Seripress (1972 - 1981)
Dates
- Existence: 1972 - 1981
Biography
Seripress began in 1972, and was officially register in April 1973. It was established by the artist Barbara Caruso, out of necessity as a means of publishing 'The Adventures of Milt the Morph in Colour', Caruso’s first collaboration with the poet bpNichol. Caruso’s husband, Nelson Ball, encouraged Barbara to start her own press. She thought carefully about it, wanting to ‘make something under my hand, using my art’.
Seripress was intended solely for the publication of concrete and visual poetry. It published work by Steve McCaffery, David Aylward, Stephen Scobie, and Mike Doyle, as well as Nichol and Nelson Ball. Most of the titles were silkscreened throughout, which enabled Caruso to use colour if required. Wherever colours were used, she mixed them herself.
Some manuscripts arrived with illustrations already supplied by the poet. Caruso sometimes redrew these illustrations in order that they transferred well to silkscreen. She also cut letters by hand. The hand-cut images and letters were placed on to profilm sheets (a lacquer gel on plastic) to make a stencil, which would then be fixed to the silk screen of the press. The pages were hand-printed; Caruso did not use photo-silkscreen methods. After each title was printed, the profilm stencil was dissolved from the screen, ensuring that the title could not be printed again using that original plate. Even the folders in which the titles were housed were handmade by Caruso. As it turned out, the inks and solvents used in the printing process made Caruso ill. In response to this she formally closed Seripress in 1981.
Barbara Caruso designed Seripress to be profit-making; the profits were used to support her painting. While she ran Seripress, she painted; and all the while she theorized tirelessly about colour, art, and poetry.
During the eleven-year lifespan of Seripress, Caruso published twenty-one titles, all of which were printed at her studio in Toronto. The final four titles, all by Nichol, were published in 1979, the last one being Movies, which consists of ten loose leaves in a card folder. Later, when Caruso and Nelson moved to Paris, Ontario, she began another small press (small, literally and figuratively) called presspresspress, the output of which she gave away as gifts to friends, never selling any of these productions.