Belles-lettres—beautiful letters—is a term applied to finely crafted literature or works of the imagination. But it should apply also to printing of the sort produced by Jerry Reddan at the Tangram Press in Berkeley.

I’ve been buying fine printing from Jerry for years. The most recent example is a chapbook titled Other Roads, containing seven poems by John Brandi. It’s string-bound and printed from Monotype Garamond in an edition of 150 copies. At $15 it’s a bargain. The handsome title page alone would be worth the price—simple to the point of severity, with the title in red, using an outline font that I can’t immediately identify. It’s not Helvetica.

I came across Jerry and Tangram years ago when he was printing work by a friend, Mike O’Connor, and we’ve now become long-distance friends of a sort ourselves. I know that he and his wife are replacing the foundation of their house and planning a trip to Ireland. But I really know little more, except that Jerry is connected in some capacity with the Arion Press, a major printer of fine and expensive works. (He once sent me a proof sheet from a new Arion edition of the Bible, designed for the pulpits of  large and prosperous churches. He said I could buy an “ordinary” copy for $9,000 or the deluxe edition for $11,000. “At that price,” another friend remarked, “it should be signed by God.”)

Jerry picks carefully the writers for whom he works. He’s done at least two books by Brandi, a western writer who produces fine work in the modern tradition—freeform syntax, vivid imagery, typographical effects that wouldn’t translate to a blog page. I discovered below that I couldn’t reproduce Jerry’s letterspacing of WINGS or the little bit of eye-pleasing space he added before the colon. Also, I use italic for poems on the blog, and Brandi appears to better advantage in the roman font Jerry has used.

In Other Roads Brandi writes about highways, truckstop waitresses, Native Americans, mountains. A short sample from “Went to Church Today”:

Down spidery cholla cactus nave
            up snowpeak choirloft,
Overlooking wide sandy congregation
from sky veranda: seed streamers
from Apache plume, WINGS
trembling in ascent.

Lovely words, lovingly printed.