Barry Gifford Archives - synaesthesia press

I wrote about selling my record collection recently. And in that post, I went over the new parameters I’ve set up for myself moving forward. Maybe parameters isn’t the best word?

Limitations.

Here’s the brief preview if you don’t feel like going back to that entry: “What if I kept 10 records at a time? No more. Just less. And once I get to 10, in order to buy a new record or two, I’d have to bring a record or two in to trade? With the five I have, I got room for five more!

Enter “Blues That Kills” by “Wild” Billy Childish and The Chatham Singers, now standing as the 6th acquisition in my newly-revived record collection. (Check out the hand-printed woodcut cover by Billy (printed on brown Kraft card stock) with hand-stamped titles on the back of the sleeve and on the white label in an edition of 300 numbered copies. I ended up with #149.)

I actually ordered this record from The L-13 crew before I sold my collection, but I had it sent to my place in Arizona. There it sat on a stack of unread mail until just recently. What a nice surprise. Billy’s been a friend of synaethesia since The Strangest One of All which was printed and published back in my San Francisco grad school days. Billy’s association came via Johnny Brewton at X-Ray Book & Novelty Co. Thanks again Johnny!

I got to meet Billy once. His band The Buff Medways played Bimbo’s 365. I’m pretty sure it was 1998. It also could have been 1999, and it could have been when he was playing with his band Thee Headcoats. So to confirm I just texted Johnny to ask and he says it was Thee Headcoats — so there ya go.

And here we are. Six records — with room for four more.

Barry Gifford has become a special friend of the press.

Initially, he was kind enough to support Steve Fisher’s book with a back cover blurb.

Mr. Gifford’s first chap book with the press, The Strangest One of All, is a short narrative about a visit he took to the Bunker — a one-time residence for William S. Burroughs.

Barry went with his son and an ex-baseball player named Jimbo Carothers. There they met Burroughs, and they talked about things like poisonous darts and deadly spiders.

The total edition for The Strangest One of All was 176 copies. Illustrations by Billy Childish. Book design by Johnny Brewton. 150 were numbered, the first 50 signed by Barry, with 26 lettered copies that were placed in a manila envelope and containing three woodcuts Billy Childish created for the book. Both Barry and Billy signed the lettered edition, too.

It was the first separate edition of a piece that appeared in SPEAK Magazine in Fall, 1997.

More recently, the synaesthesia press collaborated with Gifford and Don Ellis of Creative Arts Book Company to produce The Lost Christmas & Other Stories: A Holiday Trilogy. 99 copies were printed, none of which were sold. Instead, we sent them out in December ’01 to the friends of the author, the synaesthesia press, and Mr Ellis, as a holiday greeting.

I also printed and published Elegies in 2004. Elegies is a set of two individual poetry broadsides written by Barry as elegies to Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso: “On Viewing The Manuscript Scroll of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road in the Tosca Bar, San Francisco” and “Small Elegy For Corso”.

I printed the poems on card stock and housed them in a three panel folder with a die-cut cover that featured a linoleum block design that was heavily influenced by the Dada artists I admire. Barry signed the whole edition at his mom’s kitchen table as I handed them to him, and we talked about things like the novel he was working on, movies we admire, and Barry Bonds.

200 copies of Elegies were printed. Design and text are both digitally set and printed by hand, then letterpress printed on an old Vandercook press — a #219 Old Style, to be exact, which is the backbone of synaesthesia.

With the generous help of Barry Gifford, the synaesthesia press has become a much better thing, for lack of a better term.