Agile Meteor Press

Agile Meteor Press is the letterpress and bindery side of the practice — where the books are bound, the covers printed, and The Periodic runs off the press.

"There's a certain beauty to the tactile nature of a book that I just adore," Kyle says. A painting hangs on the wall, a precious object you don't touch. A book is meant to be carried — a little world you put in your pocket. Binding is where the rest of the work collects into something you can hold: a means to an end, and the end is an experience between your eyes and your hands.

The binding

Kyle binds in the Sewn Boards structure — a modern method built on some of the earliest Coptic bindings known, one of the oldest techniques we have for gathering knowledge into a portable, shareable form. It is functionally perfect in the hand, and light enough to make anywhere; the summer of 2026 is testing exactly that, with the whole bindery gone mobile.

Two first editions anchor this year's work, both Sewn Boards:

• Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — one of an eventual edition of eight; boards cased in black-walnut-dyed stock with a linen spine and an embossed goatskin label. Chosen for what it has to say about the limits of language at the moment the language models arrived. The first copy was sewn and cased by headlamp in a creek bottom outside Lander, Wyoming.
• Whitman's Leaves of Grass (the 1855 first edition) — a gold-foil spine, the cover dyed with desert plants. Chosen because Whitman set the original by hand, and for its pre–Civil War exuberance, which reads strangely and well against our own division.

The covers are eco-dyed from the leftover baths of Jeannie's yarn dyeing, so nothing is wasted.

The press

The print shop centers on a Vandercook 325G proof press — moved in by forklift, rolled the last stretch on lengths of pipe, then cleaned, oiled, and put back to work — alongside a small West German tabletop jobbing press for postcards and short runs, and a foil stamper for spine labels. The type is being built by hand, a case at a time. On the road, the kit shrinks to a laser printer running off a battery in the van — enough to keep publishing from wherever the work is happening.

Old tools, used on purpose: the most direct way to put something real and lasting into another person's hands.