Richard Stephens is a contemplative artist who takes from real life and values people’s stories, and his artist book based on Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried will be shown at the Northampton Book Fair this year, his fourth year exhibiting. The book features responses from veterans when asked what they carried with them during their time of service, and is hand-bound and made with letterpress with great care.

Gary Metras, the Poet Laureate of Easthampton, Massachusetts in 2018, has published 118 chapbooks, broadsides, and full length books since the founding of Adastra Press in 1979. Adastra Press, the oldest independent poetry publisher in the Pioneer Valley, is a one-person printing and publishing operation, specializing in limited editions of poetry, mostly in chapbook size, letterpress printed using hand set type, with a paper cover that has a flat spine glued to the hand