Taming of The Signatures

I spent the week folding about 800 pages of Lost Tales V by Lord Dunsany and then collating the pages into signatures.  The illustrations were scored and trimmed for insertion into the signatures.

I just need to print the spine titles and front board pastedowns and my part of the work will be finished!  It's nice to see the book becoming a completed entity.  The special pre-order price will end July 15th.  Here's a link to more information and how to order.


Rita is continuing binding work, please be patient as she has a lot of books to get through and it's slow and painstaking work to do it right.

I'll be starting on a Lovecraft broadside of one of his lesser known poems with a great period illustration.

Good and safe reading to everyone from Mike and Rita at Pegana Press.

New For 2020: Pegana Press Podcast

Several years back, we tried doing a Storycast, where we read rare stories.  We tried posting them on our blog and website, but didn’t really have the proper platform to do it.

Over time this idea has been resurrected in two ways.  One is where Mike Tortorello in partnership with Daven Tillinghast creates audio stories with music.  You can find out more about that on Dreamer’s Tales on Patreon .

The second evolution of Storycast comes in the form of a podcast on anchor . fm.  We’ve just put out our first episode.  You can listen on Pegana Press Podcast 

We hope to make this a regular thing and plan to release two episodes a month for now.

We invite you to join us.

Lost Tales Volume 5 Sneak Peek

Lost Tales Vol 5 available for pre-order at Pegana Press

Pegana Press Update for February 2020

From the Bindery:

First of all, Happy Spring.  The nights are frosty but the days are sunny with clear skies here in the Maritime Pacific Northwest.  I’ve got spring chicks in the brooder and seed catalogues are spread out before me.  But what I really want to talk about is what books are being bound right now here at Pegana Press.  The answer to that is-almost everything in our catalogue.

Thanks to the enthusiasm of our customers, we currently have sold out of bound copies of our books.  Which means I need to hustle.  So for the next several weeks I will be filling the book press with freshly bound copies of almost everything we have.  The books will need about 5 weeks to sit under weight after they’re bound and then once they get their titles they will be ready to put on the shelf, (or into a box to be shipped to their new home).

You can learn more about how I bind the books at Pegana Press, on our website at the bottom of the About Pegana Press page.

From the Press:

In other news Mike is busy working on Lost Tales volume 5.  A collection of more short stories from the pen of Lord Dunsany.  The Lost Tales series are ideal for Dunsany collectors, as they contain stories which are either previously uncollected or previously unpublished.  A real treasure provided to us all with the blessing of the Dunsany Estate.

The stories for this volume are currently being hand type set for letterpress on Hahnemühle paper.  You can learn more about the printing process at the link provided above.  

We are also excited to reveal that we have commissioned an original work from fantasy artist Amelia Leonards to use as frontispiece and are very much looking forward to see what she envisions for this piece.

Mike expects to be finished printing the book early this Summer.  Then he will hand it over to me at the bindery, where it will be bound uniform with the other Lost Tales volumes.

To find out more about the Lost Tales series or to pre-order a copy of Lost Tales volume 5, you may go to Pegana Press/Dunsany. 

Thank you for your interest in Pegana Press.

Pegana Press Celebrates 10 Years

It was about this time in July 10 years ago that Mike unpacked the restored Vandercook sp15 press which had just shipped from the Midwest to its new home in the Pacific Northwest, and Pegana Press became a part of our lives.

We feel very lucky to have come so far with this endeavor from a part time obsession to a full time business creating the kinds of books inspired from our early days of book collecting.  We want to thank others like us, who have supported our efforts by collecting our letterpress, hand made Pegana Press Books.  Together all of us keep the press alive.

The Men of Baldfolk...More Lost Tales

The Men of Baldfolk and Other Fanciful Tales is another edition of lost tales from the imagination of Lord Dunsany.  The content included in this book offers a range of styles from the humorous and whimsical to the dark and brooding to the thought provoking observations of a master story teller.

Visions of wonder and splendor await you in this volume.  From the archives at Dunsany Castle, these stories were shared by the curator, the majority of which were previously unpublished.  Also included in this volume are two very early essays hunted down by Mike and retrieved from The Saturday Review magazine.

