Dates

• Existence: Established 2009

Biography

The Crater Press is an independent poetry press based between London and Santiago de Chile. The Crater Press began in 2009 with Crater 0, an A6, 16 page group pamphlet containing very short poems by Michael Kindellan, Harry Gilonis, Jonty Tiplady, Robert Rehder, Joel Duncan, Francesca Lisette, Sara Crangle, Daniel Kane, Gareth Farmer, Tom Raworth, Stephen Rodefer and Alex Pestell. This was produced on letterpress in a run of 58. Until 2014 everything Crater produced was done on letterpress, using a mixture of FAG and Vandercook proofing presses, printing on a variety of paper stocks (mostly Fabriano Accademia) and with various types of ink. Elizabeth Guthrie’s X Portraits (2011) features hand-painted sections and a hand-made block, while Sarah Kelly’s TONO (2014) is printed on hand-made paper.

Among the most ambitious volumes published by Crater Press are Keston Sutherland’s 'The Stats on Infinity' (2010), a fifteen page black and white A4 pamphlet, and Gwen Muren’s 'Glitch' (2014), an eight-page, six colour pamphlet which features lots of complicated, multi-colour over-printing.

Crater's first few years’ worth of pamphlets were printed at Inkspots Press in Brighton, with the assiduous help of John Packer and Les Ellis. Crater 2, Jonty Tiplady’s 'Above Shoes by Some Margin', was printed on a Vandercook press at Central Saint Martins in London in October 2009, while Crater 20, Jeff Hilson’s 'From ORGAN MUSIC: AN ANTI-MASQUE NOT FOR DANCING' was printed on a terrifying old Spanish machine in Mataró in Catalunya in July 2012. From 2014 Crater's letterpress work has been printed at the London Centre for Book Arts, while the press has also begun publishing a number of full-length volumes using digital Print On Demand methods. Among Crater's POD volumes are Tim Atkins’s 'Petrarch Collected Atkins' (2014) and 'Leg Avant: The New Poetry of Cricket' (2016). Crater Press has also done some conventionally printed poster-poems, including Jeff Hilson’s 'A Ritual Poem Against the Sea' (2014) and Amy De’Ath’s Crater 31 (2015).

The Crater Press won the Michael Marks Prize for poetry pamphlet publishing in 2011.

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