Barbara Caruso was born in Kincardine, Ontario, Canada, in 1937. She was first and foremost a visual artist, whose preferred self-descriptor was ‘painter’. She also wrote poetry, and, for a decade, ran Seripress. In 1965 she married Nelson Ball, poet, publisher, and later bookseller, who founded the small poetry press Weed/Flower and whom she always referred to as ‘my poet’.

In 1967 the couple moved to Toronto, where Caruso became involved in the poetry scene which was newly emerging there. During the years when she was painting, Caruso designed covers for little magazines and for Coach House Press and Weed/Flower Press. Over the course of her life Caruso exhibited her large-scale canvases in galleries and museums in Canada, the United States, and Europe. One of her major projects, developed between 1969 and 1983, was the Colour Lock paintings, comprising nine series (141 paintings in total). Her intense preoccupation with colour and line in the paintings of this period informed her collaborations with bpNichol, and manifested itself in the Seripress books.

Seripress was intended solely for the publication of concrete and visual poetry. It published work by Steve McCaffery, David Aylward, Stephen Scobie, and Mike Doyle, as well as Nichol and Nelson Ball. Most of the titles were silkscreened throughout, which enabled Caruso to use colour if required. Wherever colours were used, she mixed them herself. ‘Silkscreen is the most direct of the print media,’ she remarked, ‘and that makes it the best medium for colour. Its directness is important to me now.’3

Some manuscripts arrived with illustrations already supplied by the poet. Caruso sometimes redrew these illustrations in order that they transferred well to silkscreen. She also cut letters by hand. The hand-cut images and letters were placed on to profilm sheets (a lacquer gel on plastic) to make a stencil, which would then be fixed to the silk screen of the press. The pages were hand-printed; Caruso did not use photo-silkscreen methods. After each title was printed, the profilm stencil was dissolved from the screen, ensuring that the title could not be printed again using that original plate. Even the folders in which the titles were housed were handmade by Caruso. As it turned out, the inks and solvents used in the printing process made Caruso ill. In response to this she formally closed Seripress in 1981.

Seripress began in 1972 and was officially registered in April 1973. It was not, however, a deliberate decision of Barbara Caruso’s to establish a press; Seripress came into being out of necessity. The 'Adventures of Milt the Morph in Colour', Caruso’s first collaboration with bpNichol, was completed and needed to be published. Caruso’s husband, Nelson Ball, encouraged Barbara to start her own press. She thought carefully about it, wanting to ‘make something under my hand, using my art’.

Barbara Caruso designed Seripress to be profit-making; the profits were used to support her painting. While she ran Seripress, she painted; and all the while she theorized tirelessly about colour, art, and poetry.

During the eleven-year lifespan of Seripress, Caruso published twenty-one titles, all of which were printed at her studio in Toronto. Later, when Caruso and Nelson moved to Paris, Ontario, she began another small press (small, literally and figuratively) called presspresspress, the output of which she gave away as gifts to friends, never selling any of these productions (a full set of which forms part of the Small Press Poetry Collection).