belongs equally to both of us. It is, as one might expect, a beautiful book. In all truth, however, I must say that I felt some sadness when the book was finally in my hands. The work was at an end, although in some essential way it remains with me.
I hope that this conveys some small sense of how privileged I felt in working with Brighton Press.
—Peter Everwine
I first visited the Press with Jerry Rothenberg when I was teaching at UCSD in the Fall of 1992. I had already met Bill and Michele at the private view of an exhibition “Phillips/Tilson/Tyson” at UCSD. I was very interested in what they were doing and it was suggested at that point that Brighton might publish a collaboration between Jerry and myself. Like good wine this took some time to mature. I was back in San Diego in 1998 and after some reconsidering as to the form it eventually saw the light in 2003 for Diane Rothenberg’s birthday. I was greatly impressed with the care with which it was done. Another project around that time was a book with Jerry relating to his autobiography but after a lot of discussion I couldn’t find a way into this and it was dropped from my end but is still maturing at the Press I believe. The next Brighton/Tyson piece was the superbly printed “Surimono” commissioned by Mandeville Special Collections Library for the retrospective exhibition of my archives in April 2004. It was around this time that the current “work in progress,” Ghost, was conceived. This has been a true collaboration fed from both sides, moving from my own texts to those of Li He (Li Ho). The images are developments from the previous “Surimono” idea and have required great expertise to print and I can’t imagine them better. Working with Brighton one values the painstaking care and attention each piece takes, a slow thoughtfulness one accepts as essential to the end result. Working on projects from a distance makes for difficulties but these are always minimised by continual discussion. The fact that Bill and Michele are personally involved with the creative process is the most important aspect of the Press’s identity. My only question is—what are we going to do next?
—Ian Tyson
Working with Brighton Press was for me a joy in many ways. Bill and Michele paired me with an artist whose work I deeply admired, and who, I was convinced, understood my poems exactly as I wished them to be understood. The creation of the book from start to finish was a long process, and there were many delays along the way, but every delay resulted in an 
improvement to the design of the book. Who but Brighton Press could make you relish delays? The most important feeling for me, however, came on the day the finished book arrived and I unwrapped it for a look. The sense that I had then was that I had been given the rare opportunity to make art twice. One always feels pleasure and pride at finishing a poem, but opening my Brighton Press book for the first time gave me feelings of pleasure and pride that were even greater than when I had written the poems. My poems had been elevated into a whole new esthetic realm by being so beautifully presented. The wine was the same, but when it was served in a beautiful vessel, it tasted a whole lot better, and nobody creates a more beautiful vessel than Brighton Press.
—C. G. Hanzlicek
The books of Brighton Press are not predictable. They are not marked by the flavor of a dominant personality, as are books by Baskin or Van Vliet. They are—each one, and every one—perfectly realized books. Every element of each book they publish belongs, every choice is quietly right, each volume is, inevitably, perfectly itself. They don’t think of putting poems and images in a book, they think book.
As an artist who has collaborated with the Press, I know something about how they do things—persuade, cajole, or trick artists into surpassing themselves in their contributions. They helped me (I’m putting this rather kindly) make decisions about my work I could not have made myself. Their books frequently represent the finest examples of work by the artists with whom they collaborate—has Manuel Neri, Faith Ringgold, or Harry Sternberg ever been so revealing, so direct, so unassuming, and so much themselves?
—Brian D. Cohen, Bridge Press
“When the opportunity for creating a book with Brighton Press first presented itself in the early Spring of 1993, I was in the throes of finishing a rather complex assembly of sculpture and drawings entitled The Christopher Whitby Coloring Book. The piece was far enough advanced that I was experiencing that familiar ecstatic desperation that occurs with all endings of intense involvement . . . that hiatus between works however brief when an artist is most undefended and vulnerable. My first impulse was to reject, or at least put off until some future date, this opportunity with remarks such as, ‘too precious,’ ‘commercial,’ ‘limiting,’ etc., etc. . . . and then Michele used the word ‘pagination’. . . and now, nearly one year later, the book Procrustes Inn Register is the intellectual base for the Procrustes project whose culmination will be a large sculpture which will include the seven pages of Procrustes Inn Register transcribed into a predella. It would seem that the making of this book at this time is a natural sequential pagination of my process as an artist and as a person. It was unavoidable . . .”
—Robert Cremean