Category Archives: fine press editions

fine press editions

On Such a Full Sea

Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea (New York: Riverhead Books, 2014). Copy 471 of 500. Graphic Arts Collection 2014- in process.

When Princeton University Professor of Creative Writing Chang-rae Lee was ready to publish his fifth novel, On Such a Full Sea, a decision was made to produce a special, limited edition book in addition to the trade volume. His publisher Riverhead Books teamed up with MakerBot to create 500 copies with a 3D printed slipcase designed by art director Helen Yentus. Fabricated on the MakerBot® Replicator® 2 Desktop 3D Printer, the extended typography was then repeated on the cloth cover and each book signed by Lee.

To watch a video of Helen Yentus, the art director of Riverhead Books, talking about the design and construction of the 3D printed slipcase for Lee’s novel, click here: http://youtu.be/vfr2ARWWKHs

Chang-rae Lee is the author of five novels: Native Speaker (1995); A Gesture Life (1999); Aloft (2004); The Surrendered, which was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and On Such a Full Sea (2014). His novels have won numerous awards and citations, including the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the American Book Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, ALA Notable Book of the Year Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Literary Award, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, and the NAIBA Book Award for Fiction. He has also written stories and articles for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time (Asia), Granta, Conde Nast Traveler, Food & Wine, and many other publications.

Peter Blake’s Under Milk Wood

The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired a deluxe edition of Dylan Thomas’s 1954 ‘play for voices,’ Under Milk Wood, with images by Sir Peter Blake. Published by Enitharmon Editions to mark the 2013 centenary of Thomas’s birth, this publication was designed by Libanus Press and bound by Shepherds, Sangorski & Sutcliffe, accompanied by a signed stochastic aqueous pigment print editioned by Chaudigital.

The work took Blake over 28 years to complete and includes illustrations using pencil, watercolor, and collage, which detail every aspect of Thomas’s fictional seaside village Llareggub. An exhibition of Blake’s art launched the Dylan Thomas 100 Festival, a celebration to mark 100 years since Wales’ best-known poet’s birth in Swansea.

“It could have gone on forever,” admitted Blake. “But the festival was as good a place as any to stop. I am thrilled that it ties in with Dylan Thomas 100. It’s perfect really.” Blake said the original plan back in 1985 had been to create a series of wood engravings to illustrate Under Milk Wood in a limited edition book, never produced.

In an interview with the BBC, Blake continued, “I never met him no, but I started at the Royal College in October in October 1953 and he would have been in Soho. We may well have been in the same pubs. If we met now, I think we would have something to talk about, a common interest in Under Milk Wood.”

A BBC Wales programme Under Milk Wood in Pictures showing Sir Peter Blake at work on Llareggub was screened on BBC One Wales on Monday, 25 November 2013.

A review in The Guardian of what must be a spectacular exhibition can be read at: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/22/peter-blake-under-milk-wood. If you only buy one book this year, this is the one to get.

Sean Scully

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). Heart of Darkness, etchings by Sean Scully. [New York]: Limited Editions Club, 1992. Copy 169 of 300. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2013- in process

In 1982, the Dublin-born artist Sean Scully painted three joined canvases called Heart of Darkness, after the 1902 novel by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). Today, the painting hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. It was also the last year he spent teaching at Princeton University, traveling down from New York on the bus each Tuesday and returning after class on Wednesday. A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983 allowed the artist to stop teaching and work on his painting full-time.

“When I was making the painting Heart of Darkness, I was reading the book by Joseph Conrad,” said Scully. “It was not the structure of the book but there was an atmosphere that was perhaps influencing the painting. There are certain images of dark rooms, dark spaces, primal forms and quite primitive forms that were influencing the painting.”

Ten years later, Scully reread Heart of Darkness and created a portfolio of 8 prints. Four full-page and four half-page etchings were bound into a new letterpress edition of Conrad’s novel, published in an edition of 300 copies for The Limited Editions Club. The volume was bound in Nigerian goatskin and its clamshell box is covered in black Italian cotton.

We are fortunate to have finally acquired a copy for Princeton.

