After taking a six-day course in operating a letterpress from Barbarian Press under the direction of Jan and Crispin Elsted, Andrea Taylor acquired a 1956 Vandercook Proof Press and other equipment in order to start her own imprint, Cotton Socks Press. "My Grandad used to call me Cotton Socks when I was a little girl," she wrote in Amphora, the periodical of the Alcuin Society. "I've always been fond on the name." The first production was a four-verse poem in 2000 by Eliza Cook called The Sea Child, written in the 1800s about a child playing by the sea. In 2003 she produced and published a 60-page, limited edition collection of her own writings about childhood summers on Bowen Island entitled Childhood Summers by the Sea, including her own linocuts. The book and accompanying prints were exhibited for her first solo art show at Dundarave Print Workshop & Gallery on Granville Island in September of 2003. [Illustration from Childhood Summers by the Sea]

Andrea Taylor was born in Vancouver in 1969. In 1993 she and her husband moved to Kamloops where she joined the Kamloops Calligraphy Guild. Returning to Vancouver, she joined the West Coast Calligraphy Society. Later in New Mexico, where her husband worked as a science librarian, she took a year-long letter arts course from Reggie Egel in Albuquerque and studied bookbinding with Sam Feehan Hammock.

[BCBW 2004] "Publishing" "Art"