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Eddie's Club

I first published Dave Thomas’s poem Mexico City World Map fifty-two years ago in my fledgling literary and graphic arts magazine Montana Gothic. That was in 1974 just after I had returned to my hometown from Paris and a two-year stint in Berkeley working at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to start Black Stone Press, a small art and literary printing and publishing business. We (Jane Bailey and I) published Dave’s work in all six issues over the following 4 years. Dave and I already had a history going back to our undergraduate days together in 1969. I was the Missoula home boy (politically inclined to the left) who befriended the artistic country boys and their female counterparts as they trickled into Missoula from the Hi-Line to escape their small towns and get a university education. They came down from the Blackfoot and Flathead Reservations and from the towns of Choteau, Havre, Chinook, and Ft. Belknap to drink at Eddie’s Club, write poems, and occasionally travel outside their native range. 

After graduating, Dave was always moving from job to job and traveling in between when work was slow. He worked construction mostly, at the Libby Dam on the Kutenai River, sometimes on the Northern Pacific Railroad, and various building sites all over Western Montana. He was the Zen wanderer, the Taoist poet, the beat road-master. Among his literary forebears were Gary Snyder, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Han Shan, with a dash of Philip Whalen. Dave’s wanderings often brought him to San Francisco where we continued our friendship if I was in the city at the time. 

Over the many years since Black Stone Press and the first Montana Gothic I designed two slim volumes of his poems Fossil Fuel and Buck’s Last Wreck for other publishers and printed and published three poems under my Hormone Derange Editions imprint — a series of illustrated letterpress broadsides by poets and writers of my acquaintance. Then, in 2025, looking around for a new project for our CODEX Foundation letterpress series at The REAL LEAD SALOON, I selected seven of my favorite poems from Dave’s previous books and chapbooks and we began typesetting Eddie’s Club, seven poems with a wood engraving by Keith Cranmer of the neon sign that hung above the entrance of Eddie’s Club, the bar where all the writers hung out in the 60’s and still do as far as I can tell.

—Peter Koch

From WORDS OUT WEST the podcast website of Montana Public Radio:

"David grew up on the Hi-Line in North-central Montana, graduated from the University of Montana, then found himself on the streets of San Francisco to begin his literary education. David has published five books of poems: Fossil Fuel, Buck’s Last Wreck, The Hellgate Wind, and Waterworks Hill. FootHills Publishing released his latest book of poems, Old Power Company Road (2019) and Afternoon Stroll. His poems have appeared in many magazines and journals, and anthologized in The Last Best Place, Poems Across the Big Sky I & II,and New Poets of the American West.  David says he’s been, “slogging through the literary trenches under the Big Sky for more than forty years, from a parking lot in Missoula to the peaks of Glacier Park.” Economic realities drove him to seek and find work, first on the railroad gangs, but also on big construction projects like Libby Dam. He has also worked on a potato ranch, picked cherries on Flathead Lake and traveled extensively in the United States, Mexico and Central America. He currently lives in Missoula, Montana, eking out an existence as a janitor and odd job man while writing continuously."

Eddie's Club was printed from Dante metal type on a Geitz platen press formerly owned by Jack Stauffacher. The frontispiece was by master engraver Keith Cranmer. This book was designed, typeset, printed, and bound by faithful Salooners Monique Comacchio, Keith Cranmer, Sam Duffy, Susan Filter, Jonathan Gerken, Mark Gorenstein, Peter Koch, Jennifer Osgood, Andrea Scharff, and Christopher Stinehour, as well as friends Karen and Xoxo Eng. Thirty-five copies were printed on Serpa handmade paper and fifty copies were printed on Mohawk Superfine.