Look at Jon Webb. Leaning into his “ancient 8 by 12 Chandler & Price letterpress”, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. Hand on hip. His tiny desk crowded with type furniture and paper. Ink cans stacked on a rough shelf above. The room itself looks less like a print shop than a hideout — a comparison Webb might have appreciated, or resented, having spent real time behind bars years earlier. It’s improvised, cramped, and seemingly on the edge of collapse.
In another photograph I’ve stumbled across, his wife, “Gypsy” Lou Webb, stands beside the press in her bathrobe, barefoot, surrounded by books and freshly printed pages stacked and collated in a disorder that somehow feels entirely alive. In yet another picture I managed to find (perhaps these three are the only ones to exist?), she’s seated beneath their handmade little bedroom loft beside their enormous dog. The loft itself built directly into the workspace because there was barely enough room for the three to live there, let alone make books. Jon looks down at her from above, surrounded by boxes of what I assume are either paper stock or freshly printed sheets. There’s a silent communication between them — a look that seems to say they both understood this life couldn’t possibly be sustainable, and yet neither one of them was willing to give it up.
To surrender most of the niceties in life in pursuit of something as impractical as hand-printing a literary journal for a small-but-devoted audience of counterculture readers in the early 1960s is heroic in a way that’s almost impossible to explain to most people then or now. Jon and Gypsy Lou Webb weren’t “fine press people” in the polished sense. They weren’t wealthy collectors producing decorative books for subscribers with deep pockets while carefully documenting the process in pursuit of more followers. The Loujon Press came and went out of struggle. Out of obsession. Out of a desire to create something that would outlive them both.
And surviving them is exactly what the small handful of books Loujon Press managed to publish did.
Published by the Loujon Press in New Orleans in 1963 in an edition of just 777 copies, It Catches My Heart In Its Hands remains one of the towering achievements not only of Charles Bukowski’s publishing history, but of twentieth century American small press poetry itself. The work collected here — written between 1955 and 1963 — captures Bukowski operating at the height of his powers. There’s no literary perfume sprayed over these poems. No academic posturing. No attempt to impress anybody. These are poems written by a man who actually lived through what he describes: bars, rented rooms, dead-end jobs, loneliness, cheap sex, tiny moments of grace followed by long stretches of defeat. Bukowski understood something many poets never do: style without lived experience is pretension at best, fakery at its worst. The poems in It Catches bleed because the life behind them bled first.
And yet somehow the workmanship of the physical book equals the writing inside it. This never happens.
I’ve handled my share of “artists’ books” and “fine press books” over the years that were technically beautiful but spiritually dead. The printing is precise. The papers expensive. The binding impressive. But the object itself? Soulless. Pick it up, admire it, and feel almost nothing. It Catches My Heart In Its Hands is a wholly different experience. The moment you handle it, you understand you’re holding something genuinely important. Not “important” because of scarcity alone — though 777 copies is certainly small — but because every single creative decision inside the book feels necessary and earned which pushes the poetry contained within to another level.
The illustrated, printed cork cover alone is unforgettable. The book opens like a folio, not a conventional book. The delicate Japanese tissue sheet separates the outer cover from the illustrated inner wrapper. The papers move through shades of “whitestone, saffron, bayberry, peacock, ivory, bittersweet, gobelin, and tabasco” like steps in a staircase leading deeper into the object. Nothing feels arbitrary. Nothing feels ornamental for ornament’s sake. The book is made and not manufactured.
And then there’s Webb’s colophon — one of the great colophons in American small press history. Less a technical description than a short story about survival. Webb writes of moths, spiders, rats, rain, loosened showers of nineteenth-century dust and plaster falling constantly into the workspace while he fought to finish the book. Money was always short. Help was always scarce. Gypsy Lou sold artwork to tourists in Jackson Square to keep them alive. Reading the colophon, you honestly begin to wonder how the book ever made it into existence at all. Which somehow makes the finished object feel even more miraculous.
Not many photographs of the Webbs exist, which makes the few surviving images deeply moving. In one I’m showing you, seated beside Webb is Ed Blair — oil man, renowned collector of Beat literature, and one of Loujon’s primary patrons. We met on two occasions. Ed was kind but curt; deeply factual, maybe even to a fault, but willing to share stories if you listened carefully. He once took me to the studio’s exact location, now hidden behind a plain modern wall that gives no indication of what once took place there. Blair’s support helped keep the operation alive during periods when survival itself seemed uncertain. Years ago, while going through the Jon Webb / Bukowski papers at the University of Arizona in Tucson, I came across a receipt showing Blair had advanced Webb money for 200 copies of It Catches My Heart In Its Hands. Blair never actually took delivery of those books, and Webb eventually repaid the advance. Even in the world of small presses — a world built largely on favors, trust, and desperation — that detail says something meaningful about their relationship.
And maybe that’s why the copy that sits in my library has always felt haunted to me in the best possible way. Bukowski signed and dated it December 16, 1963 — the exact day I entered this world some 800 miles north in Chicago, Illinois. The very day when, in New Orleans, Jon and Gypsy Lou were fighting moths, debt, rainwater, exhaustion, and impossible deadlines to create books that mattered, while Bukowski sat there with beer in hand in their cramped little space and signed the book now in my possession on the same winter day I took my first breath. That strange collision of time — poet, printer, book, and reader unknowingly entering each other’s lives on the exact same date — transforms my copy from merely collectible into something deeply personal. A book that found me long before I found it, and one that profoundly shaped my life thereafter.
