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JOB PRINTERS, AN UNDERGROUND PRESS, AND A POETRY MAGAZINE
The job-printing era. For most of its history Fort Wayne published the way every American city did: its newspapers doubled as job printers, and its books — the histories on the Sources shelf, Stapleford's novel from the Fort Wayne Paper & Blank Book Company in 1905 — came off local presses under local imprints. The scholarly and popular history publishing of the city is treated in Sources and not retold here.
The underground. The city's counterculture had its own imprint: Babylon Publishers put out the Fort Wayne Free Press, a biweekly underground newspaper, in 1970 — its surviving issues, preserved in Purdue Fort Wayne's digital collections, carry the era's Fort Wayne in its own typography.
The Windless Orchard. The city's one literary magazine of national small-press standing was The Windless Orchard, published from the English Department of Purdue University at Fort Wayne and edited by Professor Robert Novak. It appeared three times a year at the start of the 1970s — single issues seventy-five cents, haiku contests and all — was still running at number 40 in the summer of 1982 and number 46 later in the decade, and circulated through the little-magazine exchange lists of the Wormwood Review alongside the era's serious poetry journals; a second Fort Wayne little magazine, White Arms Magazine, appears on the same exchange lists. The Orchard also worked as a press: its chapbook arm printed local and visiting poets, and in 1977 it published a twenty-two-year-old Fort Wayne writer's first book — Michael Martone's At a Loss. The Allen County Public Library's own role as the city's literary institution — its Indiana Collection and Genealogy Center are where this entire shelf is kept — is told in Libraries.
Sources: The Windless Orchard, masthead and subscription notices (via the Fort Wayne Free Press, Purdue Fort Wayne digital collections, 1970); Wormwood Review exchange and press notes (1973–1982); HathiTrust record for At a Loss (1977); booksellers' records for the Windless Orchard chapbooks (1973–1977).