Richard-Gabriel Rummonds, master of the cast iron handpress

On Tuesday, October 20, 7:30 pm in the Little Theater (BH 176), Richard-Gabriel Rummonds, acknowledged master of the cast iron handpress, will give a talk entitled “Creating Great Literature in Limited Editions on Iron Handpresses: Borges, Cavafy, Burgess, Calvino, Cheever, Gioia.” The lecture is sponsored by the Dept. of English and Linguistics and the Dept. of Classical and Modern Languages.

Professor Rummonds grew up in California and has lived in cities as diverse as Berkeley (California), New York City, Quito (Ecuador), and Buenos Aires. He has taught at numerous universities, and served for ten years as director of the Master of Fine Arts in the Book Arts program at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. However, the most significant period in his development as a skilled handpress printer was the decade of the 1970’s, when he was producing fine editions of great literature in Verona, Italy, for collectors worldwide.

The catalog of creative individuals Professor Rummonds has met and worked with includes some of the greatest figures of the 20^th century. In New York he met with Jorge Luis Borges and Anthony Burgess, and later in Italy with Italo Calvino while publishing their works. He met Günter Grass at the Frankfurt Book Fair. He met with Pier Paolo Pasolini at Campo de’Fiori in Rome, but Pasolini was murdered before a publishing contract could be signed. He was also in contact with John Cheever and Tennessee Williams by phone. Random connections include his friendship with Andy Warhol in the 1950’s, and meeting Dylan Thomas, Harry Partch, Kurt Vonnegut, and Robert Penn Warren in elegant settings in California and New York City.

Professor Rummonds has written numerous technical books and articles on printing with the cast iron handpress. His most recent book (2015), a memoir of his life, is entitled Fantasies and Hard Knocks: My Life as a Printer; it’s available through major online booksellers.