Category Archives: fine press editions

fine press editions

Heat Wave

Charles Bukowski, Heat Wave, serigraphs by Ken Price (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Graphic Arts, 1995). “There are 170 numbered examples, each copy signed by Ken Price, constituting the regular edition, containing 15 original serigraph prints after illustrations by Ken Price. Four of the 15 original serigraph prints in the regular edition have been individually numbered and signed by Ken Price”–Colophon. Copy 169 of 170. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Oversize NE2237.5.P753 B85 1995f

David Godine wrote a short biography of John Martin, founder of Black Sparrow Books, which is posted on his website: http://www.blacksparrowbooks.com/aboutbsb.htm
Here is a portion:

John Martin, the great collector of avant-garde books, visionary patron of Charles Bukowski, and founder, publisher, and for thirty-six years sole proprietor of Black Sparrow Press, once said: “There have always been two streams in American literature. First, the ‘insiders,’ the ones who conform to accepted standards. Some of these insiders are very good writers . . . but their work is of interest only up to a point, [because] they completely satisfy readers’ expectations of what literature should be. On the other hand, there has also been this second, parallel stream of ‘outsiders’––mavericks, beginning with Walt Whitman. To my way of thinking, Leaves of Grass is the first great modern literary statement . . . and to this day, perhaps the greatest and most astounding.”

From 1966 through 2002, Martin sought out the great and astounding statements of America’s literary outsiders, writers whose kinship is with the red blood of Whitman not the blue blood of Longfellow, with the dirty hands of Dreiser not the kid gloves of Edith Wharton. Writers who, on the whole, have looked west, toward the frontier and its promise of wildness, and away from the east, away from “civilization” and its received ideas of excellence and form. And Martin found them––in little magazines, in collectors’ libraries, and among that band of bards and truth-tellers who emerged from the jazz cellars of the 1950s into the Day-Glo orange sunshine of the 1960s and ’70s. . . . John Martin retired from publishing on July 1, 2002, but his outsider literary legacy will endure. Bukowski lives––indeed he and a handful of his old Black Sparrow stablemates (Paul Bowles, John Fante, and Joyce Carol Oates especially) not only live but now thrive on the “inside”: times change, and tastes change, and small presses like Martin’s are powerful compact agents of change.”

Marie Cosindas, the greatest photographer you do not know

Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Oedipus. Photogravures by Marie Cosindas; translated by Leila Vennewitz; foreword by the author. 1st English ed. (New York]: Limited Editions Club, c1989). Translation of the short story “Das Sterben der Pythia” and its preceding introduction, “Schicksal und dramaturgische Notwendigkeit: Ödipus, Shakespeare, Brecht,” from the “Nachwort zum Nachwort” to the author’s Der Mitmacher. Copy 551 of 650. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Oversize Z232.L67 D87q. Gift of John Wilmerding.

“The photogravure plates were made by Jon Goodman and the plates have been editioned at Renaissance Press and Wingate Studio. The gravures are printed on Arches paper and the text on paper made at Cartiere Enrico Magnani. This book was designed by Benjamin Schiff.”

Marie Cosindas (born 1925) did not intend to be a photographer. The eighth of ten children in a modestly situated Greek family living in Boston, she studied dressmaking in school and took up a career designing textiles and children’s shoes, also acting as a color coordinator for a company that made museum reproductions in stone. On the side, she created abstract paintings filled with atmospheric color.

Cosindas initially thought of the camera as a means for making design notes. But as so often happens, several photographs she took on a visit to Greece convinced her that such prints could stand on their own as finished works. In 1961, she participated in one of Ansel Adams’s photography workshops in Yosemite Valley. The following year, when Polaroid sought photographers to test its new instant color film before bringing it to market, Adams recommended her.—Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 2013

Marie Cosindas, Color Photographs with an essay by Tom Wolfe, [edited by Susan Feldman] (Boston: New York Graphic Society, c1978). RECAP Oversize TR654 .C675q

The Gardens of England

E. Adveno Brooke, fl. 1844-1864. The Gardens of England. London: T. McLean, 1857. [62] p., 25 leaves of chromolithographic plates: ill., col. front., 24 col. mounted plates ; 53 cm. Graphic Arts Collection (GA) Oversize Rowlandson 6093e

The gardens depicted include those at Trentham Park, Enville Hall, Bowood House, Alton Towers, Elvaston Castle, Shrublands Hall, Woburn Abbey, Holkham House, Castle Howard, and many others.

