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James Weston (1688-1751) was a London teacher and practitioner of stenography. He published four books, here together in one volume, presenting his own geometrical system of short-hand.

Weston assures the reader that with his system words “can be joined in every sentence, at least two, three, four, five, six, seven, or more words together in one without taking off ye pen, in ye twinkling of an eye, and that by the signs of the English moods, tenses, persons, particles, &c., never before invented.”

He goes on to say, “By this new method any, who can but tolerably write their names in roundhand, may with ease (by this book alone without any teacher) take down from ye speaker’s mouth, any sermon, speech, trial, play, &c, word by word, though they know nothing of Latin. And may likewise read one another’s writing distinctly be it ever so long after it is written. To perform these by any other short-hand method extant is utterly impossible as is evident from ye books themselves.”

According to the Cambridge History of English and American Literature (v. 18), the first Shepherds’ Calendar was printed in 1491 by Guyot Marchant, whose workshop was in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The work was entitled Kalendrier des Bergiers and it was the first illustrated French almanac.

In Honoré de Balzac’s 1843 novel Illusions Perdues (Lost Illusions), the Shepherds’ almanac plays a small role: “After rummaging round the workshop Eve discovered a collection of figures required for the printing of a so-called Shepherds’ Almanac, in which objects are represented by signs, pictures, and symbols in red, black, and blue. Old Séchard, illiterate as he was, had formerly made a lot of money by printing this little book intended for equally illiterate people. An almanac of this kind costs only a penny and comprises a hundred and twenty-eight pages of very small format. Delighted at the success of her broadsheets—the sort of production which is a specialty with small provincial presses—Madame Séchard decided to print the Shepherds’ Almanac on a large scale by putting her profits into it.” (translated by Herbert James Hunt).

This book comes bound with Almanach pour cette Année M. DCC. LIX. Supputé par Mtte Mathieu Laensbergh Mathematicien (Liege: G. Barnabe, 1759); and Pronostication particuliere pour l’an de notre Seigneur 1759. Par M. Mathieu Laensbergh, Mathematicien (Liege: Guil. Barnabe, 1759); and Continuation des choses les plus remarquables arrivées par toute l’Europe & autres parties du monde, depuis le mois de Septembre de l’An 1757. jusqu’audit mois de l’An 1758 (Liege: V. G. Barnabe, 1759).

Dieter Roth (1930-1998), Book AC 1958-1964 ([New Haven, Conn.]: Ives-Sillman, 1964). 24 sheets of black and white cut paper. Copy 9 of 250. Graphic Arts GAX 2011- in process.

Book AC is a sequential cut-paper narrative in two-color squares that can be rotated and flipped in all directions. With each turn of the page, a new image is uncovered, offering each reader a unique visual narrative. It was while living in Iceland during the 1950s that Roth began creating handmade books, which can be divided into either fixed (bound) sequences or open architectures.

Artist and historian Mikhail Karasik used old newspaper and literary sources to shed light on the legendary trip to Russia made by Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (1876-1944), the founder of Futurism.

Karasik writes: “The Triumph of Futurism was the title of a show planned by the director of the new mechanistic and urban movement in modern art. In Russia, however, the production unexpectedly underwent a change of genre, taking the director himself by surprise. The Russian performers—Futurist poets and artists—had been allocated technical walk-on parts.”

Instead of acquiring pupils and associates for his movement, Marinetti found himself up against sabotage and misunderstanding. The Russian Futurists not only refused to recognize Marinetti as their leader but sought to enlarge their own branch of Futurism.

It was only towards the end of Marinetti’s trip that the situation improved but the result was the realization that Russian and Italian Futurism had little in common. Italian Futurism promoted urbanism, the cult of technology and machines, and the destruction of tradition and old culture. Russian Futurism focused on folk culture and the Russian icon.

According to Karasik, after the October Revolution, Futurism’s political direction also changed. The Russian branch became Communist (Komfutu was a Communist Futurist organization led by Mayakovsky), while Italian Futurism turned to Fascism.

To see a video of the entire book, click below:

This winter, the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York City mounted an exhibition of a collaborative project between an artist and a writer. Watercolors by the Scottish painter, Callum Innes, were exhibited alongside excerpts from the short story that inspired them, water | colour, by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín.