Although the material presented in this book is of the Lost Tales, the book design was a departure from our usual Lost Tales volumes.  This book did not appear in chapbook format, and was letterpress printed on  paper of a green tint.  And we include a color Sime illustration, courtesy of Dunsany Castle, as frontispiece.

The signatures were sewn with green linen thread and the book was quarterbound at Ars Obscura in Seattle using paper and silk on boards.

The binding reminds us of an unpublished story which appears in this book titled The Book of Flowery Tales, which would have been at home in A Dreamer’s Tales.

This book is currently being offered at a special price through the end of July in celebration of our 9 year anniversary with Pegana Press.  You may find it on our website

Pegana Press - Since 2009

This month, we celebrate 9 years in business.  It was in July of 2009 that Mike acquired the Vandercook sp15 and Pegana Press came into being.

Since then Mike has printed 13 books and 3 broadsides.  Book number 14 is currently in the works.

To celebrate our 9th anniversary, we are offering A discount on selected books.

Paris, A Poem by Hope Mirrlees was the first book printed and released at Pegana Press.

The Men of Baldfolk by Lord Dunsany

Zothique Prism 1 and 2 by Clark Ashton Smith

These books are specially priced at 20% off the regular price through the month of July.  You can find them on our website.

Calling All Dunsany Fans: Lost Tales Volume 4

Lost Tales Volume 4 A collection of rare stories by Lord Dunsany

Available in a letterpress book from Pegana Press.

Frontispiece by Sidney Sime

Table of Contents 

Please visit our website for more information. 

News From Pegana Press

Lost Tales volume 4 pictured here with color frontispiece by Sidney Sime (courtesy of the Dunsany estate).  Rita is sewing these editions currently, and preparing the materials to begin binding them.  The first batch is expected to begin shipping in late February.

We will notify you when your copy ships!  😊

Update from Pegana Press

As the year draws to its conclusion, we are wrapping up another project at the press.  Mike tells me he only has the title page left to print and an introduction.  The test print has been done on a beautiful Color Sime illustration from the Dunsany estate and we will be moving forward getting the illustration printed.

Once these are complete, I will begin hand binding Lost Tales Volume 4, another collection of previously unpublished stories written by Lord Dunsany.

For details or to preorder this limited edition hand made letterpress book, please go to our website.

The Weight of Time

I visited Ars Obscura and Joel Radcliffe, master bookbinder to take a look at the binding progress for the limited edition Men of Baldfolk and Other Fanciful Tales by Lord Dunsany.  The book looks terrific and Joel does superb, meticulous work.  The books are now under weight and will cure until August 15th and then officially be published and begin shipping.  The special pre-order price will end on the 15th so please visit the website for purchase information.https://www.peganapress.com/the-men-of-baldfolk.html

Of Silk and the Hammer

We've been making some slight changes to the binding for The Men of Baldfolk and Other Fanciful Tales. The black cotton cloth we were using on the test dummy for the quarter bound spine really picks up dirt and shows the scoring of the bone folder so we've gone to a beautiful black, shimmering silk moire material that really looks great I've also added more information about the contents for the book and posted an audio excerpt from one of the unpublished stories.  Work progresses on the new Lovecraft edition; I'm in receipt of some beautiful color illustrations from our artist.  I will share his name and some images soon.  We invite you to visit the page and look and listen.

https://www.peganapress.com/the-men-of-baldfolk.html

A Fold In Sime

I've just completed the next to last step for my part of the work on The Men of Baldfolk and Other Fanciful Tales by Lord Dunsany.  While listening to baseball on the Grundig windup radio I've been preparing the Sime watercolour illustration for the edition.  This entailed measuring six inches and then scoring each with a bone folder.  The sheet is then folded in half and smoothed down with the bone folder with wax paper over it, otherwise the paper gets marks on it. From there each sheet is trimmed to about 6 3/8 inches.  This leaves a small tab which allows it to be sewn into the book signature.  I then trimmed the eighty signatures to a nice even edge.  Whew!
The only thing left for me to do now is print the spine titles.
This deluxe limited edition is available for preorder and can
be viewed on our website.  We invite you to visit and look
around.

presenting The Men of Baldfolk & Other Fanciful Tales

 Mike and Rita of Pegana Press are pleased to announce that we are taking preorders for The Men of Baldfolk & Other Fanciful Tales by Lord Dunsany on our website.

