From our friends at Watershed Press:

This book features 11 conversations with Robert Bringhurst. Open this book to any page and you will find a compelling, plainspoken discussion of an interesting subject. It might be the relations between poetry and carpentry, the growth of introspection in music for the lute, the convoluted fabric of Hopi/Navajo relations, or the development, on the Northwest Coast of North America, of a range of oral literatures rivaling those of ancient Italy and Greece. No cocktails are served, but there are plenty of good eats.

Robert Bringhurst is a celebrated poet, essayist, linguist, translator, and typographer. Incidentally, he is also a pretty good carpenter, forester, mountaineer, and field naturalist who has worked for extended periods in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He was born in Los Angeles in 1946 and has lived on the British Columbia coast for fifty years. Along the way, he has written a number of books, both poetry and prose.

To purchase a copy, temporarily at a launch discount:

Our friends in Canada can buy the Canadian version of the book, published by our friends at Gaspereau Press.

There is also a deluxe cloth edition of the book with a strict limitation of 100 copies, each signed by Bringhurst. The book is currently being bound, but if you are interested in reserving a copy, please drop me a line at wirthj@seattleu.edu. The cost is $100 + $6 shipping.

Finally, to celebrate the appearance of this book, we have a beautiful letterpress broadside printed by Sally Green at the renowned Brooding Heron Press. Each copy is signed by Bringhurst, has a strict limitation of 60 copies, and features the following lines from Buying the Ghosts a Drink:

Good carpenters get interested in wood. They stop thinking of it as board feet of lumber and start to see it as tissue – liv­ing tissue whose life has been arrested and whose form has been, for a while at least, preserved. They start to collaborate with the wood instead of simply sawing it up and nailing it back together. That’s how I try to work with wood myself, and that’s the way I like to work with language. Few things interest me less than regular picket fences or purely formalist verse, but sensual and intellectual pleasure both interest me a lot. A good piece of carpentry makes you want to reach out and touch it. A good piece of writing makes you want to say the words aloud, to feel them in your mouth and in your mind. That’s not everything in life, but it’s a part of what I’m after.