Walter Hamady

Using the Perishable Press trade name, he has designed and printed 131 limited edition books by such well-known writers as Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan (the Black Mountain poets), Loren Eiseley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Bernard, Clarence Major, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, W. S. Merwin, Howard Nemerov, Toby Olson, Richard Wiley, Joel Oppenheimer, Reeve Lindbergh, Jonathan Williams, William Stafford, Bobby Byrd and Paul Auster.

In the process, he has also collaborated with a number of visual artists (who have illustrated his books), among them John Wilde, Henrik Drescher, David McLimans, Jim Lee, Peter Sís, Margaret Sunday, Lane Hall, and Jack Beal.

Throughout that series (there are eight gabberjabbs), he pokes fun at nearly everything, including his own artistic seriousness, the snobbery of those who claim to be scholars, and the widespread, unchallenged assumption that traditional page layout and, particularly, typography, are governed by immutable rules.

Although he has made frequent use of drawing and photography in illustrating his books, his involvement with collage has grown to include the construction of box-like assemblages of metal type, altered images, and fragments of other ephemera from the history of printing.

He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1969, has received three artist's research grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and, in 2006, was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Crafts Council.