Helen West Heller Joins The Latin Quarter-ly

Woodcut by Helen West Heller in The Latin Quarter-ly (New York: Maspa Press, 1933-1934). Graphic Arts Collection 2014- in process.

During the depression of the 1930s, Ruth Widen and Lew Ney could no longer afford to live in Manhattan and moved their Parnassus Press to the Brooklyn waterfront south of the Brooklyn Bridge. For their larger print jobs, Max Spiegel, owner of Maspa Press on Barrow Street, let them use whatever equipment they needed. It was his Linotype machine that enabled them to bring out a substantial new magazine called The Latin Quarter-ly (associating Greenwich Village with its Parisian counterpart).

Unlike Lew Ney’s other news-sheets, this is a fifty-page magazine with editorials, poems, a short stories, essays, plays, cartoons, book and art reviews, and literary news. The content is decidedly more political, given the editors’ involvement with the Writers’ Union. The art is sharp and satirical thanks to artists borrowed from the New Masses, included Art Young (1866-1943) and Helen West Heller (1872-1955), who had only recently moved to New York City. Over 100 subscriptions were sold before the first issue was out, including to NYPL and Harvard University.

Sherwood Anderson’s name is front and center as a consulting editor, although he never contributes his own writing. Regular contributors include Louis Ginsberg (1896-1976, Allen Ginsberg’s father); the young Norman Fitzroy Maclean (1902-1990), later known for A River Runs Through It; the progressive minister Rev. Eliot White; Oxford-educated literary scholar Walter Edwin Peck (1891-1954), recently fired from Hunter College; journalist Isaac Don Levine (1892-1981) responsible for the formation of the Citizens National Committee for Sacco and Vanzetti; and Estelle Sternberger (1886-1971) a radio commentator who became the executive director of World Peaceways.

Woodcut by Helen West Heller in The Latin Quarter-ly (New York: Maspa Press, 1933-1934). Graphic Arts Collection 2014- in process.

The 1934 winter issue includes the music for The Peril of Sheridan Square by Robert Edwards.

I know a girl I’d like to hurl into the river some day.
You may think me crude when I allude to any lady this way.
But she’s a pest, I get no rest from her nagging for lodging and food
But when I resist then she’ll insist that my reluctance is rude.

She’s the belle of Stewarts’ cafeteria down in Sheridan Square.
Where the nuts and the bums with their sex-hysteria patiently give her the air.
She hasn’t a home, no place of her own, she domiciles anywhere,
And her name if you ask it is Lizzie Mossbasket, the peril of Sheridan Square

This village queen, Lizzie I mean, went into Stewarts to feed
But there she found hanging around others in desperate need.
She hoped to mash some guy with cash to pay for the food that she’d et
But somehow I guess she’d little success poor thing is sitting there yet!

Another Lew Ney (Looney) post

In May 1936, the printer Lew Ney (aka Luther Widen) wrote to the poet Allen Tate (1899-1979) to let him know why the publication of Tate’s book, The Mediterranean and Other Poems had been delayed. Commissioned by Ronald Latimer, the publisher of Alcestis Press, Lew Ney had already printed five fine press poetry books for Latimer, including work by Wallace Stevens, Willard Mass, William Carlos William, Robert Penn Warren, and John Peale Bishop. Tate was to have been third on Alcestis’ list but Latimer pushed Warren and Bishop ahead.

In the midst of the Great Depression, Latimer owed Lew Ney $1,000 for his work but was refusing to pay. Instead, he pulled Tate’s manuscript and sent it to Vrest Orton, a Vermont printer who was unaware of Latimer’s under-handed business dealings. Although Orton’s name is not on the volume, it looks decidedly different from the other Alcestis books.

Back at Lew Ney’s Parnassus Press in Brooklyn, the pages for Mediterranean were still locked and ready for printing. He wrote to Tate to say that he would hate to redistribute his famous “Inkunabula” type without printing at least a few copies. According to the colophon Tate’s brother, a financially successful businessman, funded the printing of twelve copies designated a “Benfolly” edition printed solely for Benjamin Ethan Tate.

Princeton University Library is fortunate to hold two very rare copies of these twelve. One is signed by both the author and the printer with his special mark, Caveat emptor! (Let the buyer beware!) and Sursum corda! (Lift up your hearts!). While both of Tate’s books are “first editions,” Lew Ney added “first issue” to let us know his book actually came first.

