Category Archives: Books

books

Cane


Cane [by] Jean Toomer; with a foreword by Waldo Frank. New York, Boni and Liveright [c1923]. Firestone Library » PS3539.O478 C3 1923

Cane [electronic resource] [by] Jean Toomer; with a foreword by Waldo Frank. New York : Boni and Liveright, [c1923]

Plays of Negro life; a source-book of native America drama. Selected and edited by Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory. Decorations and illus. by Aaron Douglas. New York, Harper, 1927.
ReCAP » PS627.N4 L635 1927

Song of the sun / by Jeam Toomer. Detroit : Broadside Press, 1967, c1950. Special Collections Broadside 261

Singers of daybreak; studies in Black American literature [by] Houston A. Baker, Jr. Washington, Howard University Press, 1974. Firestone Library PS153.N5B27

Jean Toomer’s “Cane” and Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” : a Black reaction to the literary conventions of the twenties / by Darrell W. McNeely. 1974.

The Living earth. [s. l.] : Danbury Press, [c1975-1976] ReCAP .b17153055x

The waiting years : essays on American Negro literature / Blyden Jackson. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, c1976. Firestone Library » PS153.N5J34

The dream of Arcady : place and time in Southern literature / Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, c1980. ReCAP » PS261 .M25

Singers of daybreak : studies in black American literature / Houston A. Baker, Jr. Washington, D.C. : Howard University Press, 1983. African American Studies Reading Room (AAS). B-7-B » PS153.N5 B27 1983

Cane : an authoritative text, backgrounds, criticism / Jean Toomer ; edited by Darwin T. Turner. New York : Norton, c1988. Firestone Library » PS3539.O478 C3 1988

The collected poems of Jean Toomer [electronic resource] / edited by Robert B. Jones and Margery Toomer Latimer ; with an introduction and textual notes by Robert B. Jones. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, ©1988. www.jstor.org

Invisible darkness : Jean Toomer & Nella Larsen / Charles R. Larson. Iowa City : University Of Iowa Press, [1993] www.jstor.org

Cane / Jean Toomer. New York : Modern Library, 1994. Firestone Library » PS3539.O478 C3 1994

Classic fiction of the Harlem Renaissance / edited by William L. Andrews. New York : Oxford University Press, 1994. ReCAP » PS647.A35 C57 1994
Cane de Jean Toomer & la Renaissance de Harlem / Françoise Clary. Paris : Ellipses, c1997. ReCAP » PS3539.O478 C33 1997

Jean Toomer and the terrors of American history / Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Firestone Library » PS3539.O478 C337 1998

Cane / Jean Toomer ; illustrations by Martin Puryear; afterword by Leon F. Litwack. San Francisco, Calif. : Arion Press, 2000. Graphic Arts Collection 2019- in process

The Country of the Blind privately printed

H. G. Wells, The Country of the Blind (New York: Privately printed [by Mitchell Kennerley], Christmas 1915). Aquatone frontispiece after a photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn. Graphic Arts Collection 2019- in process

This is the first separate edition of one of the stories from the collaboration between H. G. Wells and Alvin Langdon Coburn, The Door in the Wall. Although there is no statement of limitation, a folded typed account of the book and its production, signed with initials by Mitchell Kennerley, states that two hundred copies were printed on handmade paper, typeset by Bertha Goudy.

The Country of the Blind was first published in The Strand magazine, April 1904, pp 201-15, with illustrations by Claude A. Shepperson.

The Fortunes of Mitchell Kennerley [Recap Z473.K45 B78 1986] was reviewed by Leonard Shatzkin, “Zero Royalty” in New York Times December 7, 1986. Here is a section:

MITCHELL KENNERLEY was a pioneer among American publishers. Only two years after he joined John Lane as a junior clerk at the Bodley Head in London, Kennerley was taken by Lane to New York. In ”The Fortunes of Mitchell Kennerley, Bookman,” Matthew J. Bruccoli says Kennerley always insisted Lane had put him in charge of the firm’s American branch then; he was 18 years old. Three years later, irritated with Kennerley’s failure to handle essential business details, Lane arrived at the New York offices unannounced, discovered that Kennerley had also been taking company money and fired him.

