jw curry contributes an article dealing with the bibliographic details of Gronk. Nicky Drumbolis writes about jw curry's printing methods in an article summarizing Industrial Sabotage Issues 1-38 and other issues of his handwork as follows. "Making things with type and paper is for some people an irresistible temptation. One guy gets a job, buys an old press, some type, and all the etceteras, goes about making what he can, nice things. The other guy, street poet, bums an Atlas Office Printing Outfit #3 from someone, scrounges up some paper, begins by setting his own lines. This is the same thing -compulsive. In seven years, John Curry, with the sometime help of Peggy Lefler, has produced 376 different things. Most of them have been handset and handstamped using various rubber types. After the initial series of 13 pieces begun in Vancouver in 1978, most of them his own poems, Curry decided to explore the technic of the medium publishing the work of other writers-to date, over 100. What I think happened here is not an affinity for type nurtured in the aesthetic, but a fumbling with identity that converges ultimately in the discovery of history. The indenture is never to craft, it is the self being husbanded. When I started buying his ephemerals, Curry mostly worked in materials found or gifted: in an age so indulgent where an army of suits brusquely retires incalculable tons of letterhead to the trash each goddam day, it is a shame to even consider increasing the demand with ideas. If you can find a batch of yellow card stock ends suitable for three lines, how much more difficult can it possibly be to find the person with the lines? Curry's method is to maintain a file of the manuscripts mailed to him by names until he fits them to his scheme, the exigencies of the publisher reduced from cost accounting to the actual exploration and recovery of appropriate materials. As in the famous line of least resistance, accommodation leads from recreation to the creation of new missiles. Curry started out with the series Curvd H&Z. Included in this was another series, Pomez A Penny, later I cent, which made minimal works available to the great unsure for next to nothing. The series for his magazine named Industrial Sabotage is also part of Curvd H&z and has had two issues appear in I cent. Th Wrecking Ballzark, another subset, is reserved for non-linear writing. Toybox is for fiction. Hangnail is a series of signed broadsides, some of his loveliest productions, while the counterpart Sticky Lights is devoted to free street posters. There is a postcard series as yet unnamed and one for catalogues called Systems Retrieval. Spider Plots in Rat-Holes, not part of Curvd H&z, is a collaborative series with Mark Laba, while Utopic Furnace Press, also not Curvd H&z, is a series of found anything. Ariadne's clue to all this involuting is to string a line about the very way In which it comes about, the organic growth of a veritable beast: a filing system you develop as you go, a private unive. One beautiful aspect of any experience is the inevitable build of momentum to clean inspired productions, a synergy. Curry's work familiar to us these years in its candid celebration of its derivations must soon be admitted as the marvellous departure to flight it has become. l'N SPLAT CE, the railway ingot piece perched somewhere in the bowels of Metro's Reference Library, just goes on in the head resounding. The lovely grace of design of many of the newest pieces installs an aesthetic of origin, each dish in the stack a dream of the one beneath. You see you are talking through other men's mouths and one day find you really are saying something. Curry's afinities are clean and direct. He derived most from three of Canada's great artists, each at one time a publisher/ printer: bpN ichol's ideas; Barbara Caruso's refinement of those; Nelson Ball's care of materials-to make something out of nothing. He has fixed to wood rubber automotive parts discovered on the road and printed them; the underpattern on a swatch of carpet; a child's plastic ring from a gumball machine printed using acrylic. In one very effective piece, "Jazz" by Lillian Necakov, he has spattered with ink his only ever white shirt and mounted I" squares of it for the frontis. Some texts have been typewritten through the edition, others handwritten. He has used mimeo, woodcut, color xerox, photographic reproduction, offset (one item), and letterpress (one sheet). His latest departure is screens. But the mainstay of John Curry's amazing industry is the rubber type. Since that first alphabet (Kosco's Atlas #3) in 1978 he has gathered sets of type for the pro and for the child, cutting into whatever occurs for new effects such as erasers, or the sole of an old shoe. He sits there, pot notwithstanding, setting three or four lines at a time (depending on the holder size) and prints out elbow and wrist a satisfying shitload of puzzling artifacts between each surfacing (a following has built up which requires deliveries and a quite extensive mailing to). And much of it works well: Gerry Shikatani's "Language: Voice Hitting the Form," beautifully produced, is one of the greatest conceptual pieces in recent Canadian poetry. "3S IN THE 4EST" by Andy Hedgecock was eaten up by the faithful transients usually given to suspicions of perpetual incomprehension. Curry has introduced writers like Loris Essary and Randall Brock to Canada. He has set an infection down: others are following his lead. The no-name millions have a place to send work to and be separately published, in time, virtually the only place in Canada. Among the others one of the interesting ones is sometime Curry collaborator and Curvd H&Z author Mark Laba. His press, Coma Goats, has churned out 36 little delectables since November '82, primarily rubberstamped, and featuring the levity of the cynic and social critic where both, due to poverty, like jam inhabit a thin attitude of the cake somewhere under the greater concerns of the vested class. Laba's classic "Suddenly 'Who Put That Dead Nun Here'?" is the piece most threatened with piracy by those unlucky ones who missed out on the original run. You see these guys, the activity, the excitement, you want to think maybe you're in the middle of a history lesson, that down the road a movement back to the rented room will Iook like a major passage forward in CanLit. The lesson should more properly read: this repetitive fiction might be relieved of its sameness where each of us curves his hand and fashions his own improbabilities out of the fetid effluence of the herd, something out of nothing. Fine irony, this rubber fetish at a time when the photon, the lineprinter have already successfully delivered into the hands of the great unwashed the coveted power of the press. Well, John Curry is practicing art, not flexing his face to the rhythm ofbodies snaking thnrough the vast catalogue of spasms: he is making the labyrinth they are dancing through." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.