Chester River Press

03/23/2025

Chesterriverpress.com is down for revision. Wil be back up end of April.

12/31/2023

Happy New year from Mad Parrot Press. Image ©2021 by Vladimir Zimakov for MPP's "The Wind in the Willows."

11/30/2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbtE2o5tCHg

11/25/2021

Deep Wood Press and Chester River Press dance again as Mad Parrot Press with Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows limited edition. Shipping soon.

www.madparrotpress.com

06/26/2021

New From Chester River Press
For Not Finding you by Robert Day

From the Preface

"My novel The Last Cattle Drive was first published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1977. There were good reviews in the New York Times and in many other papers around the country. It was a Book-of-Month-Club selection. Secker and Warburg in London (George Orwell's publisher) brought out a fine edition to excellent reviews in the papers and on the BBC. Both the British and the US publishers issued second printings, and both later brought out paperback editions. As it happened, when the first edition came out, I was in New York to see Tim Seldes at Russell and Volkening, my agent in those days, and he took me for a ride up Fifth Avenue to see that Scribner's windows were filled with the hardcover editions.

By now the novel has never been out of print, and these days it exists in a special anniversary edition published by the University of Kansas Press. It's as if the book has been my friend all these years, although long ago I stopped giving readings from it and explaining how with glee I ripped off Mark Twain and Vladimir Nabokov. There is more to say later about this, but in the meantime, how come it has taken all these years until now for me to write a sequel?" ~Robert Day

NOW ON AMAZON

04/15/2021

A favorite of mine by woodcut artist Andy English. andyenglish.com

02/05/2021

12/28/2020

CRP just finished an interesting biographical novel by Virgil Demery. Voyage to Wadidly is the story of Black man careening between the social structures of the North and South but with an eye on understanding both and transcending them. It's raw and complicated—like the life he led.

11/19/2020

Looking for a top-rated Editor for your book manuscript? I highly recommend Gerry Cataldo.

https://chesrivlit.com/

Chester River Literary Solutions Editing, writing, and manuscript preparation services for authors. Gerard Cataldo Welcome Writing is a solitary task, but one thing we writers learn is that we can't do everything ourselves! We are certainly not our best editors, nor are most of us adept at stepping....

01/24/2020

01/24/2020

"Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favorite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.

"Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography. There is the long, thin stem that obviates fingerprints on the bowl. Why? Because no cloud must come between your eyes and the fiery heart of the liquid. Are not the margins on book pages similarly meant to obviate the necessity of fi*****ng the type-page? Again: the glass is colourless or at the most only faintly tinged in the bowl, because the connoisseur judges wine partly by its colour and is impatient of anything that alters it. There are a thousand mannerisms in typography that are as impudent and arbitrary as putting port in tumblers of red or green glass! When a goblet has a base that looks too small for security, it does not matter how cleverly it is weighted; you feel nervous lest it should tip over. There are ways of setting lines of type which may work well enough, and yet keep the reader subconsciously worried by the fear of 'doubling' lines, reading three words as one, and so forth."

"The Crystal Goblet or Printing Should be Invisible"
from Beatrice Warde, The Crystal Goblet, Sixteen Essays on Typography, Cleveland, 1956

03/28/2019

Review of our "Moon As Bright As Water".

As a reader more than a collector, I’m blessed that I enjoy poetry as much as I do. For poetry readers, there is much more reading available in private press books than, say, a reader of novels or …