User:Georginabecker/sandbox

Peter Koch (born 1943) is a letterpress printer, artist, poet, and self-taught typographer. He founded Peter Koch Printers in 1974, which specializes in designing and printing limited edition livres d'artiste, broadsides, portfolios, text transmission objects, and various ephemera. Koch co-founded the CODEX Foundation in 2005 and currently serves as the director.

Koch was born on November 15,1943 in Missoula, Montana. He is the fourth generation of a strong lineage of bibliophiles and cowboys from the Western state. In 1970 Koch graduated with a BA in Philosophy from the University of Montana. Following graduation, after a brief career at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in scientific data analysis and computer operations, Koch returned to Missoula and established Black Stone Press, the first fine letterpress printing/publishing business and independent literary journal in Montana. From 1974 to 1978, he edited and published Montana Gothic, a journal devoted to maverick poets and artists from Montana, Paris, London, New York, San Francisco, including expat communities in Nepal, Mexico and Tangier.

In 1978 Koch moved his press to San Francisco, working as an apprentice at Adrian Wilson's famous press in North Beach. During his early years in the Bay Area, Koch began experimenting with a 19th-century handpress to produce fine art relief prints. These experiments soon gave way to a long lasting methodology centered around the sculptural aspects of language transmission. Koch describes his work as “typographic printmaking," a practice which involves letterforms as both image and text.

The Fragments of Parmenides, his most ambitious project to date, was completed in the fall of 2003. With Canadian essayist Robert Bringhurst as translator of the fragments of Parmenides for the bilingual edition, Koch commissioned two new typefaces based on archaic Greek epigraphy, both designed especially for this book. Peter also commissioned wood engravings from the artist Richard Wagener to accompany the texts.

In 2010, Koch collaborated with author Debra Magpie Earling, illustrating and printing her, “The Lost Journals of Sacajawea". Earling is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation and her work has been widely published. Her narrative is a first person account of a 17-year-old Sacajewea as she travels up the Missouri River in 1804-5. The text was set in Jonathan Hoefler's interpreted version of the historic Fell types and printed on Twinrocker Da Vinci handmade paper. The cover paper was custom designed and hand-made out of smoked buffalo rawhide by Amanda Degener at Cave Papers. The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is bound with trade beads and small caliber cartridge cases.

Throughout his career, Koch has designed and printed collaborations with artists and writers, including W.S. Merwin, Denise Levertov, Margaret Atwood,  Robert Duncan, Jess Collins, Thom Gunn,  Robert Creeley,  Manuel Neri, Joseph Goldyne, Guy Davenport, Ismail Kadare, Eleanor Antin, John Yau, Barry Gifford, Kara Walker, Robert Bringhurst, and Toni Morrison.

From 2005 until the present Koch has served as founding director of the CODEX Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation devoted to the preservation and promotion of the fine arts of the book. The foundation's objective is to celebrate the hand-made book in the broadest possible context as a work of art and to bring to public recognition the artist, the craftsmanship, and the right history of the civilization of the book. The 2007 debut event and symposium entitled: The Fate of the Art: The  Hand Made Book in the 21st Century, was attended by 120 exhibitors that came from 11 countries and over 700 people attended both events. Since then, every two years the foundation has organized a book fair and symposium, the next event will take place in the fall of 2013. The CODEX book fair has been heralded as the single most important book fair for artists in the United States.

In 2011 Codex Foundation co-cordinated CODEX MEXICO with the Centro Cultural Estación Indianilla and Tonaltepec Global S.C., which included an inaugural exhibition Libros de Artista at the Centro Cultural Mundo Cuervo in Tequila, Jalisco, and a presentation at the Guadalajara International Book Fair.

In addition to his studio work and his role at the CODEX Foundation, Peter has lectured and taught print making at various universities, including, University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco State University, New College of California, San Francisco, and the University of Montana, Missoula.