…Kennerley made significant contributions to book publishing and book collecting. From the start, he strove for the highest physical and artistic quality. His first office was in a New York building in which Frederic W. Goudy, America’s most famous typographer and type designer, was struggling to get started, and Kennerley used his services extensively. One of Goudy’s best-known and most important typefaces, Kennerley Old Style, grew out of that association.

Kennerley’s books were beautifully typeset, printed on high-quality paper that was often handmade and tastefully bound. Some were set into type by Bertha Goudy, Frederic’s talented wife. Alfred A. Knopf, who in his time set the standards of quality for the modern generation of publishers, acknowledged that his youthful apprenticeship with Kennerley associated him ”with a man who had a very fine sense of typography and of sound conservative book-making.” Among the many distinguished authors whose first or early works were represented among the 400 titles Kennerley published are Van Wyck Brooks, Frank Harris, D. H. Lawrence, Vachel Lindsay, Walter Lippmann, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Upton Sinclair, H. G. Wells and Oscar Wilde.

…In 1915, Kennerley became president of the Anderson Galleries. He continued to publish books for a time on a very much reduced scale, but auctions, particularly of rare books, became his main occupation. Later, as his financial fortunes drifted downward, he worked unsuccessfully in book retailing and even in printing. Kennerley ended in poverty, a lonely suicide in 1950 at the age of 71.

Madeline Gins, speculative fiction

Madeline Gins (1941-2014) was an American poet, writer and philosopher. She grew up in Island Park, NY, and graduated from Barnard College in 1962 where she studied physics and philosophy. While studying painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1962, Gins met Arakawa and she would become one of the primary interpreters of Arakawa’s work.

Gins published three books: the experimental novel Word Rain (or a Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says) (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1969); What The President Will Say and Do!! (New York: Station Hill, 1984), an excursion into identity, language and free speech using the devices of political rhetoric; and Helen Keller or Arakawa (Santa Fe: Burning Books with East/West Cultural Studies, 1994), an art-historical novel that took on a form of speculative fiction.

With Arakawa, Gins developed the philosophy of ‘procedural architecture’ to further its impact on human lives. These ideas were explored through three books that she co-authored with Arakawa: Pour ne Pas Mourir/To Not to Die (Éditions de la Différence, Paris 1987); Architectural Body (University of Alabama Press, 2002); and Making Dying Illegal – Architecture Against Death: Original to the 21st Century (Roof Books, New York, 2006). …Gins also completed the manuscript for Alive Forever and the illustrated version of her poem Krebs Cycle.–http://www.reversibledestiny.org/arakawa-and-madeline-gins/madeline-gins



 

http://www.reversibledestiny.org/arakawa-and-madeline-gins/madeline-gins/bibliography1

Word rain; or, A discursive introduction to the intimate philosophical investigations of G,r,e,t,a, G,a,r,b,o, it says. New York, Grossman Publishers, 1969. Firestone Library » PS3557.I5 W6 1969; Rare Books Off-Site Storage » RECAP-94763388

For example (a critique of never) = Par esempio (una critica del mai): a melodrama / by Madeline Gins and Arakawa (from The mechanism of meaning). [Place of publication not identified]: A. Castelli, [1974?]. Rare Books Off-Site Storage » RECAP-94765342

The mechanism of meaning: work in progress (1963-1971, 1978) based on the method of Arakawa / Arakawa and Madeline H. Gins; [editor, Ellen Schwartz]. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1979. N7359.A7 G56; Rare Books Off-Site Storage » RECAP-97151300

What the president will say and do!! / Madeline Gins. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, c1984. Rare Books Off-Site Storage » RECAP-33922780

