by a group of forward-thinking, but easily startled, cattle (referred to by their detractors as “skitterati”), Desperado Press has been publishing high-quality poetry for over 150 years.

While Billy the Kid never worked for the Press, it is true he once hid behind one of our giant, steam-powered printing presses for three weeks in 1880, on the run from Sheriff Pat Garrett.

The great Wyoming blizzard of 1897 froze the Press’s lone door shut for fourteen years.  The editor trapped inside—a pockmarked, lonely man named Andrew Crandon—survived those years on a sort of salad made of wood shavings dressed with ink.

In the 1920s, the Press suffered severe financial setbacks due to a successful plagiarism lawsuit brought by Edna St. Vincent Millay.  Seeking to make Ms. Millay’s somewhat-racy poetry even racier, Hank Abernathy, a disingenuous young editor, took a selection of her poems and liberally sprinkled them with exclamation points:  “What lips my lips have kissed!  And where!  And why!”, and so on.  Abernathy released What Lips! (the Remix!), a title judges from circuit branches all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court did not find amusing.

During Word War II, Desperado Press, never one to shirk its civic duty, voluntarily offered numerous of its typesets to be melted down and converted to nylons for our boys to wear on the front.

Since the 1950s, the Press has enjoyed stable growth and received numerous awards, including three Nobel Prizes and a favorable mention in the Aberdeen, South Dakota, Press-Gazette.

Desperado Press is currently run by a sect of fourteenth-century Trappist monks.  In the off hours when they aren’t printing the best of American poetry, they are crafting exquisite Belgian beers.

Desperado Press
Cedar Lake, WI