In this offering, we have moved away from the chapbook single signature design that marked our Lost Tales editions.  But as with the rest, our books continue to be hand made from start to finish by Mike and Rita Tortorello at Pegana Press.

This book is quarter bound, black cloth spine with Florentine paper covered boards.  Letterpress spine title on Hahnemühle Ingres paper.  Inside the book is hand typeset letterpress printed, also on Hahnemühle Ingres.

Now for the good stuff...

5 of the 9 stories contained in this book have never appeared in print before now.  The other 4 have not appeared since their original magazine publications.

We are also excited to offer as frontispiece, a rare Sime watercolor.

If you're a Dunsany fan, you are in for a treat with these stories.  A rare and beautiful book of material from a master story crafter, brought to you with love from Mike and Rita of Pegana Press.

...and Thor said to the rest "It is even as we have dreamed.  The years have been going by and the ages passing away; Time has been active here, and it grows late on Earth.  Unstained and cold are the stones.  It is later than we had dreamed."       

--Lord Dunsany from The Vengeance of Thor, written 1929 and previously unpublished.  Available from Pegana Press Spring 2016.

We invite you to visit our website.

The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars

A lot of my work making books for Pegana Press reminds me of a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story in which the Mouser can only concentrate on small, seemingly insignificant details and items.  The setting of the type with little bits of metal, viewing the printing under a magnifying glass, pulling tiny cat hairs off the ink rollers, etc., etc., etc.  I've now reached one of my favorite points in making a book with The Men of Baldfolk and Other Fanciful Tales by Lord Dunsany.  All the printing is done and I've been folding pages for the past few days.  Nearly a thousand pieces of paper to fold and carefully crease while keeping them as square as possible. Then collating the pages into their signatures and trimming each one. There's something very soothing and therapeutic about repeating the same sequence over and over to create tidy piles of pages. Somewhat like mowing a lawn with all the neat straight rows. Very little thinking or decisions to make; what a relief.  Seeing all the months of work slowly taking shape as a book is immensely satisfying. Knowing I'm almost done and the relief that comes with it.  We got back the test print of the rare Sime watercolour frontispiece and it's quite lovely  I will be posting the story titles of the book soon on the website as well as more images.  It's going to be a beautiful book and we hope you're as excited as we are.

A View From Pegana

As we near completion of the new Dunsany collection, The Men of Baldfolk and Other Fanciful Tales, it seemed like an appropriate time to talk about Sidney Sime and the watercolour illustrations we've been so fortunate to be able publish in Lost Tales III and the upcoming edition.  The illustrations were commissioned by Lord Dunsany, who retained the originals. They were painted for two Jorkens stories and published in the Christmas issue of The Graphic for 1926. When I heard of these illustrations I was amazed to say the least. Sidney Sime and his visions are of course interwoven and part of Dunsany's works, but always in black and white.  And when I saw photos of the original paintings I realized that these had to be shared with Dunsany collectors.  Since the Jorkens stories have of course been published and collected several times, I had no real need to do them again, but felt that it would be in keeping with my desire to bring rare Dunsany material to light to include them in our books.  The Dunsany Estate graciously allowed us to use the one pictured here for Lost Tales Volume III and we will be presenting another exquisite one for The Men of Baldfolk and Other Fanciful Tales.  So after nearly ninety years, and unknown to most of the world we are delighted to share these wonderful visions of the Master painter of Pegana.

Men of Baldfolk Nearing Completion

March is very nearly over and we have been very busy at Pegana Press.  Mike has finished setting and printing all the stories for The Men of Baldfolk, which is the title of our latest volume of stories written by Lord Dunsany.  This morning he printed the colophon for the book.  The only pages left to print are things like table of contents, copyright, title page, etc.

He also plans to start work on the illustration this week.

I have been using the time between releases to catch up with all the work that went undone during the binding frenzy caused by The Golden Key.  This is tax season, and my book keeping skills always cause a frantic search for records and receipts in various files as I try to fill out forms correctly.

