12 Postcards from the Diana Press

Baltimore: Diana Press, 1973. First Edition. Twelve offset-lithograph postcards (5 ½" x 3 ¼") printed in red and black, on gray paper, titled and copyright on the verso. The designs are adapted from 20th century linocuts, primitive art and sculpture; depicting fertility idols, goddesses, and abstractions, a couple with quotes. Original envelope with the publisher's rubber-stamped address. Founded in Baltimore in 1972 by Coletta Reid and Casey Czarnik, Diana Press was among the earliest and most important lesbian-feminist publishing houses in the United States, operating as both a commercial print shop and a radical publisher committed to bringing openly lesbian literature into print at a moment when mainstream houses would not touch it. Its catalogue included early work by Rita Mae Brown, Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, and Elsa Gidlow, as well as a reprint of Jeannette Foster's pioneering Sex Variant Women in Literature. This set of twelve postcards, issued in 1973 at the beginning of the press's publishing operation, reflects the visual vocabulary the Women in Print Movement was developing for itself; goddess iconography, fertility figures, and primitive and folk forms drawn from sources outside the male-dominated Western canon, adapted into inexpensive, mass-producible objects that carried feminist imagery into everyday circulation. The press relocated to Oakland in 1977 and closed in 1979, following a fire, an act of vandalism, and internal disputes; surviving ephemera from its Baltimore years is now scarce.