Agile Meteor Press
Desert Town. Plenty of Water.
A small press at an oasis. Hyper local focused publishing records of time spanned and place evolving. We craft small beautiful books of unique stories for nomads out there on a rock way out there between those big loving arms of the Milky Way.
Each Being’s unique experiences and emotions define collectively the fabric of a place. A history cowritten in the atmosphere and soil of some small bit of planet earth. Hyper local existence transmitted around the world, durably in book form. Agile Meteor Press is an experiment into understanding this medium.
We started this publishing company to tell unlikely stories from our community. These books and book-like objects support our art exhibitions and allow for a durable take-home way to continue to experience the art we have on view.
An agile meteor adapts to the inevitability of demise: planetary impact. For but a moment it ignites our minds. A dance through the atmosphere sprinkling magic into the mind of all eyes glimpsing this magnificent end. Agile Meteor Press collects those stories written out here on the edge of America’s deserts — espousing the truths found at the fringes as we eke out an existence against unlikely desert odds.
Lineage
The press is new but the story goes back a ways. In 2017 we bought a working letterpress at a local auction with a $1,500 DIY grant from Meow Wolf, and by the next winter we were teaching letterpress workshops at Desert Archaic, which we called “trials for much bigger ambitions.”
In January 2021, deep in the pandemic, Desert Archaic grew a publishing wing, Desert Archaic Press. Its first book was Modern Ancient, made by the two of us, “an art exhibition in the form of a book.” We wrote then: “How do we show art when the simple act of gathering together is dangerous? How do we escape the constant trend towards the virtual and bring some physicality back into the world? That ancient art form of the book becomes cutting edge again.”
Agile Meteor Press launched in July 2025, and it is that same wing grown into an imprint of its own.
How we make them
Agile Meteor Press crafts small editions of work using a dichotomy of processes. We contract printing out to Bookmobile in Minneapolis, MN to print larger runs of our titles using state of the art digital printing. Simultaneously we craft special editions in house using ancient book binding techniques by skilled hands with the help of our community volunteers.
Each edition is conceived as the founding of the next edition. The presales and initial release of a book is designed to recoup the production cost so it may be rolled forward into the next title.
We publish one book per season based on invitations or submissions. Almost all our books are tangentially related to the physical location of Truth or Consequences, NM — but we take a broad view on just what that means and don’t follow any hard or fast rules.
Catalog
- a.m.p. no. 1 — Nonlinear Memories
- a.m.p. no. 2 — TorC no.75 (November 1st, 2025)
- a.m.p. no. 3 — Hiraeth (October 2025)
- a.m.p. no. 4 — Women of Consequences (November 14th, 2025)
- a.m.p. no. 8 — Symbology & Characterizations (October 11th, 2025)
More
The press has its own home at amp.torc.art. Books are for sale at the gallery and in the shop.