Pentagram Press

The Pentagram Press was founded in 1974 by the Milwaukee-based poet Michael Tarachow as a publishing outlet for poetry and other new literature. Michael Tarachow was born in 1954 and graduated from the University of Wisconsin. Tarachow began his printing and publishing career while still in college, financing the press at his own expense. The press originally contracted offset printing to local Milwaukee houses, but in 1976 Tarachow began using the letterpress of a fellow printer to produce fine press books in limited editions. Pentagram remained a one-man operation and Tarachow did his own designing, typesetting, presswork, printing, binding, and publishing. In 1979 Tarachow moved Pentagram to Markesan, Wisconsin, where he printed books of poetry, fiction, literary criticism, and typographical design on his own nineteenth-century letterpress. By the time the press moved to Minneapolis in 1987, Pentagram was known as one of the best private literary presses in the United States, publishing editions of 200 – 500 copies by authors such as Bob Arnold, Tom Clark, Cid Corman, Theodore Enslin, Tom Montag, and Diane Wakoski. By the 1990s Pentagram began producing books of typographic ornaments, such as An Exploration of the Granjon Arabesques (1990). The Pentagram Press produced more than seventy-five books and a host of broadsides and other letterpress ephemera. Particularly well-established among Wisconsin and Midwestern poets and printers, Pentagram’s reputation also gained national and even international renown. Pentagram Press books have received awards and certificates of excellence from the American Institute of Graphic Design, the Chicago Book Clinic, and the Pushcart Prize.

In addition to operating the Pentagram Press, Tarachow has published his own poetry, including Somewhere Music, Somewhere Song (1981), The Turning Point (1981), and In Place & Out (1982).

Halla, Chris. “Harvesting in the Hinterlands.” Small Press, November - December, 1984 - - “Pentagram: A Press and a Purpose.” Wisconsin Trails, November - December, 1986

From the guide to the Pentagram Press archives, 1972–1999, (University of Delaware Library - Special Collections)