To see the whole book online, try the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s site: https://archive.org/details/gardensEngland00Broo

“René Char: Poetry and War”

René Char has long been recognized as one of France’s greatest modern poets, whose prolific career began with Surrealism and ended only with his death in 1988. On February 27-28, 2015, Princeton University will host a series of academic talks, a film, and readings of Char’s work by poets, critics, and students.

http://complit.princeton.edu/events/%E2%80%9Cren%C3%A9-char-poetry-and-war%E2%80%9D-colloquium-princeton-university-february-27-28-2015

This colloquium, open to the public, will address philosophical, historical and aesthetic issues raised particularly through Char’s texts from 1938-1947. It will include remarks by filmmaker Jérôme Prieur and several scholars, a conversation with Marie-Claude Char, René Char’s widow and editor of numerous books on his poetry, as well as a set of readings and translations by well-known poets, translators and members of Princeton’s French theater company, L’Avant-Scène.

This colloquium is co-sponsored by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, the Department of French and Italian, the Department of English, the Humanities Council, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the University Center for Human Values, and the Department of Comparative Literature.

René Char (1907-1988), The Summons of Becoming: Marking the Centenary of a Poet. Poems by René Char, translated by Mary Ann Caws with lithographs by Ed Colker (Millwood, N.Y.: Haybarn Press, 2007). Copy 37 of 50. Graphic Arts Collection GAX oversize 2010.0383Q. “This portfolio edition was conceived to celebrate the centenary of René Char, poet and leader in the French Resistance during World War II.” — colophon. “The images were hand-colored as pochoir by the artist.”

For information and a schedule of events, please consult the Princeton University website (http://complit.princeton.edu/events)

Yeats

The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired a first edition of a 1935 selection of William Butler Yeats’ poetry, privately printed by the Cuala Press, 133 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, for Eleanor Lady Yarrow. Its pages are, as yet, uncut and it is still bound in its original light blue paper wrappers.

Not only is our book one of only 30 copies printed by the poet’s sister, Elizabeth Corbet Yeats (1868-1940) but it is Miss Yeats’ own copy, with her bookplate inside the cover [pictured to the left].

The hand colored frontispiece [seen below] was designed by Dublin artist Victor Brown, a frequent Cuala Press contributor, then heightened with gold. Miss Yeats added hand drawn initials and ornaments throughout the volume.

The collection includes nine W.B. Yeats’ poems: “The Lover Tells of the Rose in his Heart,” “Into the Twilight,” “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” “The Fiddler of Dooney,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “When You are Old,” “A Faery Song,” “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” and “The Pity of Love.”

This book is considered one of the rarest and most desirable of all the Cuala Press books (only one copy is known to have appeared at auction in the past thirty years) and we are thrilled to add it to Princeton University Library’s already extensive Irish collection.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1935). One of 30 copies. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2015- in process.

For more on Elizabeth Yeats and the Cuala Press, see the exhibition website:
http://libweb2.princeton.edu/rbsc2/ga/unseenhands/printers/yeats.html

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin built there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine been rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

Fifteen Engravings Accompanied by a Heroic Crown of Sonnets

Encheiresin Naturae: Fifteen Engravings by Barry Moser Accompanied by a Heroic Crown of Sonnets by Paul Muldoon (Santa Rosa, Ca.: Nawakum Press, 2015). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2015- in process

The Graphic Arts Collection is fortunate to have acquired Encheiresin Naturae, a collaboration between Barry Moser, Smith College Professor-in-Residence in Art & Printer to the College, and Paul Muldoon, Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities; Director, Princeton Atelier; Professor of Creative Writing; and Chair, Fund for Irish Studies.

