“I will not try to describe the horrid sight of houses spilled across the streets instead of standing upright, of gunfire and screaming and whistling bombs, while we sit in the basement feeling it must be us next.”
Blitz: Letters from London September and October 1940
Evelyn Lister, Susan Allix
London, 2014
On September 7, 1940 the German Luftwaffe began bombing London and other British cities for over 50 consecutive nights.
From the artist’s statement: “As it will never be possible to have this same experience, designing the book seemed sometimes similar to creating an historical novel. Descriptions, film, artifacts and related reconstructions can help to provide brief windows and snapshots of the time…”
From the colophon: “The letters between Mildred, ‘Billie,’ and Evelyn, “Ana,’ are selected from a small collection that came to light when Billie died. They are accompanied here by later prints and photographs. Of the 5 photographs, 3 were taken in the early 1960s with a ‘box Brownie’ camera. The handwriting is reproduced from the original letters. The aquatints, printed in black and brown with hand colouring, are from drawings made at demolition sites and in the underground. The burning and smoking give different results on each copy. The letterpress is hand set and printed in 18pt. Grotesque 215 with 12pt. Grotesque Italic and 18pt. Granby Light Italic. The paper is Saunders Waterford.”
Bound in black goatskin and light brown textured handmade paper, with morocco, reversed leather, and metallic onlays. Issued in slate gray cloth clamshell slipcase. Edition of fifteen copies. Rare Books copy is no. 14, signed by the artist/bookmaker, Susan Allix.
“Earls Court tube is full of poor folk at night, with rugs and eats spread out on the platform; it’s an awful sight as you know how stuffy and dirty the deep undergrounds are, and all the people bring their little children with them.”
“You’ll have some idea of the state of the collapse and debris when I tell you that there are still 4 bodies that they can’t reach…”
Somewhere in the world, something similar is happening now.
Here are some of the pieces chosen by the Rare Books staff for this episode:
ARKA
Timothy C. Ely
Portland, OR: T. Ely, 1995
N7433.4 E35 A7 1995
The book is drawn on BFK gray paper that was brush-sized with gelatin and CMC, then under painted with CMC and acrylic paint. Other materials include ink, Graphite, and watercolor. Each folio is sewn onto four raised cords that, on completion of the sewing, were laced into birch plywood boards. The end bands are silk worked over cores of leather. The spine of the book is goatskin. The board pastedowns are painted paper. The boards have a small amount of gold tooling suggestive of one part of the history and technology of the art of binding. Otherwise the cover boards are painted. The book is contained in a wooden box.
Hunting the Burn
Alicia Bailey
Lake City, CO: Ravenpress, 1998
N7433.4 B22 H86 1998
Two-sided leporello with self in-folded covers and removable spines. One side is Carolyn Hull’s poem “Hunting the Burn,” laserprinted on Basingwerk, overcoated with wax and pigment; the other side is a panoramic painting by Alicia Bailey, digitally reworked and printed with color inkjet on Arches 90 lb. cover and overcoated with wax. Four of the twelve panels have hand-cut rectangular openings with mixed media insertions. Covers are black Canson with hand applied enamel. Title piece is laserfoil on black paper. Spine pieces are black embossed paper laminated to black Canson. The box is paper-mache, gesso and pigmented wax. Box top has metal mesh and hemp-wrapped, wax-covered bullet attached. Inside box are stones and feathers. Edition of twenty copies, signed by Alicia Bailey and Carolyn Hull. Rare Books copy is no. 10.
Surplus Value Books: Catalog Number 13
Rick Moody
Santa Monica, CA: Danger! Books, 2002
N7433.4 M644 S6 2002
Deluxe edition presented as a collector’s box, containing two pens, one felt tip marker, one white-out correction pen, one pencil, one wooden nickel, one photograph with loop, seven photographs of “original artwork for placement only,” and other items. Text is composed in the form of galley proofs. Upon removing the galley holding the text, the reader is presented with a removable panel resembling a hospital release checklist. Holes cut into this panel reveal the objects contained below. The collectible objects in the box act as literal illustrations to the story. The narrator of the story is a bookseller, collector, mental patient. The story is told through the description of books for sale in the bookseller’s catalog. Values are assigned to each item in the catalog according to the bookseller’s inherent personal desire for each item. Themes of value, voyeurism, and deceit are presented as a pathology of collecting through the multiple layering of information and the revealing of objects of desire that are contained in the collector’s box. This work was first published in offset. Collector’s box constructed by Daniel Kelm at Wide Awake Garage. Rare Books copy is lettered “H.”
43, According to Robin Price with Annotated…
Robin Price
Middletown, CT: Robin Price, 2007
N7433.4 P753 A15 2007
From the colophon: “Paper maps from locations along the 43rd parallel are bound in an accordion that structurally supports the main text, which is printed on graph paper and also hinged together as an accordion (opening to 20 ft.)…The unusual double-layer accordion, housed in a printed cloth-covered clamshell box, is co-designed and co-produced by Daniel Kelm at Wide Awake Garage…” Edition of eighty-six plus twelve deluxe copies. Rare books copy is no. 23.
The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances
Jen Bervin
New York City: Granary Books, 2008
N7433.4 B47 D47 2008
An altered book is a form of mixed media artwork that takes a book from its original form into a different form, altering its meaning. The artist may take an old or new book and cut, tear, glue, burn, fold, paint, add collage, create pop-ups, rubber-stamp, drill, bolt or be-ribbon the book to create a new work that is the expression of the artist. In this case, it is the text that is altered — by sewing over certain passages and leaving others exposed. The text from which Jen Bervin’s poem emerges is The Desert, written by John Van Dyke (1856-1932), a professor of Art History at Rutgers University. Van Dyke, the author of several books on art theory of the Art-For-Art’s-Sake school, claimed to have spent three years in the American Southwest desert with only his fox terrier for company and a pony for transportation. According to Van Dyke, he carried with him a rifle, a pistol, a hatchet, a shovel, blankets, tin pans and cups, dried food and a gallon of water. His romantic rhapsody of this trip, published in 1901, was a big hit, extremely influential and remains in print. In fact, Van Dyke saw most of the great desert over which he swooned looking out the windows of trains on his way from one first-class hotel to another. The Desert, version 1901, is the fact-faulted, fantastic hoax of a well-bred, well-educated Easterner, in much the same way that Harvard-educated New Englander Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian (1902) is a glorification of an American West culture that didn’t exist. Prose poem adaptation with overlay of zig zag stitches in pale blue thread. Composed and sewn at James Turrell’s Roden Crater on the Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour in October, 2006. Housed in a hinged archival case. Issued in a wrapper of white muslim cloth and white felt stitched together with blue thread.
Justice: What is Justice?
Thomas Ingmire
T. Ingmire, 2009
N7433.4 I48 J87 2008
Handmade paper mounted over board, Chinese Sumi ink, wide-edged pen (Automatic pen), Japanese brush.
The Latest Things in Kites
Christopher Fritton
Ferrum Wheel Press, 2014
PS3606 R58 L37 2014
Artist’s statement: “A chapbook produced for Carrier Pigeon magazine as as tip-in, The Latest Things in Kites borrows language and its title from a chapter in the book, Fun for Boys. The chapbook is a single-sheet, four-page fold-over with rounded corners and a small embroidery thread tail. Handset in 14pt Goudy Bold and 10pt Goudy with antique copper cuts on Mohawk Via vellum. Hand letterpressed.” Edition of 1200 copies.
Whitman Crosshatch
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
East Hampton, NY: 2015
PS3222 A7 2015
“Colour and light have an important relationship in the act of seeing…colours multiply among themselves, but, like the elements, there are only four true colours from which other species of colour are born. There is red, the colour of fire; blue, of air; green, of water; and earth, ashen grey…from these four colours according to the addition of light or dark, black or white, are made innumerable other hues. Therefore the mixing in of white will not change the basic colour, but just make tints;’ and black has a similar power, with its addition making an almost infinite number of colours. You can see colours alter in the shade; when the shade deepens the colours fade, when the light brightens they become brighter and clearer.” — Leon Battista Alberti
ON PAINTING
Leon Battista Alberti (1401-1472) and Susan Allix
London: 1999
ND1130 A4813 1999
Leon Alberti was born in 1401 in Florence. His art was influenced by the work of Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Masaccio. He wrote On Painting in order to “set forth principles to be followed by the painter.” Alberti then turned his attention to architecture, for which he is better remembered today. He wrote De Re Aedificatoria and received several commissions for building projects. He had a deep understanding of the classical past, but an eye for contemporary change. He wrote on sculpture, poetry, prose, mathematics, engineering and other topics. His work was studied by generations of artists.
This translation of On Painting is by Susan Allix, based on the Italian text published in L. B. Alberti, Opere Volgari, Volume Terzo. Allix writes, “This translation…is a painter’s translation and includes those parts that seem to hold, for the present, the most important of Alberti’s ideas…it has been extensively abridged to prevent it from becoming several volumes.”
In a letter to Michael R. Thompson Rare Books, Allix wrote, “One day I started to read Alberti’s book and was astounded at his idea that everything begins with a dot. I spent a long time struggling away with fifteenth century Tuscan (helped with a more modern translation), but present Italian hasn’t altered so much and I did find it readable. I wanted my own translation. Slightly unprofessionally some of this was done in the afternoon quiet of an Italian camping site. One interesting page is where I followed Alberti’s instructions on how to achieve a squared pavement. So complicated, I never believed it would work, but lo and behold the perspective of the squared pavement appeared!”
This edition contains twenty-eight intaglio prints, the result of four years of sketchbook observation and drawing, plate-making and reworking the plates. The prints were made from copper, zinc, and Perspex plates, and contain a wide variety of techniques. There is etching, drypoint, and mezzotint, often in combination, and also open bite, aquatint, sand grain, and carborundum. The plates have been printed black and white and color in intaglio, relief and blind. All the inks are made from pure pigments ground in copperplate oil, so interleaving sheets is necessary to stop the plates from offsetting. As each plate is hand-inked and printed separately, complete uniformity is not possible. Twenty of the prints are in color, seven in black and white, one in blind, and many have extra hand-coloring on the prints or the type. The first ten copies, of which this is number three, have watercolor and pencil paintings on Japanese paper between each of the three of Alberti’s books.
Bound in full cream goatskin, upper cover tinted with a border of darker purple dye, extending to the spine, and an abstract design of other lighter tints and various colored goatskin onlays with textured endpapers.
Rare Books copy has holographic letter written in ink on both sides of the press’s stationary from Allix to book collector Denis Collins, prospectus, and biographical article about the author, entitled “God is in the datail,” laid in. Signed in ink on the verso of the front flyleaf: “For Denis/with warmest regards/Susan/11 April 2000.” Collins’ stamp on recto of terminal endpaper. One of twenty-two copies, numbered and signed by the artist.
Although I have no beauty, colour & perfume
Am I not after all the grass of His garden?”
— Saadi
COLOURS OF PERSIA: PERCEPTIONS, ACCOUNTS…
Susan Allix (b. 1943)
London, 2007
N7433.4 A57 C65 2007
From the artist: “The text is arranged around the headings of five cities – Tehran, Mashad, Yazd, Shiraz and Isfahan. These names are printed in English in 48pt. Garamond Italic and Farsi, which was cast in Tehran. Different typefaces have been used for the different voices of the authors: Ker Porter speaks in Bembo, Curzon in Baskerville, Hafez in varying sizes of Garamond.
Handset and letterpress printed on handmade Barcham Green. The paper for the prints is handmade Richard de Bas. Twenty-six prints, of which seventeen are etchings with drypoint, carborundum and other methods, seven are linocuts, and two are a combination of two or more of these processes. Four prints in black and white, the rest in color, including hand coloring by watercolor, crayon and airbrush, and gold and silver foil.
Additionally illustrated with some foldouts of varying sizes, including some with cut-out shapes. A variety of colored sheets act as interleaving or free colored collages.
Bound in goatskin, some of which has been dyed cobalt blue and yellow. The inlaid leather is also inlaid with waxed paper printed in a style similar to tilework, its semi-transparent quality allowing the title to show through in shadow. The design, based on architectural shapes, has onlays of black, freely-cut leather reminiscent of calligraphy. Within the edition, each binding differs slightly.”
This is the forty-fifth publication of Susan Allix, who has received the Prix de Rome for her book work. Edition of twenty-five copies, signed by the producer. University of Utah copy is no. 9.
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