Graphics/Fine Arts Press is pleased to offer to our friends and to the reading public well-researched and documented information of interest to historians with both national and regional focus, as well as to living history interpreters and reenactors.

The small press has an interest in primary documentation, runaway ads, journals, diaries, inventories and account books; historic clothing and gear; music of the period, foodways; importation; the lives of the common soldier and his family; crafts and occupations; agriculture and useful wild plants; dyeing and medicinals; settlement and everyday life in towns and cities and on the frontier, as well as maps and original art from the period–wherever that may have been found, from the East coast westward. The relationships between the Native Americans and the French, German, English, Irish and Scottish settlers are of special concern. We are interested, most especially, in women’s lives and occupations, from the 16th to the early 19th centuries. All of these things have appeared in our books and in The Journal of the Middle Waters Frontier, no longer in print. (At some point these periodicals may be available as an eBook…please check back periodically.)

Graphics/Fine Arts has been in business for 30 years, and as a press since 1993, publishing information on the unusual as well as the common–as long as it is based on the primary documents.

Owner Cathy Johnson, often known as Kate, has been interested in history for decades, and has written for Early American Life, Women’s History Magazine, Americana, Artist’s Magazine, Country Living, Sierra, Muzzleloader, Harrowsmith, Country Journal, Science Digest, Watercolor Magic, Personal Journaling, and Sports Afield, among others. She was a contributing editor of three magazines and has written and illustrated 35 books, most on art and natural history, and five published by her own small press on subjects of interest to the history-loving community. You can find those in our Bookshop, along with many of Ms. Johnson’s other books.

She has also published the very popular Recreating the American Longhunter by Joseph Ruckman, historian and reenactor, and the women’s clothing book by Mara Riley, Whatever Shall I Wear; A Guide to Assembling a Woman’s Basic 18th Century Wardrobe. Riley is well known in historical circles for her impeccable research and knowledge.

Herself a reenactor, Johnson has enjoyed historic scouts as well as events at such sites as Missouri’s Fort Osage National Historic Site; New York’s Fort Ticonderoga; Historic Mansker’s Station, Tennessee; Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia; and the Battle Road event at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts.

She was “listowner” for three historical discussion groups, Revlist, Fort Osage, and Middle Waters Group.