“Fifteen abstract relief engravings were invented and engraved by Moser in his studio in Hatfield, Massachusetts in 2014. They were inspired by the phrase encheiresin naturae taken from reading Goethe’s Faust, referencing an alchemist’s experiments in “manipulating nature.” Muldoon was asked to respond to the images poetically and he chose an advanced form of a crown of sonnets, known as a sonnet redoublé, or heroic crown of sonnets for his tour-de-force response.”–prospectus

Encheirisen Naturae was printed by Art Larson at Horton Tank Graphics directly from the blocks on a Vandercook Universal IV. The paper is mouldmade Zerkall and Twinrocker handmade. Jemma Lewis of Wiltshire, UK, designed and produced the marbled papers. The binding is by Craig Jensen of BookLab II in San Marcos, Texas.

Congratulations to the students of VIS 415

Congratulations to the students in VIS 415, Advanced Graphic Design under the 2013-15 Princeton Arts Fellow Danielle Aubert, who held a launch party at the Princeton Public Library tonight.

Each student wrote, designed, and produced a complete book. In addition, a class book entitled Princeton Places, combined elements from each of the individual projects.

Each book uses both words and images to examine a different site in the area. The students made their own selection and researched the history, geography, and sociology of their chosen site, such as the Princeton Airport, Palmer Square, the Delaware and Raritan Canal towpath, the YMCA and YWCA, Princeton Running Company, and others.

Aubert’s fall semester studio course was structured around three studio assignments that connected graphic design to other bodies of knowledge, aesthetic experience, and scholarship.

VIS 415 always takes a local concept or event as the impetus for investigations. Last semester they took New Jersey, as a place and an idea, as a starting point. It was a nice complement to the Firestone Library exhibition of historic New Jersey maps.

We are happy to have acquired a copy of Princeton Places for the Princeton University Library and the Graphic Arts Collection. Hopefully, this will be the first of many books the students produce (even if they don’t sew every one individually).

This spring, the students in VIS 321 will explore Words As Objects with Joseph S. Scanlan and Susan Wheeler. “This course will explore ways that language can take on material properties and how objects can have syntax and be “read”. Through studio assignments, readings, and discussions, students will investigate the idea of language as a tangible material that can be sliced, bent, inserted, reproduced, embedded, and scattered, as in the work of such modern artists as Guillaume Apollinaire, Susan Howe, Marcel Broodthaers, or Jenny Holzer.”

We wish them equal success and enjoyment.

Tom Tit Tot

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

Is it a book or is it a boat?

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.

A Season in Hell

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) and Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), A Season in Hell (New York: Limited Edition’s Club, 1986). Edition: 1000. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2014- in process

Arthur Rimbaud was eighteen years old when he wrote A Season in Hell (Un saison en enfer) in 1873. Mapplethorpe was forty years old when he accepted the commission to make photographs in response to the prose poem. It was also the year that Mapplethorpe learned he was H.I.V. positive, which led to his death in 1989.

Seven of Mapplethorpe’s Hasselblad negatives were selected for this project and printed on handmade etching paper by Jon Goodman, in his studio in Florence, Massachusetts, a few miles from Dan Keleher’s Wild Carrot Letterpress in Hadley, where the text was printed.

The translation is by librettist, poet, and actor Paul Schmidt (1934-1999) who published translations of Rimbaud’s complete works in 1975 (PQ2387.R5 A28 1975). Schmidt also wrote an introduction, commenting “It is a work of adolescent passion—not the passion of exuberance, but passion as suffering. It is the record of a failed attempt to create a new identity by creating a new world. Passion is universal, yet some particular facts may help to explain Rimbaud’s feelings, to illuminate the smokey density, the nerve-edge screams, the sulfurous flicker of this little book.”

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: