We print the future using tools older than the stories.
Callisto Press is a small bindery working in the old sequence — wet paper, set type, inked plate, folded signature, sewn thread — applied to a genre that spends most of its time imagining what comes after all of that is gone.
Each edition begins as kozo fiber beaten by hand and formed sheet by sheet on a bamboo su. The text is composed in Dante, a face cut for the page rather than the screen. The illustrations are generated, not drawn — a controlled collision between an old craft and a new one, printed the same way Gutenberg would have insisted on: under real pressure, with real ink.
Founding Edition — No. 1
The Automated
Battlefield: Second Variety
Philip K. Dick's 1953 story of self-replicating war machines opens Callisto Press's three-volume Dick series — a set built from clean public-domain texts and grouped by the anxieties they share: first contact, the enemy already inside the house, and the battlefield that runs itself.
Forty-one copies. Each hand-numbered, each bound to order, each carrying a tip-in illustration pulled from a generative pipeline built specifically for this book.
- Text
- Set in Dante, 12 pt, from the setting established by Giovanni Mardersteig
- Display
- Joanna, cut by Eric Gill
- Paper
- Kozo, hand-formed by nagashizuki, sized with kaolin and dosa
- Illustration
- Generative tip-in plate, one per copy
- Binding
- Hand-sewn, edition of 41
- Printed
- Callisto Press, Eugene, Oregon
Three Ways In
Tier
Fine Numbered
The standard run. Full letterpress text, one generative tip-in, hand-numbered and hand-sewn — the edition as designed.
Numbered copies
Tier
Deluxe
An expanded binding with additional illustration plates and a slipcase, for readers building a complete shelf of the series.
Limited count
Tier
Lettered
A handful of copies outside the numbered run, signed and marked by letter rather than number.
Smallest count
How A Copy Is Made
Four stages, in order
01
Paper
Kozo fiber is cooked, beaten, and formed sheet by sheet on a bamboo su — the same nagashizuki method used in Japan for a thousand years.
02
Type
Text is composed in Dante, display in Joanna, and locked up for the press exactly as a Monotype-era printer would recognize it.
03
Illustration
A generative pipeline built for the title produces a unique tip-in plate for every copy in the edition — no two identical.
04
Binding
Signatures are folded, sewn by hand, and cased in — each copy checked, numbered, and signed before it leaves the shop.
Collector Notice List
Hear about it before the numbering starts.
Second Variety is in production now. We'll send word directly to collectors before copies are offered publicly — no spam, just the news that matters.
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