To not to die / Arakawa, Madeline Gins = Shinanai tame ni / Arakawa Shūsaku, Madorin Ginzu; Miura Masashi yaku. Tōkyō: Riburo Pōto, 1988. PS3557.I5 T66 1988

Helen Keller or Arakawa / Madeline Gins. Santa Fe, N.M.: Burning Books; New York: East-West Cultural Studies: D.A.P., distributor, c1994. PS3557.I5 H44 1994; Rare Books Off-Site Storage » RECAP-94763370

Reversible destiny: Arakawa/Gins / [organized by Michael Govan]. New York: Guggenheim Museum: Distributed by H.N. Abrams, c1997. Marquand Library » Oversize N7359.A7 G562 1997q

Architectural body / Madeline Gins and Arakawa. Tuscaloosa, Ala.; London: University of Alabama Press, c2002. Architecture Library » NA2500 .G455 2002. Marquand Library » NA2500 .G455 2002

Making dying illegal: architecture against death: original to the 21st century / Arakawa and Madeline Gins; introduction by Jean-Jacques Lecercle. New York: Roof Books, 2006. HQ1073 .A73 2006g

The Sun – El Astro Brillante

Invitacion al mundo filosofico para reconocer al sol. verdadero iman conocido [Invitation to the philosophical world to recognize the sun. The true known magnet] found in: J.L.T. .., Historia sucinta de un feliz descubrimiento hecho en uno de los paises del Asia (Madrid: [Don Tomás Jordan, impresor de camara de S.M], 1836). Cover: Descubrimiento oriental, representado en una lamina fina. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2019- in process

This small, obscure brochure has one engraving by Esteban Boix (born 1774) after a design by D. Domingo presenting Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727); Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743-1794) Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) and others contemplating the sun with the author “J.L.T.”

The anonymous writer relates how “he grappled with the nature of light – its propagation, materiality, interaction with the eye etc. – by reading the theories of Lavoisier, ‘immortal’ Newton, Descartes, Huygens, Bernoulli, and Malbranche, but was left confused and dissatisfied.

So one night in summer 1832 he undertook to travel mentally into space to contemplate the sun (‘el astro brillante’), traveling for three quarters of an hour and being oblivious to a fire raging in his village. While the experience left him with a three-day headache, it revealed the sun to him as ‘elVerdadero Iman’, and a new science styled ‘Imanica’.”

This is the only recorded copy in the United States. Thanks to our dealer for the transcription/translation.

Forms of the Book in the East

 

Martin Heijdra, Director of the East Asian Library at Princeton University, welcomed members of the IAS/Princeton workshop “Formats of the Book in East Asia and Environs” to Firestone Library and the Institute for Advanced Studies this week.

Below is the complete list of treasures Martin pulled for the group, beginning with two rare facsimiles of the Bamboo and wooden slips (Chinese: 简牍; pinyin: jiǎndú) used in China before paper. Also included were spectacular examples of book formats from South East Asia and regions beyond China.


The overall aims of the project are listed as:
“The Book and the Silk Roads: Phase I” is a 2-year Mellon Foundation-funded project of the University of Toronto’s Old Books, New Science lab. The grant’s purpose is to challenge the triumphalist Western narrative of book history as a path of steps leading from the Christian codex to the Gutenberg press to the digital age. Instead, we seek to build and support a network consisting of scholars, curators, conservators, and scientists exploring significant developments in book technologies within a range of contexts, focusing particularly on occasions of cultural interchange or entanglement in the premodern world.


Amanda Goodman’s work on ephemeral documents from the Dunhuang cache has deeply inspired us, and we hope to build further points of connection with the community of Dunhuang researchers in the Princeton area. What stories can be told by exploring the varied formats and structures of the text-objects from the cache in Mogao’s Cave 17, or the recycled examination papers used as burial shoes in Turfan, now housed in Princeton’s East Asian Library collection? …

Although most of us are not part of this distinguished group, we can still appreciate the marvelous books and manuscripts being studied. Here are just a few images without commentary.



