publishes books that grow out of the the community of people who live and work at the Spiral House, a bluestone structure inspired by sacred geometry, and surrounded by sculpture, gardens, and landscaping walls. Founded by Patty Livingston and artist Tom Gottsleben, the press was named for their beloved Airedale, named Rafferty. He was with Tom and Patty for seven years before his sudden death in 1988. It was the process of making a memorial bench for Rafferty that inspired Tom, then a painter, to see with new eyes the bluestone that was everywhere on the property. The following year Tom began making stone sculpture and the couple launched a sculpture business called Rafferty Rocks. In time, the Spiral House was created as a stone sculpture large enough to live in and Tom’s Rainbow sculpture came to define the hillside above Rafferty’s Bench.
In 2016, Rafferty Rocks Press was created to publish a cookbook, For Goodness Sake: Plant-Based Recipes from the Spiral House Kitchen. In 2019, in partnership with Glitterati Inc., Rafferty Rocks Press published The Spiral House: Revealing the Sacred in Everyday Life. As so often happens, loss and grief became the door to new possibilities.
The logo for the press is a silhouette of Tom’s EarthSeedsculpture, seen from above on the home page of this website, and at ground level in the photo below this text. The sculpture is a sphere made of large bluestone squares stacked one on top of the other and turned so that the diagonals create a spiraling form. The difference in size between adjacent stones is greater at the wide center than at the bottom or the top, so the curve in the sculpture’s form symbolizes the life cycle — materializing from the unity of the source, expanding into the fullness of life, and then beginning the contraction back to the source. It is our hope that the books published by Rafferty Rocks Press will support all sentient beings on that same journey.
Sadly, Tom died suddenly in January 2019. His inspiration — in being awake to each moment in life — continues on the property and through the pages of the book that was his last completed artwork. You can see Tom’s sculpture and paintings on his website.