Allen Tate (1899-1979), The Mediterranean and Other Poems (New York: Alcestis Press, 1936). “This first edition … is strictly limited to 165 numbered copies, signed by the author … 135 copies are for sale and 30 copies are reserved for presentation and review purposes”–Colophon. Rare Books (Ex) 3952.88.362.11

Allen Tate (1899-1979), The Mediterranean and Other Poems ([New York]: Privately printed, 1936). “This special edition … is strictly limited to twelve copies numbered I-XII and printed solely for Benjamin Ethan Tate on Duca de Modena, an Italian handmade paper. No copies for sale. Designed and printed by Lew Ney with inkunabula type set by hand and the type has been distributed”–Colophon. First edition, first issue. Rare Books (Ex) 3952.88.362

Dionysus Crucified

Simon Jarvis, Dionysus Crucified: Choral Lyric for Two Soloists and Messenger ([Cambridge, England]: Grasp Press, 2011. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2013- in process

OCLC lists Dionysus Crucified as: Book poetry 12 unnumbered pages; 34 x 34 cm. A cataloguer has listed the subtitle as Choral Lyric for Two Soloists and Messenger and the epigraph as You cannot walk down two roads at once, even in fairyland. The reverse might also be valid.

Written in 2011 by Prof. Simon Jarvis, Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Cambridge University, this cunning book of visual and aural poetry moves in long lines across the pages in various directions with few signposts. Happily, a recording of Dionysus Crucified, read by Jarvis and Justin Katko at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in King’s Cross London, was made in 2011 and can still be accessed at https://soundcloud.com/the-claudius-app/jarvis-katko-dionysus. This is definitely a book to be seen as well as heard.

Overdue Accounts

In 1923, when Frances Steloff (1887-1989), owner of the Gotham Book Mart, moved her bookstore to West Forty-Seventh Street, it was her friend Lew Ney (Luther Widen, 1886-1963) who gave up his Fourth of July weekend to carry the books and shelves to the new shop. When Steloff needed a brochure or keepsake printed, it was her friend Lew Ney who hand-set the type, dampened the paper, and printed the edition for her.

And so, when Christopher Morley (1890-1957) wrote the verse, “Rubaiyat of Account Overdue,” in response to the many unpaid bills at the Gotham Book Mart, it was Lew Ney who editioned the poem for Steloff.

Lew Ney designed two separate formats: a narrow broadside that would go in an envelope with each overdue notice and a four page keepsake as a reward to those who paid their bills. He printed 350 of each, using his famous Inkunabula type. Morley signed them all and as they went out, Steloff added the date and her signature.

“That not only brought good results,” wrote Steloff, “but also a problem—our prompt paying customers then felt it was more rewarding to be delinquent.” [Special Gotham Book Mart issue of Journal of Modern Literature 4, no.4 April 1975): 792]As soon as he finished Steloff’s project, Lew Ney was on to his next jobs, using the same Inkunabula type to set Robert Penn Warren’s Thirty-Six Poems; Williams Carlos William’s An Early Martyr and Other Poems; and Wallace Stevens’ Ideas of Order, among other project that year.

Christopher Morley (1890-1957), Rubaiyat of Account Overdue (New York: Gotham Book Mart, 1935). Copy 29 of 350. Rare Books (Ex) 3866.5.3785.1935

Christopher Morley ( 1890-1957), Rubaiyat of Account Overdue ([New York: Gotham Book Mart, 1935]). (Ex) Oversize 3866.5.3785q

Lew Ney (aka Luther Widen)

This is not, as previously thought, a cut created for Ruth’s book but a stock print taken from “American Specimen Book of Type Styles : Complete Catalogue of Printing Machinery and Printing Supplies” by the American Type Founders Company, 1912.

The printer/publisher Lew Ney (pseudonym for Luther Emanuel Widen, 1886-1963) was born in Iowa of Swedish parents and grew up in Austin, Texas. He left school to run the Southwest Book and Publishing Company and in 1908 became the southwestern representative for publications at Charities and the Commons, a National Journal of Philanthropic, Civic, Industrial and Social Advance (Jacob Riis was the New York representative). Eventually, Widen made his way to New York, where he settled on West 4^th Street in Greenwich Village.

