The Letters of Heaven

Short story by Barry Lopez

Five hand-colored etchings by Robin Eschner

When I was a boy of thirteen I found a packet of letters in my father's desk. The letters had been written in Castilian Spanish in the first decade of the seventeenth century between a man and a woman who did not sign their names but who wrote in exquisite phrases of desire and anguish about their passion for one another. During the years I read and reread these letters I thought them composed of the most beautiful and, at the same time, the most illicit of human statements.

The Letters of Heaven is a remarkable story about what it means to love and about love's capacity to transform and transcend. The letters that the young narrator Ramon discovers are, he learns much later, a clandestine correspondence between two saints, Rosa de Lima and Martin de Porres. Charged by his dying father to be the future guardian of the letters, "to protect them from the righteous," the narrator experiences emotional upheaval and an unraveling of his own rigid moral order. He must confront the idea of ecstatic love as an element of spirituality, of physical rapture transmuted as a deeper understanding of God. And he must make a moral decision about what to do with the letters.

The format of The Letters of Heaven suggests a portfolio of letters bound together with a leather tie. Elements of hand lettering and Robin Eschner's hand-colored etchings evoke the historical period.

Barry Lopez

Barry Holstun Lopez is an essayist, author and short story writer, and has traveled extensively in remote parts of the world. When he is not on an extended trip to places such as Australia's Tanami Desert or the Transantarctic Mountains, he lives and writes in Western Oregon, in the forested foothills of the Cascade Mountains, along the McKenzie River.

In his nonfiction, Lopez writes often about the relationship between the physical landscape and human culture. He is the author of Arctic Dreams, for which he received the National Book Award, Of Wolves and Men, for which he received the John Burroughs Medal, several works of fiction, including Light Action in the Caribbean and Field Notes, and two collections of essays, Crossing Open Ground and About This Life. He contributes regularly to many prominent literary publications in the United States and abroad. He has received many awards and honors for his work, which appears in dozens of anthologies and has been widely translated. Lopez has also been involved in landscape photography, theatre and concert productions, and collaborations with various artists, including work on a city monument in Portland, Oregon.

Barry Lopez has published three previous books under the imprint of lone goose press, Sandy Tilcock's limited-edition fine press: Apologia (with artist Robin Eschner and designer Charles Hobson), Looking in a Deeper Lair: A Tribute to Wallace Stegner, and Children in the Woods (with artist Margaret Prentice).

Robin Eschner

California artist Robin Eschner is a painter and printmaker who uses natural imagery in still life and landscape and often works with literary themes. She earned a BS degree in a self-created program combining botany and fine art at the University of California Davis in 1976, where she studied with Wayne Thiebaud and Cornelia Schultz. Eschner exhibits widely in one-person and group shows. For The Letters of Heaven Eschner created a series of etchings that are hand colored with colored pencil and tipped into the book. She has produced artwork for several other books, among them Barry Lopez's Apologia, published by lone goose press in 1997. You can view Robin Eschner's work on her website at www.robineschner.com.

Specifications

• Edition of 125 press-numbered and 10 lettered participant copies
• Signed by the author and the artist
• Printed on Hahnemule Heine from Bembo monotypes cast by Michael Bixler
and passed through the composing stick
• Cover constructed by laminating two handmade papers, Moulin de
• Larroque's Brown and Twinrocker's Mica Rose
• 31 pages13 1/8 x 8 5/8 inches
• Calligraphic title, headings and ornaments by Marilyn Reaves
• Designed, printed and bound by Sandy Tilcock
• Publication Date: April 2000

Price $425.00

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