The Brother In Elysium

Jon Beacham of The Brother In Elysium setting metal letterpress type with a composing stick in...

The Brother In Elysium is a publishing imprint and studio run by artist Jon Beacham, based in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The press issues handmade books presenting artwork and writings, with recurring themes of self-determination, search for community, sense of place, and dialogues across time.

Beacham has been a bookseller and also works in photography, collage, and 16mm film. Through making books—setting metal letterpress type, printing on a Vandercook press, and hand binding—the materials, imagery, and rituals from these other practices also find a venue and emerge in new forms.

The Noguchi Museum has collaborated with The Brother In Elysium to co-publish handmade letterpress books collecting writings by Isamu Noguchi with related images and archival materials: I Become a Nisei (2020 / 2022) and Conversations with Isamu Noguchi (2022). The Shop is pleased to also offer these other books from the press: Ideal Forms of Vanishing (2021) by Herbert Pföstl, A Symbol of Constancy: Works on Paper by Jon Beacham (2020), and A Measure of Silence (2017).

Available in person in the Shop. For more information on currently available works, please email shop@noguchi.org.

The Brother In Elysium studio with Vandercook presses and type cabinets
Detail, Artwork in A Symbol of Constancy
Detail of book cover with metal letterpress type forms
Image spread, A Symbol of Constancy
Hand binding book in wooden rig
Cover, Ideal Forms of Vanishing
Image spread, Ideal Forms of Vanishing
Image and text spread, Ideal Forms of Vanishing
Image and text spread, Ideal Forms of Vanishing
Conversations-with-Isamu-Noguchi
I Become a Nisei book. Covers for the first and second printing.
Frontispiece, I Become a Nisei
Spread of I Become a Nisei, with Foreword by Brian Niiya and Poston plan
Image spread, I Become a Nisei, with Remembrance and Noodle
Type forms on composing stone

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