Beginning on August 23, 1920, Widen typed and distributed a newspaper called The Vagabond. For six months and 48 issues, he circulated his writing throughout the neighborhood until, one day Widen was arrested, directed to stop publishing his paper, and banned from Greenwich Village. As reported in the New-York Tribune, Widen was arrested because a detective investigating a robbery next door, at the Studio of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, became suspicious when Widen tried to help by announcing the name of the thief, which he said he discovered psychologically.

Ruth Widen, In Praise of Pain (New York: Parnassus Press, 1928). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2013- in process

Although he agreed to the ban rather than be committed to Bellevue Hospital, Widen merely moved the office a few block north, took the pseudonym Lew Ney, and established a new Type Shop on 12th Street. In 1928, he was married (a second time) to writer Ruth Willis Thompson, who joined the shop and served as editor for many of their Parnassus Press books. As a wedding present for their friends (who took up a collection to pay for the marriage license), Widen hand-set and printed Ruth’s In Praise of Pain. He also reprinted the stock image above as an illustration.

I am working on a complete biography of Ney and welcome any information on his life.

Emil Rudolf Weiss

Gerald Cinamon, E R Weiss: the Typography of an Artist: Emil Rudolf Weiss: a Monograph (Oldham [England]: Incline Press, 2012. One of 250 copies. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2013- in process

Graham Moss of Incline Press issued a wonderful survey of work of the German type designer Emil Rudolf Weiß (1875–1942) with a text by Gerald Cinamon. According to the prospectus, when Cinamon was approached to write about Weiss, he was provided with two suitcases full of research material and examples of Weiss’s work, all in German. The folio volume includes numerous tipped in facsimiles along with two small supplements: The Anagnostakis Pocket Guide to Austrian German and Swiss Antiquarian Bookdealers Terminology and E.R. Weiss In Memorium.

Weiss created Art Nouveau designs for books, textiles and furniture, theater sets and costumes, stained glass, and much more. His work came to prominence in 1895 when it was included in Pan magazine (SAX Oversize N3 .P25q) when he also began publishing small editions of his poetry, such as Die blassen Cantilenen (Recap 3496.23.396).

In 1913, Bauersche Giesserei commissioned a font that became Weiss-Fraktur, which was published in a luxurious specimen book (GA Oversize 2006-0820Q). Two other fonts were designed and cast in metal type.

In the 1920s, Weiss was one of the designers selected by Stanley Morison for the binding and endpaper design of The Fleuron: a Journal of Typography (Weiss: no. 5; GAX Oversize Z119 .F62q).

The Sea of Matrimony

On June 10, 1931, Elmer Adler (1884-1962) wrote to the artist Tom Cleland (1880-1964) to say Harvey T. White, of R. Tyson White’s Sons, manufacturers of paper boxes, had contacted him. White was confirming a previous conversation in which Adler, acting as Cleland agent, “authorized us to reproduce the The Sea of Matrimony by Wm [sic] Cleland for use on trays, waste baskets, lamp shades, cigarette boxes, etc., on the conditions. . . Print royalty is 3-7 cents each up to a total of $300. Depending on size.”

The Colophon (New York: Pynson Printers: The Colophon, 1930-1940). Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Z1007 .C71

The image was published on the colophon page of vol. 2, part six (1931) of The Colophon and proved much more popular than the cover image, also by Cleland.

This was the middle of the Great Depression in the United States but Cleland had a good job as art director for Fortune Magazine. He went on to design for Cadillac; Newsweek; and the newspaper PM.

The artist would not agree to Adler’s arrangement with White, but not because Cleland objected to seeing his art on waste baskets and lamp shades. He felt that so many people would want to license the image that $300 was not an appropriate price ceiling. Cleland would only agree if the company either bought the design for $300 or continue to pay royalties forever.

It is unfortunate that the response from White is not in the Cleland papers at the Library of Congress or Adler papers at Princeton University. If anyone has a lampshade with The Sea of Matrimony, please contact us. Thanks.

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