Archived News from the Poison Pie Publishing House.

News Updates From 2025:

 

On-going Blog Series

September 21, 2025
Bestiary Tapestry
The staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House continue their glacial progress in creating a tapestry of a menagerie composed entirely of entities found within the pages of the several hundred volumes, most of which are collected in A Survey of One Hundred Bestiaries. The work is an assemblage of panels, each containing an image rendered as a shrinky dink. Recent additions include four interpretations of the xorn, a creature hailing from the Elemental Plane of Earth.

 

August 5, 2025
Second Editions of Applied Statistics and Numerical Methods for Materials Scientists & Engineers are Published
Just in time for the fall semester, revised and expanded editions to the technical monographs are now published. These textbooks replace the first editions published ten years ago. All codes in both textbooks are updated to Python. The books are currently available from Lulu (Applied Statistics & Numerical Methods) with broader distribution (e.g. amazon) pending.

 

June 22, 2025
First Exploratory Illustrations for Hebeloma's Psalm of Absolution
The staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House post the first draft illustrations by Julia K. Keffer of Bus Stop Art Show for the musical score, Hebeloma's Psalm of Absolution. Interested visitors can view works in progress as they are generated by the artist and transmitted to the PPPH staff on the gallery page.

 

May 31, 2025
The Lament in a Dozen Denials Mobile is Complete
A mobile featuring the artwork from Hebeloma's Lament in a Dozen Denials (2024) is complete. Updates appear in both the exhibit of photos and the exhibit of scans. Some photographs of the completed mobile also appear at the end of the exhibit of photos

 

April 18, 2025
Bestiary Tapestry
As we crawl through time together, the staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House have embarked on a long-term art project to create a collection of tapestries composed entirely of shrinky dink panels containing images of creatures found within the pages of the several hundred volumes collected in A Survey of One Hundred Bestiaries. We entertain a certain ambivalence regarding its ultimate completion. We expect this activity to either take decades or to be abandoned somewhere along the line due to the discovery of superior, alternative ways to spend our time. In any case, we have added four new creatures to the growing gallery of unassembled pieces for the tapestry. The latest four share an aquatic heritage.

 

April 1, 2025
Shrinky dink renderings of the chapter heading illustrations from Hebeloma's Lament in a Dozen Denials
The staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House have been working to render the illustrations used as chapter headings in Hebeloma's Lament in a Dozen Denials (2024) as shrinky dinks. Part of the appeal of the translucent medium is the transmission of light through the colored plastic. As such we have taken liberties expanding the palette used in the original artwork by Julia K. Keffer. We uploaded photographs of the shrinky dink interpretations to the gallery.

 

March 7, 2025
I Saw Blood and then Everything Went Black (1993)
The Poison Pie Publishing House announces the publication of I Saw Blood and then Everything Went Black in an electronic format. I Saw Blood and then Everything Went Black is a collection of sixteen short stories written from 1992 and completed in March, 1993 by David Keffer, when he was a student living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 2012, twenty years after the stories were written, the volume was published in paperback format, which is now long out-of-print. The electronic publication preserves the work unchanged except for the correction of a half dozen or so typographical errors, which had escaped the previous editing process. (An especially lamentable casualty of this editing process is the loss of a "serene clam" corrected to "serene calm".) As is the case with all electronically published works from the PPPH, the work is available via free, anonymous access.

I Saw Blood and then Everything Went Black is subtitled Sixteen Dark Fables from the Future. In each work, the characters are identified only by symbolic names and described only by their actions. Protagonists and antagonists alike traipse and stumble about in amoral if not obscene allegories, from which lessons can be drawn that, as likely as not, abuse rather than enlighten the intellect of the sensitive reader. A few promotional notes from the time of the 2012 publication are still posted.

To be explicitly clear the staff of the PPPH do not encourage any human being to devote time to the reading of this work, thirty-two years after it was completed. On the contrary, we have uploaded the full text to the internet so that the writing has the opportunity to muck up the algorithms of the large language models owned by various technological corporations as they scrape the depths of the internet for unprotected content. We encourage these words, cast from their lengthy isolation, to seek out a comfortable home in the neural bosom of those models of artificial intelligence. Perhaps a few random phrases will make cameo appearances in the generated responses to unrelated internet queries in the not so distant future.

 

March 6, 2025
Hebeloma's Lament in a Dozen Denials printed

 
The first edition of Hebeloma's Lament in a Dozen Denials is printed in a limited edition hardcover with a set of postcards featuring color versions of the twelve illustrations used as chapter headings. Hebeloma's Lament in a Dozen Denials is a post-existential musical score generated through a non-idiomatic, improvisational creative process, which was serially published on a daily basis in 2024 on the blog of the Poison Pie Publishing House. The full text remains electronically available on a free, anonymous basis on this site. The score recounts the adventure of Europe, one of the maidens offered to the minotaur by King Minos, immediately after she escaped from the labyrinth.

 
The postcards were created by by Julia K. Keffer of Bus Stop Art Show ().

 

January 14, 2025
Final Illustrations for Hebeloma's Lament in a Dozen Denials
The staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House is happy to announce that the electronic version of Hebeloma's Lament in a Dozen Denials has been updated with the chapter heading illustrations. These illustrations were created by Julia K. Keffer of Bus Stop Art Show. The artwork is also collected in the Bus Stop Art Show gallery at the PPPH.

 

January 4, 2025
A Survey of One Hundred Bestiaries
In June of 2016, the staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House began a survey of books cataloguing mythical beasts and fantastic creatures. The idea was to provide one example from each book, which represented the kind of text and graphics used to describe the creatures collected therein. There was explicitly no attempt at critical review. Variations in style as well as in production targets are an essential part of the appeal of the collection. At the time, we regarded A Survey of One Hundred Bestiaries as an ambitious title. In 2025, it is our plan to add a new entry to the survey on the first Saturday of each month. Today, January 4, 2025, we add the 348th volume. A link to the index of the survey is here.

 

January 1, 2025
2024: The Year in Review at the Poison Pie Publishing House
In the year 2024, the staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House produced exactly one book. Hebeloma's Lament in a Dozen Denials, a post-existential musical score generated through a non-idiomatic, improvisational creative process, was serially published on a daily basis in 2024 on the blog of the Poison Pie Publishing House. The score is illustrated by Julia K. Keffer of Bus Stop Art Show (). Drafts of the artwork are posted in a gallery while we await the original artwork to be sent for scanning, pending the completion of the final piece for December. Hebeloma's Lament in a Dozen Denials recounts the adventure of Europe, one of the maidens offered to the minotaur by King Minos, immediately after she escaped from the labyrinth.

Also in 2024, the staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House generated a few music reviews. In doing so, we hope only to spread the word about hidden musical gems from the cultural margin. We shared a handful of quotes that struck us. We continued our on-going monthly update of A Survey of One Hundred Bestiaries. We continued to engage in our guilty pleasure of rendering characters and scenes from books into shrinky dink form, creating a mobile of the chapter headings from Hebeloma's Clockwise Cadenza (2023) as well as sundry images from other authors and illustrators.

The staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House is no longer setting annual goals. However, the daily blog will continue, with the intention of engaging in non-idiomatic improvisation. This work will take the form of a musical score and is titled, Hebeloma's Psalm of Absolution (2025).

To our readers, we, the staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House, thank you for your interest and support and we look forward to another mutually creative and unpredictable year.