Note the corrections added to this manuscript by the author.

Tesoros musicales de la Nueva España: Siglo XVI. Tacámbaro de Codallos

María Isabel, Tesoros Musicales de la Nueva España: Siglo XVI. Tacámbaro de Codallos ([Mexico]: Taller Martín Pescador, 2018). One of 210 copies. Graphic Arts collection GAX 2019- in process

Publisher’s quote: “Dr. María Isabel Grañén Porrúa is Mexico’s leading scholar of 16th-century printing in the Viceroyalty of New Spain and Juan Pascoe of the Taller Martín Pescador is Mexico’s greatest living handpress printer.

Her scholarship, based on archival research and the minute study of early colonial-era printed musical texts, and his precise and meticulous presswork are here combined to give us a masterful study of a neglected area of the history of the book in Mexico, in a volume that is joy in the hand and a jewel to the eye.

Prior to publication here, the extended essay had been ‘presentado en el simposio ‘El libro en la Nueva España. Historiografía en Construcción.’ Dirección de Estudios Históricos del INAH, octubre de 2017.'”

Florencio Ramírez composed the text using Dante, Centaur, Poliphilus, and Blado type. Juan Pascoe and Martín Urbgina printed the work on Tamayo De Ponte paper using a Vandercook cylinder press and two Washington handpresses. The work was bound by Fermín Urbina.




José Vasconcelos: not a man to inspire indifference


The UNESCO: International Bureau of Education noted that “José Vasconcelos is, without doubt, one of the most controversial figures in the social and political history of Mexico. Although he spent a good part of his life in either voluntary or compulsory exile, the impact of his original personality goes beyond his own lifetime, while his vast educative, literary, political and philosophical work is still widely studied and discussed today. He was not a man to inspire indifference, and has therefore been described in all manner of highly contradictory terms. His life covers a large period of Mexican history, from Porfirio’s dictatorship, through the revolutionary movement of 1910, and up to the establishment and consolidation of civilian regimes.”

Author, philosopher, politician José Vasconcelos (1881-1959) served twice as Minister of Education and also held the position of Rector of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He exerted a profound influence on Mexican culture by promoting education for the lower classes and encouraging popular exposure to literature. One of the ways he accomplished this was through several magazines that reprinted European authors, including El Maestro.

In her paper, “Dreaming of a cosmic race: José Vasconcelos and the politics of race in Mexico, 1920s–1930s”, Cogent Arts & Humanities 3, 2016, Linnete Manrique writes:

“Vasconcelos introduces the first volume [of El Maestro] by stating that the purpose of the magazine is “to disseminate practical knowledge among the country’s population.” He notes that the magazine will be distributed gratis precisely because it is meant for the general public. However, it is clear that his five-page introduction addresses one particular group of people and not all, that of intellectuals.

Vasconcelos critiques his colleagues for their lack of action and indifference toward the masses, and rallies them to become involved in his educational crusade. In his characteristic grandiose speech, Vasconcelos declares, “[the masses] will become a ruinous burden if we abandon them, if we maintain them ignorant and poor; but if we educate them and make them strong, their strength merged into ours will make us invincible.”

“From his point of view, the intellectual is the only one capable of leading the Mexican nation toward modernity and into the world stage. In a similar vein, Vasconcelos explains that the content of the magazine will not be what people want but what they need, with “the continuous purpose of elevating them.”

Authors presented in El Maestro include Romain Rolland, George Bernard Shaw, and Leo Tolstoy, which serve to highlight Vasconcelos’ aspiration that through European literature the Mexican people would become civilized [or so he believed].

