“Halfwood Press – The story,” is what the author calls a mockumentary to tell how an artist designed and made etching presses out of wood and steel, calling them “Halfwoods.” You learn how he was able to sell them to thirty people by reading vignettes, like brief encounters with people who love prints and printmaking. In some examples he is able to add how their owners used these etching presses, by showing pictures. As the story unfolds in mock-documentary style, he inserts descriptions of a make-believe game called “Emeralda.” His intent is to get the reader to see the Halfwood Press as a key piece for playing the game. The game’s payoff would be for him to achieve a long-held dream of an artist’s Perfect Studios. He says this book is largely fiction; taking the film genre, mockumentary, as it pretends to be rooted in actuality or memory, behaving like a documentary, history, or biography (in this instance, an autobiography). The author – who, as it turns out, is also fictional - subverted fact-based storytelling to illuminate and embellish the story of the Halfwood Press. This way you get the facts from the horse’s mouth but told via his alter ego. The etching press is real, the people who bought them are real, and the circumstances all actually happened, but the way the story is told makes one suspect there’s something else going on in “Emeralda Region,” an imaginary place.
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