According to their press release, the gallery introduced Innes and Tóibín in February 2010. A long-time admirer of Innes’s work, Tóibín spoke at length with Innes about the artist’s watercolors during their initial meeting. The conversation was continued at Innes’s studio in Edinburgh last summer. As their creative connections became apparent and their friendship grew, the gallery asked Tóibín to write an essay in response to Innes’s works on paper, a request that led to Tóibín’s short story water | colour. After reading Tóibín’s text, Innes created a new body of watercolors based on it.

Tóibín’s text tells the story of Nora, a middle-aged housewife struggling with the recent death of her husband and its effect on her family. Tóibín elegantly weaves a poignant tale of loss, depression and, ultimately, the promise of healing, placed against the backdrop of the unique colors of the Irish shoreline.

Not only did the gallery produce an exhibition catalogue with the text and reproductions of the watercolors, but they also published ten unique livres d’artistes, with the complete short story and five original watercolors by Innes. Each of the deluxe, hand-bound books is named after one of the characters in the story. Graphic Arts is fortunate to have acquired conor.

Colm Tóibín is currently the Leonard L. Milberg ‘53 Visiting Lecturer in English and Creative Writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University. If you are a fan, another original story by Tóibín can be found in the current issue of the Princeton University Library Chronicle 72, no.1 (autumn 2010).

Sean Kelly Gallery exhibit: http://www.skny.com/exhibitions/2010-12-16_callum-innes-colm-toibin/

Originally titled Le Faune, intermède héroique (The Faun, a Heroic Intermezzo), Mallarmé submitted it to the Théâtre-Français, only to be rejected. Ten years later, the work was again rejected, under the title Improvisation d’un Faune, by Alphonse Lemerre, who had previously published Mallarmé work in Parnasse contemporain.

Mallarmé left Lemerre and found Alphonse Derenne, a publisher of medical books who wanted to expand his business. Under the title L’après-midi d’un faune, Mallarmé’s pastoral was finally published in April 1876. The text was printed in specially designed Elzevir type—175 copies on Van Gelder Holland paper and 20 on Imperial Japon—with particular attention to typography, spacing, and punctuation. His best friend, Édouard Manet (1832-1883), created four wood-engraved embellishments that were printed in black and hand tinted in pink by Manet himself to save money.

Princeton’s copy contains an ex libris with a vignette by Manet mounted on the blank leaf preceding the half title, inscribed with the name of the original owner, the French artist and draftsman Émile-Antoine Bayard (1837-1891). He is best known today for his illustration of Cosette from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, reused for the Broadway musical by the same name.

Although Mallarmé is a seminal figure of our modern literary heritage, few editions of his own work were published during his lifetime. Princeton University Library holds 149 editions by Mallarmé but only five published before his death in 1898 and the majority of these are his critical studies of other artists. Rare Books and Special Collections owns the 1889 edition of Les poèmes d’Edgar Poe, translated by Mallarmé with illustrations by Manet. We also have the 1956 translation of L’après-midi d’un faune by Aldous Huxley and a German/French edition from 1975.

Mallarmé’s work would become the inspiration for many musical pieces, the most prominent of which was Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894), a ten-minute tonal interpretation of Faune. Other composers who adapted the melodic aspects of Mallarmé’s poetry were Maurice Ravel in Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913), Darius Milhaud with Chansons bas de Stéphane Mallarmé (1917), and Pierre Boullez, whose hour-long solo soprano and orchestra piece Pli selon pli (1957-62).

Non, mais l’âme
De paroles vacante et ce corps alourdi
Tard succombent au fier silence de midi :
Sans plus il faut dormir en l’oubli du blasphème,
Sur le sable altéré gisant et comme j’aime
Ouvrir ma bouche à l’astre efficace des vins !

Couple, adieu ; je vais voir l’ombre que tu devins.

No, but the soul
Void of words, and this heavy body,
Succumb to noon’s proud silence slowly :
With no more ado, forgetting blasphemy,
I must sleep, lying on the thirsty sand, and how I love
to open my mouth to wine’s celestial effect !

Farewell to you, both: I go to see the shadow you have become.

