#finepressfriday

It’s Fine Press Friday!

Gypsy is a collection of several poems by James Baldwin (1924-1987), published by sculptor and printmaker Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press in Searsmont, Maine in 1989. The book contains a portrait of Baldwin etched by Baskin (1922-2000), printed on blue paper from the original copperplate. This copy is also signed by Baskin. The type is Centaur, cast by Harold Berliner's Typefoundry. The red pomegranate is one of the Gehenna Press's printer’s marks. Though Gehenna often worked collaboratively with poets, this collection was published two years after Baldwin’s death in 1987.

Speaking with The Black Scholar in 1973, Baldwin traced a mid-century shift in black culture in America, as part of the generation born in an urban, northern environment after the Great Migration: “It had become clear,” he explained, “that one could no longer live by the so-called standards of white civilization.” His writing embodies an intense, and honest excavation of history and its implications on the personal, the psychological, the emotional, the spiritual. “History is a very strange crucible and I don’t pretend to understand it; but I do understand at least in my own mind that you are lucky if you are forced to understand your own history.”

To grapple with reality and history through art: Baldwin here speaks to Baskin’s own artistic motivation. A vocal critic of “the irrational and accidental,” Leonard Baskin saw these approaches as the “denial of history.” Sidney Kaplan (1913-1980), an editor at Gehenna, scholar of African American history, and activist, explored Baskin’s portraits of artists:

“The true issue of mastery—the bold and conscious exploration of the past as a past of total reality, the discriminating and weighing of its necessities, the courage and intelligence to use the past without being used or used up by it, the endless desire to know man again and again in all his avatars of flesh and art…all this is what has led Baskin to look hard and long at the deathless faces of those who, for him, have been masters of man’s changing image.”

See other posts highlighting Leonard Baskin.

Check out our Black History Month posts.

--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

It's Fine Press Friday!

Multiple Discovery is a 2022 project produced in an edition of 50 copies by the five letterpress printers who make up the collaborative group, Shift-Lab: Katie Baldwin, Denise Bookwalter, Sarah Bryant, Macy Chadwick, and Tricia Treacy. The colophon describes their process:

Multiple Discovery (2022) occurs when innovations are made independently and simultaneously in different locations. Shift-lab uses Multiple Discovery as a metaphor for our own remote collaborative practice. Working with a common horizon line and color palette, we each developed imagery for this artist book in separate studios. Printed sheets were then exchanged in batches of ten. Individually, we wrote and printed text gathered from a shared collection of source material that was collated and folded into a unique set of ten copies.

Since we collect all the work of Sarah Bryant, we hold one of the ten copies printed by her (numbers 21-30; we hold #25). The entire edition, however, is signed by all five artists.

View more posts with work by Sarah Bryant.

It’s Fine Press Friday!

This Friday we highlight another book by Gaylord Schanilec and Midnight Paper Sales, out of Stockholm, WI. It’s Come to This, by Twin Cities writer Patricia Hampl, was printed in 2023, in a limited edition of 70 copies signed by Hampl, Schanilec, and Lila Shull – who drew and printed the cover lithograph of ginkgo leaves. The wood engravings are by Schanilec – the large river panorama based on a photograph by Hampl. Typefaces used include Oldrich Menhart’s Monotype Menhart,Hermann Zapf’s Michealangelo, and an italic cast by Nick Gill. Molly Brown assisted the printing “in the wilds of Western Wisconsin,” on the Vandercook Universal III. The paper was handmade in the mid-20th century, at the Velke Losiny Paper Mill in what is now the Czech Republic. According to the colophon, this was when the formula included more sizing, and the formidable paper therefore "retains its pleasing 'rattle.'" Matthew Lawler Zimmerman bound the edition at Studio Alcyon.

“Life’s a journey—no wonder it’s our most ancient metaphor. A platitude, but only truth can harden into cliché.” Written during Covid isolation at her home in St. Paul, It’s Come to This explores escape – that “Midwestern birthright, the desire to be somewhere else” – as well as the significance of a long pandemic: “At your age, a year is a serious percentage of what’s left.” With the background of Midwestern summer storms, the George Floyd protests, and menacing Boogaloo Bois, Hampl walks her dog along the Mississippi feeling both isolated from and deeply connected to the events around her. The text first appeared in The American Scholar in October of 2021. “What exactly, has come to what?” Hampl wonders to her dog. “What is this it I sigh into, what is the this I keep falling upon? What distress and what comfort does this muttered mantra express?”

Shull’s rich pattern of ginkgo leaves across the cover speaks to the dog’s favorite spot to stop along their walks. “I get it.” Hampl concludes to her companion. “And now, standing by the side of the moving water, apparently we have achieved our destination, the ghostly This.”

View more work by Gaylord Schanilec and Midnight Paper Sales.

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--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

It’s Fine Press Friday!

This week we highlight Amidst This, by Portland based book artist and designer Timme Lu. Described by Lu as “An internal dialogue; a conversation between pages. Conversation between textures, senses, insecurities, anxieties, and self-doubt,” the book was published in 2020, released in a limited edition of 35. Lu completed the design, printing, and binding in Portland, OR, in collaboration with IPRC and Caldera Arts. The type is set in Century Italic and Century Light. The paper, varying in translucent, alternates in Sekishu and Glama Natural.

Lu’s geometric designs layer atop his writing, creating visually striking erasure poems. Scattered among triangular shards, one reads: “a / Shattered / piece / Missing.”

This book was acquired in memory of Senior Academic Librarian Kathy Bowes, who died in 2021.

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--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

It’s Fine Press Friday!