Fortunately, The Men of Baldfolk won’t be ready for binding until after mid April.  Until then, I am spending my time in the bindery working on a dummy to see the practical application of our design for this publication.  When I get one finished, I’ll post pictures on the website of what the book will look like.  It will be some time yet, before I can bind an actual copy of the book, but the dummy will provide a peek into what you can expect the book to look like.

We hope to begin offering the book for presale soon.

Of Dingbats and Ornaments

I have a variety of ornaments, borders, and dingbats which I use in our editions.  Many of these are cast as sets and sold that way. Some of the more ornate fonts have them included with the typeface and are meant to complement the typeface.

The embellishment of the text within a book using ornaments and dingbats is a reflection of  the intrinsic hand drawn quality of mankind's writings even from earliest times.  The language itself was defined on stone or papyrus with the use of symbols and drawings.  William Morris,  Roycrofters, and many others carried on this tradition on paper and even had artists doing watercolour initials and borders by hand for their editions.

I've begun printing the last story for the new Dunsany edition, The Men of Baldfolk and other Fanciful Tales, a beautifully lyrical prose essay that is reminiscent of the atmosphere evoked in Mona Sheehy but written in 1908. We received the paper we hope to use to cover the boards for the book and we'll share some images soon.  The rare color Sidney Sime illustration is in the printing process and will be ready soon and Rita is continuing her binding. She is completing the last sets of Lost Tales.  There are very few of the sets left so if you've been thinking about getting them don't put it off!

Next up will be an edition of Lovecraft's early dream stories that I will begin in the spring.

Straying Into Elfland

I recently recorded some moody, contemplative piano tracks to support a story for the Lost Tales audiobook that should be done later this year.  The story, Our Laurels is a classic, dreamy tale of the struggle with dark and light and the participation of man.  All in three short paragraphs of course!  First collected in Lost Tales Volume I.

I'm in the preliminary phases of designing a Lovecraft edition of some of his early dream tales accompanied by some superb illustrations for later this year.

Continuing work on the forthcoming new Lord Dunsany edition The Men of Baldfolk and other Fanciful Tales, this group of stories are all unpublished or uncollected.  From dark gods to dreaming poets, some really fine material embellished with another very rare color Sidney Sime frontispiece. Our deepest appreciation to the Dunsany Estate for their sharing of these incredible pieces.  Will begin typesetting the second to last story tomorrow.  I'm using a german laid paper of the palest sage color for the pages which should complement the binding we have in mind quite nicely.

Rita is being kept busy in the bindery with  batches of Lost Tales and The Golden Key as well as doing taxes and taking care of 9 chickens and 3 cats. The response to The Golden Key has been very encouraging and has kept her hopping with glue, thread and all the strange things she uses to shelter and enhance our stories.

This Week At The Press: New Projects and More

This week has been busy at Pegana Press.  Mike is finished printing The Golden Key, and we are just waiting for the watercolor frontispiece to arrive from the printer before we begin the binding process.  It won't be long now.  Just a reminder, the special preorder price on this book is only offered until the release date.  This book really is special.  Charles Van Sandwyk has done some outstanding work, as usual, adding to the beauty of this offering.  Truly an heirloom quality book to treasure.  And limited to 80 copies.


Mike is already two pages into the next printing project, and we will be announcing details about that book soon.

Today, Mike is in the recording studio working on some audio readings with music.

And in the bindery, Rita is finalizing The Golden Key binding design, as well as binding our last available Clark Ashton Smith book, The Age of Malygris.  This final finished book will make two only, available at the press.  If you've been wanting to add The Age of Malygris to your collection, please don't hesitate to order while we still have it.

For Dunsany collectors, interested in the Lost Tales 3 volume box set, the last finished set went out this week, and I will be working on binding 4 more sets and making slipcases for them as time permits.  They are currently on special, so if you'd like to add this set to your collection, please order before the sale price ends.  But please allow 2 to 3 weeks for availability.



Finally, our webpage had a remodel last weekend and we think we've improved it, making it funner and easier to navigate.  Stop by and see if you agree.  https://www.peganapress.com/

Cheers for now, from Pegana Press.