Double Elephant Press presents a world both fantastic & familiar, steeped in the history of printed books & fine art

Drawing from his imagination, Michael Kuch portrays a world both fantastic & familiar in his books, prints, and paintings from his Double Elephant Press. Kuch lives and works in Northampton.

At the Northampton Book Fair, Kuch will display and sell two of his political broadsides: Rise Up and Fuck Facism. Rise Up was created by Michael Kuch in response to the 2016 U.S.Presidential election, 10 x12 inch.

Kuch grew up in northern Vermont. He began drawing in pen & ink at the age of eleven & the following year, had a one-person show at a local museum. He remained self-taught until he came under the wing of Leonard Baskin at Hampshire College. Under Baskin's critical eye, Kuch studied life-drawing in the classical tradition. As a student, he was particularly struck by the print work of Odilon Redon, Francisco Goya, and Giambattista Tiepolo.

For many years after receiving his BA, Kuch continued to work closely with Baskin, printing etchings in color for Baskin's Gehenna Press. In 1994 Kuch started his own Double Elephant Press with the publication of a book of frog etchings entitled, A Plague on Your House. The book contained a tongue and cheek exposition by Kuch on the demise of frogs that was more about human vulnerability. For the past 32 years Kuch has worked with book artisans in the Northampton area, notably the letterpress printer Art Larson, as well as numerous bookbinders. At Double Elephant Press, Kuch has delved into printing his own etched text, tirelessly working at his art, and even made forays into bookbinding with his spouse, attorney Jennifer Taub.

He is current working on Emblemata: Hic Sunt Dracones, a book, like many of his limited editions, that is steeped in the history of books. "I use the structures of these books as scaffolding in how to approach - how to make a book - that relates to the history of books, Kuch says. "I came to making books as a visual artist. Information is best related visually. My hope is that books are a visual model to begin a conversation about the whole history of books," he says.

Emblemata, Kuch's creative investment of years of work, is more than an homage to emblem books, which he characterized as a "sleeping giant in book history that carried humanism from the early days of printing through the renaissance.They are the connective tissue for the humanities."

Emblemata, derived from the Greek word for mosaics, also know as emblem books, were "publications that combined short poems in the form of epigrams, an ancient Latin heritage, with the skillfulness of woodcuts to illustrate the meaning of the verses.," according to Wikipedia.

Kuch's artist book includes ornamental poems that that are printed from etched intaglio plates, fantastic and enigmatic prints - emblemata of animals, birds, insects, & sea creatures, and a title page that follows Blake's illustrations with relief etched text and an illustration.

For more on the making of Emblemata, see: https://www.michaelkuch.com/videos

Kuch will be bringing one of his most accessible books to the Northampton Book Fair: Opera Mortis - The Works of Death: The Simulacra & Natural History of Death's Labors & Hours of Work. 

Inspired by Les Simulachres & historiees faces de la Mort (1538) by Hans Holbein the Younger, this dance of death comes as a natural history with human, skeletal death embedded in all manner of beasts. The binomial nomenclature is derived from common Latin terms: Quid proquo, Habeas corpus, Et cetera. Quatrains, etched along with the images, describe the occupations of death from Pope to artist.

The accordion-bound book measures 5" x 5" and contains 24 pages of relief etchings (recto and verso). Housed in a four-flap chemise, the book can be displayed as a 12-point star revealing all the etchings in equilateral triangles. Magnets in the chemise hold the star-display at key points. Edition of 365. Published in 2016.

Complete collections of Kuch's Double Elephant Press are housed in the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College, the Library of Congress, and the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, among others. The National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as over 60 other institutional collections hold his books. To learn more, go to: https://www.michaelkuch.com/

written by Mark Brumberg, 13 October, 2026