Before the contemporary business card, small trade cards were printed to advertise merchandise and services of various businesses. These might be elaborately designed and printed, often with humorous pictures. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, multicolor lithographic printing allowed for beautiful images on these relatively small, ephemeral cards.

Whiting & Son, a Boston firm, went to the Donaldson Brothers printing company in lower east side of Manhattan for their cards because Donaldson specialized in this type of commercial lithography. Note the African American barber. The Whiting brushes are marketed to both black and white owned businesses. Other examples of Donaldson’s cards have been posted earlier on this blog.

For a complete history of John Whiting’s firm, see http://www.efn.org/~marves/en/projects/brush.htm or if this link does not work on your computer, just google John L. Whiting brushes and it will come up.

In the early nineteenth century, the American author Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867) wrote a travelogue in the London Quarterly under the heading Pencillings by the Way, collected and published in 1835.

In 1873 William Willis (1841-1923) patented the photographic process he called platinotype and used the popular title for a series of his own pictorial travelogues. In this 1881 album, recently acquired by graphic arts, he writes, “The Pictures in this Book are Photographic Reproductions of Drawings printed in Platinotype and subsequently retouched with crayon by the Artist. The original Drawings were executed with black lead and chalk pencils in the years 1877-78 by W. Willis. Bromley, Kent, July 1881.”

William Willis (1841-1923), Willis’s Pencillings in Wales ([Bromley, Kent: Willis], 1881). Graphic Arts GAX 2010- in process

Platinotype is a photographic process using a finely precipitated platinum salt and an iron salt in the sensitizing solution to produce prints in platinum black. Mike Ware describes Willis’s invention in his site Alternative Photography: “Despite the best endeavours of the founders of photography in the 1840’s, nearly fifty years were to elapse before a viable platinum printing process was established by William Willis (1841-1923) who had himself devoted twenty years’ research to perfecting it.”

http://www.mikeware.co.uk/mikeware/Eighth_Metal.html

See also W.Willis, “A Recent Improvement in the Platinotype Process,” Journal of the Camera Club, 2, 47 (1888).

At last week’s College Book Arts Association conference, graphic arts was fortunate to collect a broadsheet printed by artist Ann Hamilton in association with her permanent installation, Verse, at the William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library, Ohio State University. In conjunction with the renovation of their library, the Buckeye Reading Room has been installed with a 6080 square foot, two-color field of words set in relief on a cork floor.

The text is an alphabetic intersection of three different accountings of world history, which are arranged in a literary concordance. The spine along the north-south axis is composed of 299 words, A to Z, adapted from a White River Sioux story entitled The End of the World. The east-west lines intersect this story with prose fragments from A Little History of the World by E. H. Gombrich (1936) and Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone by Eduardo Galeano (2009).

According to the library’s press release, Verse in its form and woven organization is a reflection of how the reader intersects with and culls information and meaning from the library’s collection.

As part of Hamilton’s continuing exploration of words and communication, the nearly 500 people attending her lecture joined in a communal phone call to the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis. Hamilton’s work, stylus, is the Pulitzer’s first commissioned installation and the first multi-sensory exploration of Tadao Ando’s architecture.

Annhamilton.pulitzerarts.org explains how you can contribute your voice to the reverberations of stylus. Whether calling in a song, a call, or a story, your words become part of an archive, which over the course of the project, constitutes stylus’s vocal body. (314) 884-1553. Call and add your voice.

Dr. Isaac Newton Kerlin (1834-1893) was the Assistant Superintendent of the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children from 1856 to 1862, first located in Germantown and then, Elwyn, Pennsylvania. After one year as a medic during the Civil War, Kerlin returned to serve as Superintendent until 1893.

As part of a fund-raising campaign in 1858, Kerlin published The Mind Unveiled, which Weston Naef called “the first photographically illustrated medical book published in the United States.” It is an unscientific chronicle of Kerlin’s early years working with twenty-two of the young adults living at his institution.

Copies of this book vary as to the images and number of plates that are included. A copy at the Houghton Library holds two photographic prints and Yale’s has none. The newly acquired copy at Princeton University has one varnished salt print taken by Philadelphia photographer Frederick Gutekunst (1831-1917).

