Welcome. Artist’s Proof Editions is the new venture from Archipelago Publishers, and Archipelago, the journal I published on the Web from March 1997 to March 2007. Archipelago was an old-fashioned site, each quarterly issue built by hand in HTML, with even older-fashioned literary values loyal to the printed text. But the Web changed my mind. This new construct wasn’t — it turned out — just a way of imitating words on paper, distributing them across borders. This new medium was a cat’s-cradle of light-threads. Our words danced along those threads like dust motes. All that was solid melts into air. Our journal is ended now but remains on the Web, enmeshed in those light-threads.
And what follows? Well, we know, now, that the codex is not the only book. Here came the iPad, little window for the hand, and we guessed at once some new kind of making and reading was going to come of it. Here is our first contribution. Artist’s Proof Editions has now published the very fine chapbook Caveboy, A Poem, by Mary-Sherman Willis, with art by Collin Willis. An edition — the multi-touch book (as Apple likes to call it) — for the iPad. An edition for the hand, an old-fashioned artist’s book typed, lovingly and furiously, and assembled of paper and paste. Come and read.