About Hand Print Press

The "press," such as it is, is a family operation conducted between kitchen, garden, studio, and a small desk in a 10x22 cabin in rural Oregon.

It started with Build Your Own Earth Oven (purchase), a sculptor's treatment of traditional earthen building, art, and bread. I was making ovens because I didn't have a place to build a house -- and because the ovens were sculpture that provided wonderful bread. The book began as bare bones notes for workshops I taught for people who saw pictures of sculpted ovens and wanted their own.

As I learned about working with earth, new ideas and projects took root in the mud, most of them educational or community-oriented, They became two more little books: Dig Your Hands in the Dirt (purchase,) and Make a Simple Sundial (purchase).

All of this mud and art and making is founded on an idea my mother taught, and traced back to Aristotle, who said "what we learn to do, we learn by doing." My mother, Ann Wiseman, is an artist whose own mother sent her to a school where learning by doing was the core curriculum -- and where her teacher was called "Miss Doing" (really!)

She has published 13 books, the best-selling of which is Making Things, The Handbook of Creative Discovery (purchase.) After nearly 30 years, Little, Brown took it out of print. I picked it up partly because I thought it should be in print for my own kids' generation, but also because it would turn my one-book operation into a real (if small) publishing concern. It also made sense because what I've been doing is really just more "making [mud] things."

With the re-publication of Making Things came a realization that both my mother and I are fortunate to have received more than the average share of what, for lack of a better term, I'll call "real knowledge" -- real because it requires not just thought or belief, but a real integration and commitment of body, spirit, intellect, and heart. That real experience of life defines who we are and our place in the world. It is also too often dismissed by "official" education as less important than the day's fashionable fact or byte of "infotainment." So we forget, hide, ignore, or deny what we "know best" -- our self, and our experience. Such experience is the source of love; it is what ties us to parents, place, and children -- and it is how we create culture.

So the hope behind this little publishing effort is to share ideas, inspiration, and information so future generations can gain real knowledge, create beauty, and know harmony.

In addition to books, my wife Hannah and I bake bread, watch children and garden grow, make and build things, teach, and trade with friends and neighbors. We live well, and exist officially "below the poverty line," but are rich in time, friends, and freedom. Books sales help make it possible. Within the book trade, which is as global as any, we operate a home-based economy, and hope for a "craft" economy" -- that is, a way of life by which what we "do" is less about money than relationships. Ideally, what we do would augment and be augmented by what our neighbors do, and we could have full, rich lives mostly within the limits of our own region, without need of global trade, global finance, or global war.

Thanks for visiting. Holler if you have questions.

Hand Print Press
POB 576
Blodgett OR 97326
541-438-4300

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