In 2013, the poet Susan Howe came down to Princeton University to perform W O O D S L I P P E R C O U N T E R C L AT T E R , a collaborative performance with the composer David Grubbs. http://www.nassauweekly.com/susan-howe-in-middle-air/.  Some of the poems heard at that event are now included in a new volume entitled, Tom Tit Tot, for which Howe collaborated with her daughter, R. H. Quaytman.

Published by the Library Council of The Museum of Modern Art, the limited edition book brings together sixty-seven poems by Howe created with “slivers of typeset text extracted from her readings in American, British, and Irish folklore, poetry, philosophy, art criticism, and history. Beginning with copies of the source material, and including excerpts from the texts themselves and from surrounding footnotes, tables of contents, and marginalia, Howe cut out words and sentence fragments, then spliced and taped them together while retaining their typefaces, spacing, and rhythms. These re-collected images, formed into arrangements shaped both by control and by chance, were then transferred into letterpress prints.” (prospectus)

Quaytman’s design for the book is inspired partly by the geographical atlases and histories of Emma Hart Willard (1787–1870), an American author, educator, and civil and women’s rights activist. For the frontispiece Quaytman created an artwork based on two of Willard’s visualizations of geography and history, Picture of Nations and Temple of Time. Quaytman’s frontispiece, also titled Temple of Time, was printed as a six-color silkscreen at Axelle Editions, Brooklyn; digitally at the Lower East Side Printshop, New York; and by letterpress at The Grenfell Press.

Three more of Quaytman’s images, printed by letterpress at The Grenfell Press, are bound into the volume. One shows an unraveled knitted baby’s sock, and derives from a photoengraving in Thérèse de Dillmont’s Encyclopedia of Needlework, first published in 1886; the second shows a thumbprint on black paper; and the third is an abstract image taken from the artist’s frontispiece.

Susan Howe and R. H. Quaytman, Tom Tit Tot (New York: Library Council of The Museum of Modern Art, 2014). Copy 10 of 95. Graphic Arts Collection.

For more on Willard, see Steve Ferguson’s post https://blogs.princeton.edu/rarebooks/2008/12/standing_within_the_temple_of.html.  Emma Willard (1787-1870), Willard’s Map of Time: a Companion to the Historic Guide (New-York: A.S. Barnes & Co., [1846]). Rare Books (Ex) Oversize Item 5146637q

Inger Lawrance, Kevin Crossley-Holland, and Nicolas McDowall, The Seafarer (Llandogo, Monmouthshire: Old Stile Press, 1988). Binding by Habib Dingle. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2014- in process

This modern translation of The Seafarer was created and published in an edition of 240 copies. Inger Lawrance cut all 43 images on wood; Kevin Crossley-Holland prepared the text from the Anglo-Saxon; and Nicolas McDowall hand-set the Albertus types, completing the printing of the book in June 1988 at the Old Stile Press.

“Ever since the tenth century, versions of The Seafarer have been committed to books, though it was no doubt part of the tradition of poems recited aloud and learned by heart. Here, Kevin Crossley-Holland has written the poem in modern English verse which retains all the Anglo-Saxon poet’s passionate love for the sea while recognising its hardships and dangers.

Inger Lawrance is Danish but now lives near the stormy Northumberland coast, so the sea features prominently in much of her painting and printmaking. Her woodcutting technique was learned partly in Japan and her imagery is very spare, almost calligraphic. The book itself is somewhat delicately bound in the Japanese style but is enclosed, almost wrapped, in a portfolio of rough linen and blue buckram – as though it had survived a turbulent time at sea and is now rescued especially for the reader.”—prospectus

From the limited edition, ten copies were reserved for the special binding by Habib Dingle, one of which is now in the Graphic Arts Collection at the Princeton University Library. Dingle wrote in the prospectus:

“After necessary consideration of the structure and function, the design was allowed, or took, full rein to express itself in organic form…. Although the sea and seafaring are the more obvious subjects, my own reading of the poem gave me a greater sense of the mystic – to this end the circular motif, mandala like, is focal to the design – it consists of burnished and distressed gold laid on gesso raised so as to give the impression of an Anglo-Saxon emblem in the centre of the image of the sun.”

The Cedar of Lebanon boards were initially roughed out with a radial saw followed by an overhead router and finally a spoke- shave. The boards were then fired using a blow-lamp and the charred wood worked out with wire-wool, before waxing. It has retained its distinctive cedar smell.

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) and Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917), Le Jardin des supplices [The Torture Garden] (Paris: Ambroise Vollard, 1902). One of 155 copies on velin from a total edition of 200. Graphic Arts Collection 2014- in process

Friends and collaborators, Auguste Rodin and Octave Mirbeau published a modest illustrated edition of The Torture Garden in 1899, to limited success. When they heard that art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939) was preparing a deluxe edition of Paul Verlaine’s erotic poem Parallèlement with lithographs by Pierre Bonnard, they approached Vollard about also publishing their book as a deluxe edition.

“Less than two weeks after they had signed a contract with Vollard on February 10, 1899, the master printer Auguste Clot received ten of Rodin’s designs for reproduction as lithographs. When Vollard’s edition appeared in 1902, the subject and illustrations proved too challenging for some clients, who returned copies they had preordered, creating significant cash flow problems for Vollard.”–Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-garde by Rebecca A. Rabinow (2006)

Clot printed 18 color and 2 black and white lithographs, with Rodin by his side supervising. In the final bound volume, these plates are interspersed throughout Mirbeau’s text, protected with a tissue printed with a linear reproduction of Rodin’s nude underneath. Today, this book is recognized as one of the rarest and most important livre d’artiste ever produced.

“Novels that produce a physical effect upon their reader,” writes Tom McCarthy, “sending jolts outwards from the spine to the remotest nerve-ends, tightening the throat and burning the ears, must number very few; and The Torture Garden must stand near the top of any list of these. Yet not only is it—in its extremity, its viscerality and violence—an uncommon or ‘exceptional’ work of fiction; it also sits neatly in the middle of what, when the dust of time has cleared and the staid realist novels of the early twentieth century have been forgotten, will be seen as a canonical mainline running between the counter-enlightenment visions of Sade and the post-industrial ones of Burroughs and Ballard.”

Richard Diebenkorn, Poems of W.B. Yeats, selected and introduced by Helen Vendler (San Francisco: Arion Press, 1990). Edition: 426 copies. Graphic Arts Collection 2014- in process

When a man grows old his joy
Grows more deep day after day,
His empty heart is full at length,
But he has need of all that strength
Because of the increasing Night
That opens her mystery and fright.
Fifteen apparitions have I seen;
The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger.

–verse from The Apparitions by W.B. Yeats

Yeats wrote this poem in March/April 1938 and published it before the end of that year. The 73 year-old poet had not been well and knew he was coming to the end of his life. Similarly, Richard Diebenkorn was in his last years in 1990 when he received a commission to create work for Arion Press. The artist agreed and chose to visualize Yeats’s late poems.

“The poetry of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) burst the boundaries of its native Ireland to become part of world culture. Helen Vendler, one of the foremost authorities on modern poetry and a University Professor at Harvard, selected for the Arion Press 145 poems and provided an introductory essay for the book. Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993), internationally recognized as one of America’s leading artists, took the Yeatsian theme of an empty coat on a hanger to produce a series of prints transforming the garment from a representational frock-coat into an abstracted suit-bag. The sixth etching is a double map of Ireland, indicative of that divided country.”–prospectus

It is, perhaps, surprising that the Graphic Arts Collection did not already own a copy of this fine press edition but the gap has now been filled.