Mike Schaefer did the abstract silkscreen prints for this book. As mentioned on Horvath's blog, "MOSTLY BROKEN SCABS PRESS 1977 -- 1984: For $10 I bought an old paste ink Gestetner mimeograph from a friend's brother-in-law who owned a used office furniture store and who has subsequently gone insane. The mimeo had a major crack in one of the drums that would prevent the image over the crack from reproducing. With a bunch of duct tape, it worked ok for me. I printed most of the publications in the kitchen of my Clifton Blvd. apartment. The last magazine was called Scratch (like the sound of a tone arm going across a record). In reality, I think the Scratch magazines were about learning to appreciate subtleties and forgiveness. KIRPAN PRESS 1998 -- Present: After not publishing for 13 years, I was pulled out of retirement when I attended a poetry reading at a bookstore in Kent, Ohio. Besides starting to resurrect partial books that had been dormant for 20 years, Dave Pishnery motivated me to dig through the scraps of poems I had written in the 1980s. The result was the co-authored & co-produced book: Surfacing. A major change in book style was a shift from mimeo to desktop publishing on an HP LaserJet 4 (thanks to my employer). A "kirpan" is a Sikh ornamental dagger which represents that a person should be equal parts "soldier" as well as "saint." I think this means attaining a balance within the soul."Internet: Horvath, Alan Robert 57 11/08/1952 09/14/2010 Alan died of cardiac arrest Sept. 14, 2010. Born Nov. 8, 1952, in Cleveland, he was a good child who wanted to go to "Cowboy College" and was fond of his Davy Crockett fur cap. At age 11, he wrote an anniver-sary song for his parents. He de-veloped a passion for music watching Hullabaloo and Shindig on TV, and did his confirmation homework watching late-night television personality Ghoulardi. In high school, he joined the wrestling team and played guitar in a band. Alan became interested in poetry in his ninth grade English class when he heard "one death in the life of julie," written by 1960s Cleveland poet d.a. levy. Alan graduated cum laude from Ohio University with a degree in journalism. Among his favorite musicians were Paul McCartney and The Beatles; Bob Dylan; Crosby Stills Nash & Young; Bruce Springsteen; David Bowie; and countless others through the years. He worked as an instrumentation designer in Cleveland, and transferred to San Francisco, where he met Kathy, who became his wife of 24 years. With a sparkle in his eyes, he would say, "We met in an elevator and have gone up ever since." For 10 years Alan worked on construction field assignments for a natural gas pipeline company as an electrical inspector, always traveling as the crow flies to remote areas in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. As he drove to and from the Pacific Northwest and his home in the Bay Area, he enjoyed the Columbia River Gorge, Smith Rock, the lava cast forest in Bend, and the John Day Fossil Beds, to name a few. When his company moved to Portland in 1995, he and Kathy settled in Vancouver. After the company phased out its construction department, he worked in the Portland office as a natural gas pipeline transportation analyst. After years of health complications and a transient ischemic attack in 2006, renal failure prevented him from working. It was his love of the small press world that drove him as a person. In Cleveland, Alan wrote poetry and solicited pieces from other local poets for chapbooks and various magazines. He began reprinting d.a. levy books and poetry using an old A.B. Dick liquid ink mimeograph machine-accompanied by swearing, sweating, and ink spreading in all directions. He organized poetry readings at Bobby McGee's bar in downtown Cleveland, where SIN, his Siamese cat, would participate. In 1998, operating as Kirpan Press, Alan again reprinted d.a. levy poetry. He didn't feel that these books should be locked away in libraries, so he issued them for the next generation of readers to enjoy. Alan's excitement about publishing was based upon a "desire to share a well-written poem with someone else." Through the years, he offered fellow poets both encouragement and a platform for their works, either in chapbooks or in his recent "Stories From The Flats" Broadside Series 1 and 2. In Alan's words, "A good poem, no matter whether it's two lines or 200 lines, shares something with the reader, is created by a poet who uses the best possible words to describe his or her vision, and is read by someone who puts forth equal effort." Many people will miss Alan. As a friend recalled, "Alan had a unique sense of humor and, although Alan was pretty quiet, when he spoke it was always something worth listening to -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.