Kura Prophetic Messenger (Part 1)

So, last year in late July, I got a call from my friend Richard Bresnahan about collaborating on a big new project. Now this sort of thing does not happen often and the sheer magnitude of the idea was immense. It scared me for a minute, scared in the way that you know you are going to do something but terrified in a motivating sorta way. I mean, this is Richard Bresnahan, the guy does not go around asking people to collaborate all willy nilly. This was intentional and important and I accepted the challenge.

Richard came out to the print shop with a packet of information: schematics, drawings, plans, pictures, you name it, he had been planning this out forever. It was intimidating but so exciting! The thought of working on ONE THING for the next 9 months was a dream come true. Giddy yup I said, we agreed on budget and we were off!

The explanation of this project has to happen in stages… but the gist is that I will be letterpress printing The Rule Of St. Benedict. Since we started in about September, it has been working with the text: studying it, working with some lovely Benedictine nuns: Sister Katherine Howard, OSB and Sister Michaela Hedican, OSB. I am going to be doing about 20+ linoleum images too so we had to layout the pages and text and then find the spots where the images could live. So much work, I enlisted the help of Judy Gilats, who has worked on religious books and publications for over 30 years! Then we had to shop around for paper, thanks to the paper people at Wet Paint we agreed on a lovely Thai Mulberry. Richard and I wanted to do the entire project in hand-set type but it just simply was not realistic for our timeline. We reached out to Boxcar Press in New York and they agreed to make the polymer plates for all the text so that we could begin printing. That is the very start of this and there will be more updates to come!