Woodblock portraits by Kevin Clinton

Since 2016, No Reply Press has been a publisher of handmade limited edition books. As hand-bookmakers, we cherish literature. The written word is always at the heart of bookmaking, and the writers who leave impressions on us inevitably shine through to our craft. To celebrate the craftspeople of the written word, artist Kevin Clinton has cut in maple endgrain the portraits of nine such writers: Jane Austen, William Blake, Jorge Luis Borges, Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Martin Luther King Jr, Toni Morrison, and Leo Tolstoy. 

Impressions is a combination of so much of what we love – literature, craftsmanship, artistry, and wonderful tactile materials.

EDITION NOTES

• Each writer’s portrait is printed in an edition of one hundred numbered copies.

• Hand-cut in maple endgrain by Kevin Clinton.

• Printed by hand on Hahnemühle Biblio using a Vandercook Universal I proof press.

• Protected in an archival folder with letterpress labeling and a glassine sheet.

• Each sheet is roughly 6 by 9 ¾ inches and each portrait is roughly 3 ½ by 5 ½ inches. 

• We have teamed up with the Portland West Elm to offer gallery framing. Each frame is made with FSC-certified hardwood, using acid-free matting, tempered glass, and handsome joiners for sophisticated museum quality.

Impression #1: Jane Austen

Perhaps no writer but Shakespeare has become as quietly iconic as Jane Austen. Her six novels form the basis of generations of storytelling, and provide the framework for how we understand an era. As a young woman working long before women might even hope to publish under the own names without prejudice, her unequaled contribution is all the more important. She has left a clear impression of an era on modern readers, and a sense that people across time are not really as different as we might think.

Because no reliable portrait of Austen exists, Kevin has imagined her – basing his portrait off of the precocious twenty-something who first sat down to write masterpieces like Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility.

The Jane Austen woodblock print features the Hahnemühle watermark. 

Impression #2: William Blake

Engraving and printing his poems by hand in limited editions, William Blake used his prophetic writing to send tremors through the world. His poems are among the most widely read in English, and the philosophy they espouse are still radical, more than two hundred years later. In poems like The Tyger and London, and prophecies like America and Jerusalem, he used his writing to reveal injustice and imagine a path forward. He leaves an impression of a wholly decent and tender mind, ahead of his own time and of ours. 

Impression #3: Jorge Luis Borges

The impresario of Spanish short fiction almost monopolizes the word "impression". Few readers of Borges have ever closed his pages unchanged. At the heart of his works are always a challenge – a challenge of time, or infinity, or life, or provenance – which go to the core. If other writers sit comfortably in the living rooms and bedrooms and kitchens of our minds, Borges is down in the basement, banging on the joists and chipping at the foundation. The impression he leaves is unmistakable and unshakable.

Impression #4: Willa Cather

Few writers have captured atmosphere – the fourth dimension of storytelling which slides subtly between and within plot, character, and narrator – as well as Willa Cather. Her operas of the West are exceedingly beautiful studies on life and land. It is impossible to travel to place described by Cather and not see it through her eyes. Hers is the softest of impressions, which hangs in the air all around her readers. 

Impression #5: T. S. Eliot

The "Old Possum" of modernism turned time past into time present, and time present into time future. His The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land, among a handful of other poems, turned the tide of poetry toward the future. He is rightly remembered as the 20th century's greatest poet, and there is likely no other writer whose titanic reputation is built upon so few works. Reading Eliot is to be given the unmistakable impression that, as Ezra Pound put it, poetry is the news that stays new. 

Impression #6: Ralph Waldo Emerson

The author of "The American Declaration of Intellectual Independence," Emerson was as much a founder of the American arts as Washington, Adams, Hamilton, or Jefferson were founders of the American state. His essays, lectures, and poetry proved cornerstones of the philosophy of self-reliance, frontiersmanship, and transcendentalism. He is among the few writers who manages to convey the truth so plainly that it is unmistakable, leaving an impression on the reader that they have known something all along. 

Impression #7: Martin Luther King Jr.

No writer has more effectively weaponized the English language in pursuit of a gloriously noble cause. Through his groundbreaking sermons and political essays, Martin Luther King Jr. rewrote the American story, bending it toward justice. The breadth of his writing is all the more impressive for the the too-short life he had. More perhaps than any other writer, MLK left an indelible impression upon an entire nation. 

Impression #8: Toni Morrison

No novelist defined the later half of the 20th century better than Toni Morrison, culminating in her winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her novels spin stories with a richness and delicacy of language rarely matched. Her characters are unforgettable, and through them she has welcomed the world onto the backstreets and hidden corners of the American experience. Never oversimplifying, she leaves the impression of humanity in every character she writes – even the most minor – and in doing so expands the reader's own empathy. 

Impression #9: Leo Tolstoy

Probably the most acclaimed writer since the Renaissance, no discussion of greatness in literature is complete with the foregrounding of Leo Tolstoy's War & Peace or Anna Karenina. While his contemporaries wrote fantastic and sweeping novels just as he did, his have within them the deepest wells of meditation and spiritual insight. The man who, at 90, ran away from home, leaves an impression on his reader that we are never done learning, never done with the fulness of what life has to offer, and, ultimately, that the end is never really the end.