El Maestro, Revista de Cultura Nacional. Tomo I: 1,2,3,4,5y6; Tomo II: 1,2,3,4y5,6; Tomo III: 1,2,3,4,5. México: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, 1921-1923. Firestone Library 0906.608

 

El Río. The River: A Collaboration


Zoe Leonard and Dolores Dorantes, El Río. The River: A Collaboration (Mexico City: Gato Negro, 2018). Risography. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2019- in process

“The River is a collaborative project between Zoe Leonard and Dolores Dorantes, with photography by the former and text by the latter. Richly textured images of water highlight the dynamic nature of the element, with experimental writing focused on topics surrounding dislocation, desire and devastation in a rhythm that matches the ebb and flow of the photography. With Spanish writing accompanied by English translations, the reader is spatially situated in Mexico and is invited to reflect on water as a life force.”

“The book collects unpublished photographs that the American artist Zoe Leonard has taken along the Rio Grande (or Río Bravo) in 2017 and texts commissioned for this project from Dolores Dorantes, Mexican poet and activist, who has been exiled to the United States for years. The book is an immersion into the physical context, the actual barrier; the very heart of the border between Mexico and the United States: the waters of the Río Bravo or Rio Grande. A number of figures in the water recall something else: skin, scars, wrinkles, genitals, the writing of an unknown language. A poem made of photographs, and the depiction of that sequence with a poem made of words. Or rather, a broken bilingual, visual-textual attempt of conversation over the tensions in between a simple, ever-changing but always the same flow of water, and all the terrible complexities around, above, beneath it.

The argument could be simple: at the end and at the beginning, it is only water. As simple, complex, beautiful and terrible as that. Or maybe not: to complete the argument it is necessary to summon the ghost of the body that runs through it.

https://www.gatonegro.ninja/

In the words of Dolores Dorantes: I’m going to walk on water. Say. Bring me all those parts of the body and put them here. Say. I’m the body and I’m on the table. Soy tu cuerpo y estoy sobre la mesa, en la estructura divisoria del mundo. Soy tu cuerpo y estoy sobre la mesa del mercado del mundo. Soy tu cuerpo y estoy sobre la mesa, donde se encausa la corriente del mundo. I’m the farce, arranged at strategic points of our territories. Between the face and neck, for example. Between the anchored ankle and satisfaction. http://flatartbookfair.com/en/programma/


Interview: Gato Negro — Leon Muñoz Santini from MISS READ on Vimeo.

 

León Muñoz Santini is the founder of the publishing house Gato Negro Ediciones in his hometown of Mexico City. As a young man, Santini studied political science at the Mexico’s National University but left that field to developed his career in editorial design, with a special focus in the fields of children’s literature, social design, and photography.

He has received multiple awards, among them the New Horizons in Bologna Ragazzi Awards (2009 and 2013); 50 Books / 50 Covers of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (2009); Quorum Award (2009); and repeatedly Caniem Editorial Arte Award, the White Ravens in Germany and the Book Bank of Venezuela. https://www.leonmunozsantini.com/

 

Hiroshima to Fukushima, the Road to Self-Destruction


[left] A kind visitor offered to show how big this book really is.

 

Sam Kerson, Hiroshima to Fukushima: the road to self-destruction, lino-cuts by Sam Kerson; concept and design by Sam and Katah; hand-pulled prints, book binding by Katah (Trois-Rivières, Québec: Produced by Dragon Dance Theatre at our print making workshop, 2018). 33 unnumbered leaves; 61 x 46 cm, on sheets 87 x 67 cm. Edition of 30. Graphic Arts Collection 2019- in process.

 

 

ARTIST STATEMENT –Looking more closely at the experience of the nuclear era is daunting, to say the least. The accidents don’t end, the fall-out from the bombs doesn’t go away. The waste from the plutonium factories, the nuclear reactors, is saved and isolated in concrete and stainless steel cylindrical casks. These specialized storage units might contain the radioactive waste for a few hundred years, while critics talk of the radiological hazard lasting for hundreds of thousands of years. The bomb continues to haunt us!

Technology often threatens, “improvement”, a “better” bomb, they say, a more “intelligent” bomb. These radioactive mountains of waste are our inheritance from a war drunk, old uncle who made a terrible mistake, which he called, “science”, decades ago. They have not been able to admit it to this day. Quite the contrary our scientist, and his scientific method have gone into full denial, a sort of extreme denial, which denies that which is obvious to anyone who dares to look. They deny the effect of the accident at Three Mile Island. They deny the mortal consequences of the disaster at Chernobyl. They deny the extreme fragility of this technology, even after the three reactors melted down at Fukushima. We must see for ourselves; see with our own eyes what is obvious and self-evident.

In this book we have selected a number of incidents which we believe will let the historian see that, we of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, were aware of the consequences of this technology. Our book might also support the protesters by recalling some of those protests that have been occurring since the invention of the bomb. We hope our book will be helpful to students of this end of the world technology and phenomenon. Our intention is to encourage resistance, even though it is late; the environment is compromised with dangerous radiation, our genes have been impacted, our offspring are mutating, therefore we must stop as soon as possible. Stop the bombing, testing and production. Shut off the nuclear reactors. –Sam Kerson, January, 2019

 

Ultra Luxury Supreme edition missed

If you don’t already have a confirmed order for the “Ultra Luxury Supreme edition” of Rihanna you are out of luck. The edition of 10 copies priced at $75,000 each is sold out. (Donations welcome.)

Rihanna and Phaidon hosted a pre-publication ticketed book party at the Guggenheim Museum on Friday, October 11, 2019, and all those who attended the event were given a copy of the regular 509 page, 19 pound “visual biography” to carry home.

In addition to the large-format trade edition of Rihanna, Phaidon and the singer have collaborated with The Haas Brothers on three limited editions:

“This Sh*t is Heavy,” the Fenty x Phaidon edition (released October 10, 2019), includes a copy of the book that features a cover with two black and white photographs, a cloth binding, and a custom-designed tabletop bookstand inspired by Rihanna’s hands. $175.00

The Luxury Supreme edition (to be released November 20, 2019) is signed and numbered by Rihanna and The Haas Brothers. The book for this edition is bound in a custom-made black fabric with an inset, matte black, laser-cut steel grille, completed with the “Drippy + The Brain” stand, a gold toned, cast-resin tabletop bookstand covered with a bespoke black vermiculated fabric. The book and stand together weigh 126 pounds. These editions are exclusively available at TheRihannaBook.com. $5500.00

The three artists also collaborated on an Ultra Luxury Supreme edition (sold out), entitled “Stoner,” a custom-sculpted marble pedestal to showcase the Luxury Supreme book. Each pedestal, in the edition of ten, is exclusively designed to cradle the book and is hand carved in Nazaré, Portugal from a unique piece of solid Pele de Tigre marble, with a soft eggshell finish. “Stoner” measures 42 inches high x 40 inches wide | 1,067 x 1,016 mm. Book and stand with packaging weighs approximately 2,000 lbs (907 kg). $75,000.00

 

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – OCTOBER 11: Attendees look through the book during the launch of Rihanna’s first Visual Autobiography, Rihanna, at Guggenheim Museum on October 11, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Rihanna)

As noted on her website, Rihanna (born 1988, Barbados) is a nine-time Grammy Award–winning recording artist, songwriter, actress, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. She has sold 60 million albums and 215 million digital tracks worldwide, making her the top-selling digital artist of all time. Rihanna launched her beauty line Fenty Beauty in 2017, her lingerie line Savage X Fenty in 2018, and most recently her luxury fashion line FENTY in 2019.

 

Rihanns’s first biography is available at the Mendel music library: Rihanna: Barbados world-gurl in global popular culture edited by Hilary McD. Beckles and Heather D. Russell (Kingston, Jamaica : University of the West Indies Press, 2015). ML3930 .R44 R45 2015