Visiting the Stone Street Press

By Ann O'Bryan

Among the treasures in Rare Books and Special Collections is the complete collection of books published by a unique small press, Stone Street Press. Although there are many fine presses publishing beautiful books, Stone Street Press books are different: they are almost entirely created by hand.

Just over twenty years ago, Malachi McCormick, a native of County Cork, Ireland, started the press in a room in a small house in Staten Island, New York. He still is making books in the same room. On my last visit to New York in September, I made the trip out to Staten Island to meet McCormick and "tour" Stone Street Press.

McCormick and his Press live in a house, which he has shared with friends since the late 1970s, in the old, village-like section of Staten Island. When I arrived on that sunny afternoon, he and his daughter, Sion, were at work: Malachi was collating and adding calligraphed initial letters to copies of his collection of poetry by medieval Irish women, Herself Long Ago, and Sion was stitching the pages together. They were working at a long table beneath a window that faced out on the street. The walls were covered with shelves holding paper and other supplies, completed books, and (where there was room) an assortment of pictures, newspaper clippings, and other amusing odds and ends. Both very friendly, Malachi and Sion talked about how they created the books, how they put them together, and how and where they sold them.

McCormick chooses texts to publish, often writing them or translating works from Irish. His subjects range widely from Irish literature (especially poetry) to cooking to proverbs from many cultures to politics. After the text is composed, translated, or selected, he calligraphs it in the beautiful old Irish script he learned as a boy in Cork. He also decorates the pages with hand-drawn illustrations or linocuts. The "master" pages are then printed by a printer in the area. The printed pages are then returned to Stone Street Press where Malachi and Sion sew, bind, and finish them.

I sat with them and chatted for several hours, and at the end of the day, we had tea. They are both lively conversationalists, and Malachi is quite the yarn-spinner. They talked a lot about art (most of Malachi's siblings and their children are artists, and Sion is also a painter) and about politics. They also amused me with some funny and interesting family tales.

Stone Street Press now has a web site with a catalog and ordering information: www.stonestreetpress.com. McCormick's books are priced for normal people to buy, and cost no more than bookstore paperbacks. If you want to pay a lot of money for them, you can go to the usual Internet sites. But it's less expensive, and a lot more fun, to order directly from him.