According to Michael J. Brody, Director of the Marvin Samson Center for the History of Pharmacy, Gutekunst learned to make daguerreotypes from Robert Cornelius, founder of Philadelphia’s first photographic studio. In 1856, Frederick and his brother opened a studio of their own on Arch Street, which is where Kerlin came in 1858 to hire someone to illustrate his text.

Isaac Newton Kerlin (1834-1893), The Mind Unveiled; or a Brief History of Twenty-Two Imbecile Children (Philadelphia: U. Hunt & Son, 1858). Graphic Arts GAX 2011- in process

Le tour du monde en 80 jours d’après le roman de Jules Verne (Around the World in 80 Days after the novel by Jules Verne) (Paris: [Société Française de Jeux et Jouets, ca. 1915]). Chromolithographed board in the original box. Graphic Arts GAX 2011- in process

The box has no publisher or date but we assume “J.J.” stands for the toy publisher Société Française de Jeux et Jouets and other collectors have dated this chromolithographed edition around 1915. An earlier version had a lithographed board with hand coloring.

To see the actual book in its first English edition:
Jules Verne (1826-1905), The Tour of the World in Eighty Days (Boston: J.R. Osgood and company, 1873). William H. Scheide Library 13.2.21

This rare Czech serial (never went beyond the first issue) focuses on the career of the Bauhaus professor and modern artist László Moholy-Nagy. Through the words of the artist himself, the issue presents his theories on the plastic arts, film, theater, and in particular, photography as “the new vision.” There are 69 photographs, film clips, and reproductions of his work.

In fact, it was probably Hellenistic, from the second or at the earliest, the first century. The Tabula was well known in antiquity, and after the first modern publication in the late fifteenth century, popular in Europe through the eighteenth century (such as this example).

Pepoli’s bilingual text is a dialogue describing a vast panoramic painting of human life in allegorical terms, and depicting the dangers and temptations that the frail human pilgrims encounter. It is an attempt to show that only the proper development of our mind and the possession of real virtues can make us truly happy. Parallels are often drawn between this work and John Bunyons’ The Pilgrims’ Progress.

Frontispiece is based on a design by Hans Holbein (below), although Pepoli’s includes a key at the foot of the plate identifying the highlights and low points of human progress, such as genius, luck and happiness, but also misery, penitence, folly of love, and much more.

Below: Hans Holbein’s title page with the Tabula Cebetis, metalcut, 1521. Kunstmuseum Basel. First used in De patienta, in Quintus Septimius Tertullian’s Opera …, edited by Beatus Rhenanus, Basel: Johann Froben, July 1521.

Above: Cebes, of Thebes, Paráfrasis árabe de la tabla de Cebes. Traducida en castellano é illustrada con notas por Pablo Lozano y Casela. (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1793). Rare Books (Ex) 2010-1020N

Below: Hendrick Laurenszoon Spieghel (1549-1612), H. L. Spieghels Hertspieghel en andere zede-schriften (Amsterdam: Hendrik Wetstein, 1694). Rare Books (Ex) N7710 .S64 1694

As a pacifist, soon to be member of the French communist party, Masereel had great sympathy for the work of Henri Barbusse (1873-1935), who was also politically outspoken. Both campaigned in 1921 in favor of Sacco and Vanzetti. 1921 was also the year Barbusse completed Le Couteau entre les dents (The Knife Between My Teeth), which reflected his sympathy with Bolshevism.

The Weekly Freeman was the weekend edition of the Freeman’s Journal, a nationalist daily broadsheet published in Dublin from 1763 to 1924, when it was merged into the Irish Independent.

In the 1870s, the Weekly began offering a large format political cartoon with each issue. These color lithographs featured the political figures and events of the day. Irish artist John Fergus O’Hea (ca.1838-1922) was responsible for these plates from 1881 to March 1892, when the job was handed to his assistant, Thomas Fitzpatrick (1860-1912). This collection of forty-five cartoons from 1892 includes the work of both artists.

Even if you don’t understand the politics of the day, you can recognize the figure of Erin, the female personification of Ireland, and Pat, the male personification of the Irish people (usually seen as a tenant farmer).

