Coffee House Press founder Allan Kornblum dies at 65

Minneapolis book publisher Allan Kornblum, who founded what would become the nonprofit Coffee House Press in the early 1980s after buying a letterpress machine at an auction in Iowa, has died. He was 65.

Kornblum died of complications from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Publisher Chris Fischbach says Kornblum loved both literature and the printer's craft, and was unfazed by the the rise of self-publishing, e-readers and other big changes in the industry.

"He was a student and a scholar of the history of printing and publishing. So he had a long view and understood that the changes that had been going on in the last 20, 30, 40 years were changes that had been going on in the publishing industry for hundreds of years."

Fischbach says Kornblum believed newly-published writers deserved high-quality printings worthy of the classics.