
Custom book publisher’s career path forever altered by Centre experience
How many people can point to a day that changed their lives?
For Stephanie Kimbro Dolin ’98, her work as owner and operator of First Bite Press, a custom publishing house that prints, illustrates and binds limited edition books, can be traced back to one random college discovery.
“It all started, actually, at Centre College at the old alumni house,” Dolin said. “I was spending one summer working at the alumni house, and someone told me to go upstairs to the attic and get this or that.”
As she explored the attic, she found a box of old books that weren’t receiving the sort of reverence she felt they deserved.
“I was always a book person, but this was like, ‘Wait a minute. These are antiques. What’s going on?’” she said.
So Kimbro asked about the books and learned they were destined to be disposed of the next day.

“I asked, ‘Can I save them?’ and they said sure, we don’t care,” Dolin said. “So I saved them. Some of them are back to the 1700s. They're all French theater. So apparently some professor at Centre passed away and these were all up there.”
Those old theatre books became treasures for Dolin.
“My college roommate remembers. I carried these books around for like two years from dorm to dorm, because I was like, ‘These are just too wonderful.”
After leaving Centre, as Dolin worked on her master’s degree in history, she learned more about how to care for old books. How to take them apart, repair them. She received training as a volunteer at the Cincinnati Museum Center working in the preservation department.
“So I started out taking books apart and fixing them, rare books, and then fell in love with book binding.”
Dolin completed her master’s at Miami University and graduated from the University of Dayton School of Law. She embarked on her law career and attained a research fellowship at the Stanford University Center for the Legal Profession.
All the while, her love of the old way of printing and binding books remained strong. She would take antique books home from her firm’s law library and repair them as a hobby.
But while working with books was rewarding, working with lawyers was frustrating. Dolin worked to develop a way to unbundle the practice of attorneys racking up billable hours in a quest to unlock the legal profession for those who can’t currently afford legal services. She found the resistance of law firms to change and adopt the technological solutions she was proposing frustrating.

“I’ve been doing this for 10 years,” she said. “I cannot keep doing this.”
Her work at Stanford had taken her from North Carolina to San Francisco, where she dove into the publishing scene, studying bookbinding and letterpress printing at the San Francisco Center for the Book and attending the California Rare Book School at UCLA.
She found local printers to learn from and eventually launched her own printing company, dubbed First Bite Press. Her logo is a linocut of Eve reaching for an apple from the Tree of Knowledge.
“Eve was brave… She was curious. She was willing to bite into the apple.”
The imagery also applies to First Bite press’s area of specialization. Dolin is a fan of sci-fi and fantasy work, but found an opening in the market for a fine press dedicated to romance steamier works.
“There are other fine press, limited edition bookmakers who are doing sci fi, fantasy and horror. Tons of limited edition presses do the classics and poetry,” she said. “And I was like, OK, nobody is doing romance and erotica. And yet. If you look at publishing, it's one of the biggest sellers, right?”
Having been at Centre around the same time as Tiffany Reisz ‘00, Dolin was aware of her success in genre, and the romance book club Dolin and fellow Centre alumnae formed during the pandemic read one of Reisz’s works.

So after First Bite Press’s first publication, “The Canon of Aphrodisia in Four Volumes” by Miranda Culp and Jef Delman and illustrated by Laurelin Gilmore, Dolin reached out to Centre friend Terena Bell ‘99 for Reisz’s number and commissioned a work from Reisz for a limited edition printing.
“I told Tiffany, the only parameters for the work is I want it to be a woman in her middle age, over the age of 40, and write whatever you want,” Dolin said. “You don't have to write for a commercial publisher that then has to worry about it being blocked on Amazon. And I wanted it to make a woman in her midlife cause a lot of romances are young 20-somethings, and I'm in this romance book club with some ladies and they're all professional, highly educated — most of them have like two graduate degrees and one has three PhDs — women over the age of 40, all wanting to see themselves represented in stories.”
Reisz’s work, which revolves around three banned books that are sitting on a woman's bedside table, and what she experiences and learns from those books, isn’t the only First Bite project with Centre ties. Dolan also has a manuscript from Bell and has been in talks with author and poet Colleen Harris ’01.
“You become family,” Dolin said of the Centre friends she keeps in touch with. “I met with Tiffany in New York the last time I was there. I hadn’t seen her in like, 20 years. But you’re just family.
“It’s really a beautiful thing.”
The custom nature of Dolin’s chosen profession doesn’t lend itself easily to scale and growth. So her long-term goals harken back to the days when letterpress printing was the standard.
“I want to pass on the skills and pass on the equipment,” she said. “For the press, that’s one of my goals. I would like to get some students in here. Let's get people learning how to set type, learning how to print, touching the paper; get away from a screen and back into an appreciation of the written word. A tactile experience.”

And in the meantime, she can use the press to bring a new voice into a medium nearly as old as the written word.
“My dream is just to keep printing as much as I can get women's perspective on love and sexuality and eroticism out there,” she said. “It's, it's not really in the fine press world. There are tons of erotica from the male perspective. But I can’t find the stuff that I’m making, so I want to get that out there.”
As for those old French theatre books Dolin found in a hot buggy attic at Centre College, what happened to them?
“I still have them with me now,” she said. “Of course I have a much larger library, but that sort of started my desire to take care of and create books.”
This article appears in the Fall/Winter 2024 edition of Centrepiece.