The Festival of Writers (FOW) is an annual event held in Rensselaerville, NY which benefits The Rensselaerville Library. For the past two years, an annual haiku project has been organized to raise funds to support The Rensselaerville Library.

In 2013, Tom Gilroy, author of The Haiku Year (Soft Skull) and director of films that include Spring Forward and The Cold Lands, curated the first FOW haiku project. Five writers, who included Gilroy, filmmaker Jim McKay, musician Michael Stipe, writer Patrick So, and poet Shin Yu Pai committed to writing one haiku a day for the entire month of April. The group wrote their poems in handmade books that were collected together with a cassette tape recorded by Stipe and sold at auction to benefit the Library.

X-Ray Book Company, publisher of Tom Waits, Mark Mothersbaugh, and Harold Norse, is now producing a letterpress limited edition of 25 poems from the original project. Designed and printed by Johnny Brewton, the poems will be printed in a trading-card-sized format and collected together unbound and housed inside a chipboard cover with an illustration of the town of Rensselaerville. The editions will be wrapped in baling wire and/or local newspaper.

What We Need & What You Get

Producing the limited edition haiku project object will cost slightly less than $2,000 - however, the purpose of the project is to raise funds for the library. As such, we hope to greatly exceed our fundraising goal! Funding will go to reimbursing the library for materials, design, and printing time needed to produce the project with additional proceeds going to directly benefit the library.

• A donation of $35 gets you one numbered broadside bundle from the edition.
  *Only 226 copies will be produced.*
• A donation of $75 gets you one broadside bundle packaged inside a vellum envelope with a signed photograph by project curator Tom Gilroy.
• A donation of $150 gets you one broadside bundle packaged inside a vellum envelope with a photograph from Tom Gilroy, signed by all of the authors.

Other Ways You Can Help

Please share this campaign to your network. If you know any special collections librarians that would take an interest in this project or book arts collectors, please forward information to them!