Chestertown’s Own Odyssey: The Making of a 20-Pound Epic

It began, appropriately enough, with an almost impossible quest. Chestertown Old Book Company publishers Bill Frank and Gerry Cataldo became determined to produce a monumental limited edition of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, complete with the original Greek, Alexander Pope’s English translation, elaborate illustrations, and enough physical weight to make each two-volume set tip the scales at nearly 20 pounds.

At the Spy’s invitation, Chestertown Spy publisher Jim Dissette and illustrator Avery Lawrence recently came together to recall the undertaking. Dissette worked with Frank and Cataldo at the Chestertown Old Book Company, helping assemble what he described as a strange orchestra of printers, designers, scholars, editors, and artists. His first reaction to the proposal was that everyone involved might need therapy.

Lawrence entered the story almost by accident. The young artist was visiting Chestertown, where his late uncle, the much-loved Michael Lawrence, owned a farm, when he stopped by the bookstore in response to a notice sent to the University of Pennsylvania. Although the deadline had already passed, Lawrence arrived carrying a sample illustration inspired by ancient Greek pottery. After a worldwide search for an artist, the team knew almost immediately that they had found the right person.

What followed was a labor of passion bordering on obsession. Lawrence produced more than 50 illustrations, often using himself as the model, while scholars checked the Greek text and designers struggled to balance it against Pope’s sometime shorter, sometime longer, English passages. The original plan called for a fully letterpress edition, but printing costs became so daunting that the team eventually turned to offset production.

The finished books were magnificent, but they arrived at precisely the wrong moment. Two thousand sets were printed just as the Great Recession began crushing the market for expensive collectible books. Copies reached major universities and won praise, but sales eventually slowed, leaving the Chestertown team with a warehouse full of beautiful monsters. In that sense, the project became its own epic: a story of ambition, chance, artistic devotion, and a commercial defeat that helped close an extraordinary era of fine-book publishing in Chestertown.