Possibly one of the most delightful surprises I had at this year’s CODEX was meeting Stephanie Kimbro Dolin and learning about her First Bite Press.
I’ve been a reader as long as I can remember and literature has always been my primary teacher in my auto-didactic life. There were no explicit restraints on my reading that I remember, at least not from my parents. I read whatever was around the house, I checked out whatever I wanted from what was in the library, and, if I had any money, I bought whatever books I wanted in the bookstores. I don’t remember ever being told I couldn’t have or read a book. I wasn’t aware of censors and book-banners back in the ‘60s and ‘70s of my youthful reading, but I can tell you that if I were, and there was a book that was being banned or I was told I shouldn’t read, I would have found a way to read it.
And since I was reading way above my level, I read plenty of books with “adult” situations in them. I didn’t read “romances,” especially what were referred to as Harlequin romance, but if I picked one up that was lying around I might have paged through to the end of the chapters where everyone knew the juicy bits were. My millennial daughter, who inherited my avid reader gene, informs me that “romances” are a lot more explicit these days than what I might have seen as an adolescent. When I wanted, or needed, to really learn about sex I sought out the books (and magazines) that could maybe give me the information I was looking for; it definitely wasn’t coming from my parents, my school, or my peers. Sex and romance became another facet of the human experience that I love to read about in all its diversity.
These First Bite Press stories are re-imaginings of classic stories by Miranda Culp and Jeff Delman. Most of them were familiar to me: I’ve read Tom Sawyer and Robin Hood, and various adaptations for film and television of those two along with Frankenstein, Peter Pan, and Dr. Jeckyl & Mr. Hyde. All of those, except maybe the Mel Brooks Young Frankenstein, were pretty chaste. These stories are anything but chaste. As the author points out in the Author’s Note:
Physical pleasure aside, sex affords us a suspended instant where the rest of the world falls away, our boundaries and inhibitions dissolve, and we forget our own mortality, if only for a moment.
Great literature has the same transcendent effect.
The selection of stories bears out the love of literature from both the authors, or adapters, and the press. In fact, most of the stories start with a apology or mea culpa to the original author.
Another brilliant aspect of these books comes from another acknowledgement in the Author’s note, that:
…we quickly recognized that the more agency we gave the female characters, the hotter the stories became. The originals were conceived in a patriarchal, hetero-normative context, but by shining an egalitarian light on each of them, dynamics emerged between these famous characters that we never would have imagined at the beginning.
The breadth of the situations in these stories was amazing, definitely outside of the norm of the times they were originally written in, if they had included erotic situations, or in mainstream literature today. Not that we didn’t have erotic literature that shocked in the past, so much so that much of it was printed anonymously by a private press. But that kind of private press mostly just put out a trade book that a “respectable” publisher would not; in this case private press means books printed letterpress by hand on fine paper and with beautiful bindings and presentations. And if First Bite Press, or another press offered a hand-made Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin, Fanny Hill by John Cleland, Venus in Furs by Sacher-Masoch, or some of the Marquis de Sade, I’d hope to afford a copy. Reading these stories was delightful and I’ll be revisiting some of them in the chapbooks that the press also offers as a way to acquire a little bit of this spiciness.
The First Bite Canon of Aphrodisia would grace any library shelf regardless of whether one was aware of the spicy content or not. One of the things I really like about the deluxe edition design is that the four volumes are housed in a box with a clear plastic “window” that lets us voyeuristically see into the book’s “house” and read the spines. A sly little play on the contents, in my mind. Don’t look in the window if you don’t want to see what’s going on in there, and mind your own business if you do. The box has one of the illustrations printed in gold on the cloth as well as a couple of embellishments around the window. It’s incredibly well thought-out and well-made.
Each of the four books has the same illustration as the box stamped on the front boards, with the title, volume number, and an ornament on each of the different colored leather spines. The books feature hand-marbled end-sheets and, in the deluxe edition, an extra portfolio of the hand-printed illustrations. The text is printed on Arches Rives Lightweight. These are small volumes, which would allow you to have a little naughtiness in your pocket or purse if you were brave enough to let them stray out of your library. Each volume has three to four stories, for a total of thirteen.
Laurelin Gilmore has done a masterful job of capturing the stories, with a full-page illustration for each, and four frontispiece illustrations that are hand-colored in the deluxe edition. There are some smaller illustrations sprinkled throughout the text. One of my favorite illustrators, Vladimir Zimakov did the press device on the colophon.
First Bite Press has managed to combine the sensual with the sensuous in a beautiful hand-made letterpress book. Stephanie Kimbro Dolin, owner and operator of the press states on the website that “The focus of the press is to publish erotica and romance writing, updating the high-quality tradition of the Golden Era of fine press printing with contemporary concepts of these genres.” I’ll be looking forward to see what else she has in store for lovers of erotica. What other genre can believably say…
AVAILABILITY: I believe that both the limited and deluxe editions are available on the press website at the time of writing this review.
This review was made possible by the kindness and patience of Stephanie Kimbro Dolin and the First Bite Press. It was a pleasure to experience the deluxe edition of this title. Many thanks!