Publications

Two Cents Press is a printmaking arts residency and a limited editions printmaking publisher.
We encourage the collaboration between artists (resident or invited) while supporting experimentation and the combination of different processes, with facilities fully equipped for all intaglio techniques, for letterpress and photographic printmaking techniques.
Two Cents Press editions are typically shared with the collaborating artists.

Mah! magazine

In 2020 during the Covid lockdowns we began the publication of MAH!, an artist’s magazine printed by letterpress and published in limited editions at irregular intervals.
The title has to do with an Italian expression that can be uttered with a frown or with a laughter.
It can be used to express condemnation, surprise, indifference, even joy, but mostly uncertainty, disbelief and bewilderment, in a word: skepticism.
Featuring the work of invited artists and artists in residence, MAH! deals with topics that relate to poetry, science, philosophy, culture, art, politics and anything that comes to mind while we aim to emphasize the tactility of the printed matter and to maintain the lively improvisational immediacy of the spoken word.
In editions that vary from 20 to 60, the magazine typically measures 10”x7” (25 x 18 cm), has 8 to 16 pages, is thread bound, and often includes pages and inserts with photogravures, engravings and etchings that are pulled by hand on quality paper.
As the result of a collaboration, MAH! is shared with the participating artists who retain half of the copies produced, at no cost.
MAH! is printed with an Heidelberg 10”x15” Windmill, with an old Ambrosia – a Chandler-type platen press – and with a poster-size Saroglia cylinder press, with movable metal and vintage wood type salvaged from letterpress workshops that have closed down due to the digital revolution.

Artist’s Books

BETWEEN THE CORNERS OF MY BED is a fairly straight continuation of my filmmaking practice. As an experimental filmmaker I used to work directly on the film emulsion as if it was a canvas. So, I drew, painted or scratched each frame, frame by frame, whether it was a Super8 or a 16mm. short. But I had grown dissatisfied with the impermanence of the moving image. I wanted something more substantial and concrete than a fleeting retinal impression. Intrigued by the possibilities offered by the technique of photogravure, to reproduce a photographic image with all gradations between black and white with etching ink on quality paper, I took a class with master printer Lothar Osterburg.
That was the beginning of my venture in the field of printmaking as I was immediately fascinated by photogravure, by its results and by the process, with all its difficult, laborious and challenging steps. It took me some time to master the process, I found it rewarding and frankly exhilarating. After several prints, a few portfolios and two books that I did for practice, I decided to embark on a much larger project. I would give it a structure and a narrative that would be the vehicle to carry a large number of photogravures that — like the travelogue/diaristic films I was familiar with —would reflect the world around me, my experiences and my thoughts derived from haphazard reading of Heidegger’s philosophy.
Having established form and content, for over a year, in 2007 and in 2008, I dived in, making plates at the Manhattan Graphics Center in New York, often several at once, and printing them in my studio, two at the same time on one piece of paper (an additional challenge) in an edition of eight. All the photographs (with the exception of C.E. Gadda’s opposite the composite image of G.W. Bush with Atta, the 9/11 terrorist, and Duchamp’s urinal) are original photographs that I either took in those days or had taken when I had first arrived in New York in the late 70s. To maintain the narrative aspect of the book, I grouped the photogravures into different loose “sequences” that deal with NYC, the neighborhood, daily living, art, nature, news, Tuscany…and interspersed them with aquatints that depict the actual corners of the loft bed (pictured in the last pages of the book) that my wife and I built in the loft on the Bowery which — by the way — belonged to Andy Warhol, our landlord (and Jean Michel Basquiat was our neighbour).
Above the loft bed there is a skylight that is represented and sketched throughout the book with different printmaking techniques as if spotted at different times during that restless night. Two of the seven copies of the book were bound by Henry Bookbindings, an Hasidic Jew who livesand works in a dark, crammed and timeless basement in Henry Street on the Lower East Side.

Franco Marinai, Serrazzano/NYC Dec. 2022

for more pictures of the book click on this link