Current News & Events

March 2022 ~ After a very long hiatus, Epidote Press has several new projects in the works. Stay tuned!

June 2020 ~ We are delighted to announce that Barbara Epler (New Directions) has included A Shelter for Bells: From the Writings of Hans Jürgen von der Wense in her curated selection of the best summer reading for TANK Magazine’s Summer Reader issue. Epler writes: “A Shelter for Bells offers a ravishing selection of the little-known work of Hans Jürgen von der Wense (1894-1966). This brilliant polymath—composer, translator, folklorist, wanderer, aphorist, poet—was also an encyclopedist; for his All-Book, Wense considered and embraced everything—from a register of the items in Alcibiades’s bedchamber to a text fragment on singing crickets and a treatise on earwax. A radical, obsessive walker, Wense was a poet of landscapes and skies. ‘Lost time is not found again,’ Bob Dylan warns, but lost times, and lost geniuses, are sometimes rediscovered—and A Shelter for Bells is proof.”

February 2019 ~ Herbert Pföstl’s Schrift-Landschaften Drawings and Other Works will be on display at The Brother in Elysium Books (Tivoli, NY) from March 2nd until April 28th. Further details at The Brother in Elysium.

BOOK ~ A Shelter for Bells: From the Writings of Jürgen von der Wense
Composer, translator, folklorist, aphorist, poet, and wanderer Hans Jürgen von der Wense was born on the 10th of November 1894 in Ortelsburg, East Prussia. His astonishing body of work includes thirty thousand loose sheets of writings on natural history, mineralogy, poetry, folklore, weather, walking, and music, to name but a few of the subjects that were a focus of his studies. In addition to these writings, his archive includes numerous diaries, three thousand photographs, and six thousand letters. A Shelter for Bells is the first book of von der Wense's writings published in English and brings together extracts from his loose sheets, diaries, and letters. Translated by Kristofor Minta and Herbert Pföstl; edited by Kirston Lightowler and Herbert Pföstl.

EDITION ~ Herbert Pföstl, Schrift-Landschaften
Our first Edition includes prints of Herbert Pföstl’s nine original Schrift-Landschaften drawings along with a text written by filmmaker David Gatten. The Schrift-Landschaften described by Pföstl: "As incantation in repetition, these landscapes of script are walks in writing on fields of paper. Resurrected fragments, summoned as vows: exercises to gain time." The drawings, composed of a single thought fragment, written in Pföstl’s distinctly small script and covering an entire page of worked and worn paper, were created through a practice of quiet reflection. One is reminded of the particularities of calligraphic expression and the meditative processes required to create needlework samplers, chronological tables, weather diaries, or even telegraphic code. Pföstl’s Schrift-Landschaften, however, come from a deep reading of and reliance upon literature; these lines are fragments from books gathered over many years and transformed into a landscape of incantations for the artist. What at first appears a wilderness of words on paper soon resolves into a garland of vows concealed within the text.

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