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In 1930 Professor Rosalind Keep's vision of a private press imprint for Mills became a reality, and The Eucalyptus Press opened its doors. At that time those doors were located in the parlor of Miss Keep's campus home. Today the press and its sister facility, the Florence Walter Bindery, are home to the Mills College Book Arts Program, an internationally recognized program that is one of only a handful of such programs offered in the United States. In the studios, which will be relocated to larger facilities in Summer, 2008, students produce unique and editioned artists' books that have been exhibited in galleries from Wellesley College to the Victorian and Albert Museum in London. The facilities, which include metal type, etching and relief presses, French handmade bookbinding equipment, and computer workstations, provide students with a broad range of options for their creative work. Book history and contemporary artists' bookmaking can be studied using the superb collection of fine and rare books housed in the Olin Library.
The Eucalyptus Press has an active publishing program that features poetry broadsides from the ongoing Contemporary Writers Series sponsored by the English Department. These broadsides are designed and printed in limited editions by the graduate teaching assistants in the Book Art Program. Writers who have contributed work to the series include Barbara Guest, Edwin Torres, Michael Palmer, Daniel Handler, Grace Paley, Jennifer Moxley, and Bhanu Kapil. Those broadsides still in print, all of them signed and numbered by the poets, are available for purchase from the Book Art Program.
In 2004 the Book Art Program inaugurated a new gallery for the exhibition of student work. This pocket-sized space also allows students to curate small exhibitions as part of their book art course work. The gallery, formerly nestled next to the book art studios in Carnegie Hall; will be relocated in fall 2008.
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