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I am finally founding my own rare book company. It’s called Type Punch Matrix -- a name which nods to the historical innovations of Gutenberg, but brings a modern sensibility to our work.
My co-founder is Brian Cassidy, a rare book dealer based in the Washington DC area. He is a faculty member at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar, and is currently developing a course on modern duplicating technologies for Rare Book School. We are working to launch a gallery in downtown DC in spring 2020.
TPM will sell a mixture of beloved classics and innovative texts, with quirky bits we just couldn’t resist: handpress and modern books, archives and manuscripts, letterpress and ephemera, for private collectors and institutions alike. We aim to make book collecting accessible and appealing to all. We believe that the mindful acquisition of material from our literary culture can be a deeply satisfying project with both personal and historical significance.
This event is bittersweet, as it means leaving Honey & Wax Booksellers, my professional home for the past three+ years. My colleague there, Heather O’Donnell, is one of the people I most respect in the rare book trade, and we’ve worked together seamlessly. I am so proud of what we accomplished during this time. But Type Punch Matrix has been calling me, and a number of important details just happened to fall into place this year. Heather has been incredibly supportive throughout this process; I couldn’t have asked for a better colleague while I carved my path forward. She and I will continue to work together whenever we can: I will remain a judge for the Honey & Wax Prize, which we co-founded in 2017, and together we are presenting at Rare Book School on “The Right and Wrong Ways to Collect” on July 10.
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