The Kasidah of Hâjî Abdû el-Yezd was published by Limited Editions Club in 1937, printed by Yale University Press in New Haven, Ct, and released in a limited edition of 1500 copies. Valenti Angelo (1897-1982) decorated, illuminated, and illustrated the poem by Sir Richard F. Burton (1821-1890). The type is Centaur roman and Arrighi italic; the double-folded paper is Japanese Yamane. A petite book, it is but 4 x 6 inches. Its colophon is signed by Angelo.

The text of this beautiful object is a long Persian poem by Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî and translated by “F.B.” – which is to say, that it was, in truth, an English poem written by Sir Richard F. Burton, who claimed to serve as its translator. This edition suggests, with plausible deniability in its vagueness, that it was merely “written down” by Burton; but a long note at the end of the text fully embraces the deception of Burton's Hâjî Abdû. Burton was an explorer, soldier, Orientalist, translator of One Thousand and One Nights, and he is said to have spoken upwards of 29 languages. He disguised himself as a Muslim and participated in the Hajj. He wrote extensively of his travels, and in particular about the sexual behavior and penis lengths of the people he met.

Burton looks exactly as you might expect.

See more beautiful work by Valenti Angelo.

See more books from Limited Editions Club.

See more National Poetry Month posts!

--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

It’s Fine Press Friday!

A sphinx speaks, a gorgon sees, and a siren sings when pulled from a polka dot purse in Stephanie Copoulos-Selle’s 2008 book, Bad Girls. The three small accordions that make up the body of the book were printed at Citron Press in Waukesha, Wisconsin, by Copoulos-Selle; the images printed with photopolymer plates. The type is Hellenic and Scotch. The box design – pink polka dots, hearts, and cursive – was screen printed. Hahnemuhle Ingres, Stonehenge, and Rives papers were used. Bad Girls was printed in a limited edition of 53 copies, signed by Copoulos-Selle.

“Don’t hate me because I’m attractive,” the Siren implores, “and have a haunting, beautiful voice.” Just as the flirty handbag opens up to the serious pillars of a temple, the three short texts dance between the playful and the deadly serious. The Sphinx explains that it’s her work to “ask a question and eat the man for a wrong answer.” But really, she has ambitions – hoping for a promotion to indoor work in the throne room. The Gorgon laments: “Every day was a bad hair day.” But confesses those “nasty men” had it coming when she turned them to stone for staring.

View other posts featuring the work of Stephanie Copoulos-Selle.

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--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

It’s Fine Press Friday!

Crucifix in a Deathhand a collection of poems by Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), was published by Loujon Press in 1965. Gypsy Lou Webb and Jon Webb of Loujon produced the book in New Orleans, handsetting the type in Bulmer, Roman, American Uncial, printing on Linweave Spectra paper in various colors, and completing the binding by hand. The book was released in a limited edition of 3,100 copies which, according to the colophon were delivered “as they were completed to publisher Lyle Stuart, Inc, N.Y.C.” Noel Rockmore (1928-1995) composed the etchings that illustrate the cover and the three sections of poems.

The front flap of the book boasts, earnestly, of Bukowski’s focus on the surface, certain that this allows him to “remain in control of the indisputable, the unquestionable…” Confident, then, in his truer and more objective vision, this laudatory flap concludes: “It is precisely his refusal to become trapped in the cerebral that marks the savage quality, the surface dynamism of Bukowski’s poetry.” A wonder, a marvel that Bukowski remained so unclouded by subjective experience as the rest of us. (In fairness, the poems themselves may be richer and less obnoxious than the way certain people talk about them.)

Bukowski humbly attributed the wild success of his previous collection It Catches My Heart in its Hands (also produced by Loujon), to the book’s aesthetic more than his writing. The publishers expressed their hope that this evocative new edition would be “comparably embarrassing” in its effect on readers.

See other National Poetry Month posts!

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--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

It’s Fine Press Friday

In 1946, a year after the United States detonated an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the New Yorker magazine planned to run a series on the attack and its aftermath over four issues. Instead, they dedicated an entire issue to the extensive report by journalist John Hersey (1914-1993). Today we feature a 1983 edition of Hersey’s Hiroshima, published by Limited Editions Club in New York City, and featuring original eight silkscreen prints by Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), and a new poem by Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989). Lawrence’s prints were produced at Studio Heinrici. Robert Burlen & Son bound the edition, and the text was printed by Bruce Chandler and Daniel Keleher at Wild Carrot Letterpress. Golgonooza Letter Foundry set the type in Optima Medium. Our copy, part of a limited edition of 1,500, is signed by Hersey, Lawrence, and Warren.

Jacob Lawrence selected Hersey’s essay, after Limited Editions Club commissioned his art for a book in 1982. The original eight paintings, from which the silkscreens were derived, now live in the permanent collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Lawrence served in the Coast Guard during WWII, as part of a racially a segregated regiment in Florida, and then as a Coast Guard Artist in Italy, Egypt, England, and India. He laments here that in addition to the “great geniuses” of the arts and sciences, “we have in the meantime developed the means to destroy, in a most horrible manner, that life that is our God-given right.”

This edition of Hiroshima came two years after the release of 1981 compilation of damages caused by the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In his afterward, Hersey describes and lists the “grim disorders” linked to exposure – especially among those who were children at the time, and those who had been in utero. These maladies “were not yet observable” at the time of the essay’s original publication. Such new documentation warrants, or course, the new edition and consideration of the work. But so too does the worry on which Hersey concludes: “civic memory has a dreadfully short half-life.”

--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern