Damaris Low Botwick

Co-Presenter with Craig Welsh

Joseph Low’s self-published, promotional pieces from linoleum cuts that he carved and printed via letterpress at his home studio - Eden Hill Press - are exquisite.

A copy of Print magazine from 1951 profiled its cover designer/illustrator, Joseph Low. Craig Welsh, like many, had never heard of Low or been aware of his work. That has changed.

In the past 18 months Craig has connected with Low’s daughter Damaris. He assembled a collection of several hundred pieces designed and/or printed by Low, and has begun work on a book and exhibition of Low’s career that reached from the 1930s to the 1980s. The work spans children’s books, New Yorker covers, LP records for Haydn Society in Boston, and 70+ cookbook inserts for Woman’s Day magazine - most driven by Low’s desire to use letterpress printing as his method for image making.

In the 1930s Low produced work at Tarbu Press. In the 1940s Low taught at Indiana University while helping establish its Corydon Press. While living in New Jersey Low worked under the Quattrocchi Press name. It was his move to Connecticut that established Eden Hill Press as the moniker by which his most significant works were produced.

Damaris Low Botwick

Damaris Low Botwick worked in textile research and development in the apparel industry for Liz Claiborne, Banana Republic, and Marc Jacobs in New York as well as international travel developing textiles for these companies. She also taught textile technology at Pratt Institute in their Fashion Department.

She is the older daughter of Joseph Low, spending her school age years as his “printer’s devil” assisting him in printing several of the Eden Hill Press publications: “Heads” and “Ten Proverbs” as well as a number of his mailing pieces on both the George Washington hand press and the electric Colt’s Armory Press.

She remembers being given permission to use his printer’s “furniture” to build castles in his studio with the proviso that each furniture piece had to be returned to its appropriate space in the cabinet. The distinctive smell of printer’s ink remains evocative all these years later.