A press at a lighthouse

Portage River Press publishes from an 1869 light station in Jacobsville, on Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula. We bought it more or less on impulse and are restoring it one window at a time, which turns out to be good training for making books.

What we publish is narrow on purpose. Coloring books with thick lines and single-sided pages, because nobody wants a magnifying glass and a ruined page. Travel adventures for children, drawn from trips we actually took. And fiction set in small northern places where something is not quite right.

Three names appear on the covers, and each one means a different shelf. That is deliberate, not a disguise: a parent buying a coloring book for a seven-year-old should not have to work out which of our books are for grown-ups.

The keeper’s house is red brick and the tower is white, and between them there is always something that needs doing. Scaffolding goes up, weather takes it down.

Most of what ends up in the books starts here: the light on the water, the winters, the stones on the beach, the cat who thinks the whole thing belongs to her.