Lifting it off the shelf and holding it, it’s difficult to believe a book so exquisite exists. Feeling the volume’s perfect heft in your hand, you ease it out of the sumptuous Japanese silk slipcase, caress the three-quarter inch black Moroccan leather spine, and marvel as you run your fingertips across the embossed, hand-dyed textured cover boards. Opening the cover reveals pages of bold text, offset-printed on coarse, 80-pound stock that was hand-milled by Southwestern artisan makers Cave Paper.
Other offerings on hand to ogle and caress include books that incorporate three-dimensional physical elements into their designs: brushed metal, screwheads, bullet holes, rose petals, glass panels, tarot cards, poker chips, mirrors, uncut sheets of dollar bills, even a crystal-studded leather dog collar.
These are just a few of the limited-edition pieces created by designer Joe Stefko and his magical Charnel House Ltd. publishing company, which he runs from his Catskill home. The business specializes in producing rare works mainly in the horror fiction/fantasy genre. And, unsurprisingly given the books’ over-the-top construction, they’re not cheap.
“This is a limited, lettered edition of the 40th-anniversary printing of Dinner at Deviant’s Place by Tim Powers and it’s signed by the author,” Stefko says, holding the tome aloft like a chalice. “It’s hand bound in full custom-dyed Hydrangea Moroccan leather and stamped in gold on the front board and the spine, the pages are printed on Mohawk Superfine paper, and we used leather headbands and Black Bugra [paper] end sheets. Only 26 copies were made, one for each letter of the alphabet. It’s $1,500. People go, ‘Why would I pay that much for a book?’ But as a book collector I’ve been very unimpressed with the quality of the modern limited editions that are being produced. My aim with Charnel House has always been to make things that I really like, because I knew there were other collectors out there who also really appreciated unique, interesting, well-done books.” Indeed, there are: The imprint’s dedicated, world-wide customer base has included actress Mary Tyler Moore and comedian Richard Lewis as repeat buyers. But it was music, not publishing, that was Stefko’s initial beat.
Playing Chicken
Before he became a bookmaker, Stefko, who grew up on Long Island, was a beat maker. An in-demand drummer, he played with some of the more prominent acts of the 1970s. And, like so many rock ‘n’ roll drummers, he was inspired to pick up the sticks by one percussionist in particular. “Ringo,” he says. “I saw the Beatles on ‘Ed Sullivan’ in 1964 when I was nine years old, and I said, ‘That’s what I’m gonna do.’ By the early ’70s I was going into the city to audition for bands.”
After stints with several groups and jamming with influential guitarists April Lawton and Tommy Bolin, he landed a spot in John Cale’s band, with whom he toured the UK in 1977.
“This was during the height of punk in England, and [ex-Velvet Underground member Cale] was being called ‘the Godfather of punk,'” Stefko recalls. “I still had long hair, which was very ‘un-punk’ then, and John really wanted me to cut my hair. I wouldn’t do it, and he just stayed on me about it the whole tour.” Things came to head, literally, at a show in Croydon where a drug-addled Cale decapitated a dead chicken on stage with a meat cleaver, right next to the drum kit. For the vegetarian drummer, it was all too much. He promptly quit, leaving his former boss to immortalize the incident in the song “Chicken Shit.” But a bigger gig would come next.
“When I got home my dad told me a friend had called and said I needed to call CBS about this guy Meat Loaf, who had a debut album that was about to come out and needed a drummer,” says Stefko. “I called the number, and they knew who I was because the stuff about me quitting John Cale’s band had been in Rolling Stone and all the English music papers. The guy said, ‘Get down here!'” Stefko ended up playing with Meat Loaf for the singer’s epic Bat Out of Hell tour, another wild ride, which continued into 1978. Work with Edgar Winter, Hot Tuna, and others followed but it was his time with Flo and Eddie—AKA the Turtles’ Mark Vollman and Howard Kaylan—that would lead the sticksman to his ultimate vocation.
Next Chapter
Vollman and Kaylan revived the Turtles name in 1980, and Stefko would spend the next 35 years on the road with the “Happy Together” rockers. He and the two singers were all big readers and while they were on tour they took to hitting bookstores to hunt for modern first and limited editions. “Word got around that we were really into books and pretty soon we had rare book dealers, along with the drug dealers [laughs], visiting us backstage,” Stefko says. “Some drug dealer would be wanting us to check out some vial of something and we’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s great, but have you seen this first edition Dracula?'”
At a 1988 Turtles concert at New York’s iconic Biltmore Hotel ballroom, Stefko met the award-winning sci-fi/fantasy writer Tim Powers, who told the drummer about the novel about Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats that he was then working on. “I thought about that book throughout the show,” remembers Stefko. “After the show, I asked Tim if he would trust me with the production of the limited edition and after some discussion he said yes and even agreed to illustrate the book. I told him that I would do it right, that I wouldn’t let him down.”
Titled The Stress of Her Regard, the book, bound in hand-bleached blue denim to evoke Shelley’s watery demise and complete with an introduction by Dean Koontz and afterward by Jim Blaylock, appeared in 1989 as Charnel House’s first release. Since then, Stefko, who in 2005 moved to Catskill, hasn’t slowed his output, publishing many more volumes by Powers as well as Koontz, Harlan Ellison, and others. “Charnel House leaps ahead of many who have spent years fashioning elegant limited editions nowhere near this spectacular,” enthused the late Ellison, a giant of contemporary American fiction, for a website testimonial. “A new, higher standard for the collectable presentation of modern literature.”
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“I thought I’d just do one book and that would be it,” Stefko says. “But at this point I’ve done 64. I look at the shelves in my office and I just can’t believe it.” He’s seemingly also grown more ambitious with each project, regularly pushing the boundaries of what can be done within the art of bookmaking. “Every time I call my bindery guy, who’s in Minneapolis, and tell him I have another idea for a book, the first thing he does is sigh [laughs],” says Stefko, who utilizes a Rhode Island typesetter, and admits he has no design schooling of any kind. “But I think he digs what I do because it’s usually a challenge for him.”
Of course, the overriding paradox of Charnel House is that its existence flies in the face of the current Kindle/audiobook age. “Those are formats that don’t really even exist, they’re in the wind,” says Stefko. “I know there are people for whom books might as well be printed on toilet paper, but I want to help raise the bar and make things that inspire me. And I hope that gives other people the inspiration to do it themselves.”
Empty Chambers by Tim Powers will be available for preorder from Charnel House in June.
Charnelhouse.com.
This article appears in May 2025.
