Penrose Press

Collaborative nano-publishing by ambitious, early-career creatives.

Thirteen books and bookart objects were published between 2017 and 2022. Brianna Tosswill worked alongside over fifty talented collaborators to create an enduring legacy in this brief period. Several of these books can be viewed in person at university libraries across Canada. (Fisher Rare Book Library, OCADU Library, Bruce Peel Special Collections, and MacEwan University Special Collections Archive)

Alice and Antius

An Epic Poem by Kit Ingram
with Illustrations by Brianna Tosswill

Alice and Antius is a narrative poem following the lives of two lovers—a scientist and a poet--through a climate apocalypse. Survivors of a lost time, they enter a labyrinth filled with the haze of nostalgia, loss, meaning, and hope.

At turns mythic and intimate, wry and lyrical, Alice and Antius show us the power of words to trace our path across the shadow of ruin.

This book is a unique artwork for your collection of beautiful reading material. There are more carefully considered details than you can possibly take in all at once. This meld of word and image will offer you new meaning every time you revisit it. Remember to be kind to yourself. This story is timely and hard to bear at times, but so worthwhile.

2021

Risograph Printed by Vide Press

Coptic Bound by Brianna Tosswill and Callum McKensie

Limited Edition of 100

'Alice and Antius, written by Kit Ingram and illustrated by Brianna Tosswill, is a poignant piece of art that is irrefutably beautifully staged. Ingram and Tosswill showcase the reality of our current climate crisis with mythological language, ethos, and characters from Ancient Greece.'
- Independent Book Review

Avebury

Poems by Wendy McGrath
Design by Brianna Tosswill

We all turn expressions of loss and grief into metaphors--an obituary in a newspaper, a gravestone, flowers... a poem.

Avebury is a collection of two redacted poems (written before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and a third poem written in response to a childhood memory evoked by an event a world away.

This artist's book is itself a metaphor for the way in which we contain our tragedies and give them shape, the way we turn them over and regard them from different angles to make sense of them. But it is also a metaphor for how we manage to keep ourselves open.

This project was completed in the spring of 2021 by Brianna Tosswill in collaboration with Wendy McGrath under the imprint Penrose Press.

- a wooden box made from recycled wood panelling.

- the booklet "Avebury Cemetery"

- the booklet "O, Bits"

- the booklet "O, Bits 2 years later"

Limited edition of 100

Epilogue

Poem by Jessica Magonet
Paper and Printing by Brianna Tosswill

Epilogue by Jessica Magonet is a brief, visceral poem about stories at the end of the world. Her words guide us across barren spaces littered with human detritus. Most shockingly, the vision she calls up of the apocalypse is almost soothing. With deep empathy for our earth, the end of human conflict seems like a relief. Magonet's spinning world feels peaceful.

While this poem addresses the apocalypse, we're still fighting for a just future on our one and only planet. $30 from the sale of each poem went directly to climate justice initiatives to help fund bold climate action.

The paper is 100% handmade with a few main components:

rag paper scraps,
torn up 1970’s sci-fi novels in which the protagonists abandon a dying earth in favour of colonizing other planets or living on spaceships
and dandelions.

Conversations with the ocean

Poetry by Evelyn Elgie
Design by Brianna Tosswill

Conversations with the Ocean was published as a series of booklets in a cloth bag. The booklets had all been washed in specific bodies of water (Pacific, Great Lakes, Atlantic) to reveal their hidden text and images. Elgie's poetry is haunting and heavy, gaining lightness. This was a wonderful project involving many more than usual collaborators: our editor and book washers across the country. It was the first summer of COVID and none of us got to see each other in person, but the books all travelled from Edmonton to Vancouver, Halifax, and Oakville, AND back. A paperback version is still available to purchase here.

Conversations with the Ocean is part of the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta. It can be viewed by anyone by appointment.

- a cloth bag, screenprinted and hand sewn, dip dyed according to edition

- three ordered booklets than unfold into art posters. These were screenprinted with water-soluble paste, and coated in pigment powder & fixative in preparation for washing.

- three teams of people washed the three different editions in water from the Pacific Ocean, The Atlantic Ocean, and Lake Ontario. They’re colour coded in hues of blue.

- post washing, each booklet was meticulously corrected for legibility, folded, and assembled into an instabook format. The single cut required for this book was instead torn, to give the page edge resemblance to a cresting wave.

Limited edition of 58

The Collaborative Edition was created with black pigment powder and was distributed to collectors unwashed, so they could have the full experience.

If a Carp Dreams of the Milky Way

Poetry by Jasmine Gui
Design by Brianna Tosswill

If a Carp Dreams of the Milky Way was published as a scroll in 2019. On it, a river-turned-fish flows between two columns of poetry that are visceral and analytical. This is one of the most satisfying projects I have ever worked on, and it once showed up in an HGTV apartment tour, which was very cool.

If a Carp Dreams of the Milky Way is part of the Fisher Rare Book Library University of Toronto. It can be viewed by anyone by appointment (they also have 7 other Penrose Press titles). When I was researching this project, I had never made a scroll before, so I went to the Fisher to handle a few from their collection. Six months later, this project was part of it.

Manahil Bandukwala had this to say in her review for Prism Magazine:

“If a Carp Dreams of the Milky Way demonstrates the possibilities of multidisciplinary collaborations to evoke a new type of heightened emotional response. This is poetry and art of dream and myth that, like folklore, carries on across generations and takes a form unique to its storyteller.”