Monkey-Rope Press was founded in 2009 and is run by Marnie Galloway, a print maker and alternative comic artist working out of Chicago, Illinois. She is a 10th generation Texan who grew up in small town apartment complexes across the great American south east, who spent the first two decades of her life escaping into books and drawing her way through boredom. She studied philosophy and symbolic logic at Smith College in Northampton, MA, and a year in the Book & Paper MFA program at Columbia College before leaving the program to pursue book work on her own.

She lives in a quiet building with her husband Tom, two monstrous cats and her beloved bicycle, Ed Jr.

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"Monkey-Rope" is a reference to chapter 72 in Moby Dick. Ahab's crew finally kills a whale (if not the whale) and tows it in next to the ship for processing and blubber-removal. One unlucky soul, our friend Ishmael, is the shipmate in charge of standing on the whale to ensure that the "scarfing" process goes smoothly. He stands on the half-submerged whale with a "monkey-rope" tied around his waist, bound at the other end to Queequeg. Barrel running on the tumbling corpse, he risks being crushed between the whale and the side of the ship, falling off the whale and being eaten by the sharks drawn by the decomposing flesh, or being accidentally impaled by the harpoons that his friends were throwing at the sharks to keep them at bay. Were he to fall in and die, Queequeg would be bound by honor (and by the rope) to die with him. The larger commentary in the chapter is about  interconnectedness and interdependence in life. Starting a small creative business, I couldn't imagine a better metaphor than the monkey-rope. I'm tied at the waist, and, as Melville said, it is a humorously perilous business for both of us.