For more information, see: Lewis Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels: the Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). Firestone Library DA925 .C85 1997

Alphonse Pélicier, Dernières paroles de Louis XVI and Dernières paroles de Marie-Antoinette, 1830? Engravings. Graphic Arts GA 2010. in process

Each of these silhouettes was created by the French engraver Pélicier, from texts written by Louis XVI (1754-1793) and his wife Marie-Antoinette (1755-1793). The King’s words come from his will, written on Christmas Day, 1792. Marie-Antoinette is drawn from a letter to her sister-in-law, dated October 6, 1793.

Remember that an engraved plate must be laterally reversed, cutting the letters right to left, so that when it is printed the text can be read left to right. The only thing I know about Pélicier is that a number of early nineteenth-century maps credit him for the lettering: La Lettre gravee par A[lphon]se Pélicier.

Edition Schwarze Seite (Black Page Edition) is the small press of German artists Anne Buessow and Eckhard Froeschlin. http://www.froeschlin-buessow.de. Froeschlin writes “our books are a combination of original graphic art: etchings, woodcuts or lithographies, with letterpress, mostly handset texts.” For the last twelve years, Froeschlin has spent time each year in Nicaragua, holding printing workshops and collaborating with the TallerContil group in Matagalpa. Four artists’ books emerged from this project, specifically focused on the culture, poetry, and graphic arts of Nicaragua.

The TallerContil started with woodcuts printed in the most basic conditions and evolved to a well-fitted studio boasting an etching press and a Hollander beater, both built in Matagalpa. The two volumes seen here resulted from the Wuppertal-Matagalpa friendships. Note: There will be a workshop about this collaboration at the upcoming CODEX III conference. http://www.codexfoundation.org.

Above, Pablo Antonio Cuadra (1912-2002) [poetry], Eckhard Froeschlin [etchings], El Nicán-Náuat (Wuppertal: Editions Schwarze Seite, 2003). Edition: 25. Graphic Arts GAX 2010- in process

Below: Ernesto Soto [short stories], Eckhard Froeschlin [etchings], Casas Perdidas = Fundstücke [Lost Homes] (Wuppertal: Editions Schwarze Seite, 2010). Edition: 25. Texts in Spanish and German translated by Guenter Schmigalle. Handmade mould paper by Danilo Rivera, Matagalpa, using banana leaf fibers. Handbound by Roger Green using Nicaraguan coffee bags. Graphic Arts 2010- in process

The most beautiful book published in 2009 was Sheets of Evidence by South African artist William Kentridge in collaboration with Dieu Donné Press. When you come to see a copy in our reading room and begin leafing through its pages of pristine hand-made paper, all you will see is just that: blank paper.

The eighteen pages are, in fact, filled with drawings and text by Kentridge translated into watermarks with the assistance of Susan Gosin and Paul Wong. The concept was “to create a book whose surface revealed nothing, and instead encouraged the viewer to, not simply read between the lines, but to look beneath the surface.”

To create the watermarks, the drawings and text were scanned, digitized, and cut into adhesive-backed rubber watermarks, which were then adhered to wove moulds. Sheets were formed with short cotton linter pulp, pressed to 2300 psi, and stack dried on pellons at Dieu Donné Papermill. This non-profit artist workspace is dedicated to the creation, promotion, and preservation of contemporary art in the hand papermaking process. To see some of the completed pages, click here http://dieudonne.org/

William Kentridge, Sheets of Evidence (New York: DD Publishing Program in collaboration with Dieu Donné Press, 2009). Edition: 20. Graphic Arts GAX 2010- in process

The Journal of Popular Noise, edited by Bryon Kalet. Vol. one, issue 1-3 (spring/summer 2007) - . Graphic Arts (GAX) 2010- in process

The Journal of Popular Noise, under the direction of Byron Kalet, “is a semi-annual audio magazine inspired by the traditions of pop music, printed periodicals, and the delight of a finely crafted artifact.” Produced in editions of 300, each issue includes a hand-folded (by Kalet himself), letter-press printed broadside that serves at once as scholarly journal, musical score, and record sleeve holding three seven-inch vinyls.

According to their website, instructions are given to each artist to contemplate during the composition and production of their record. These instructions are completely open to interpretation by the artists. Loosely based on the pop song structures canonized during the mid to late 20th century, the order of appearance is according to the standard format of a traditional magazine. To read the instructions on each track, see http://www.popularnoise.net/

In an interview, Kalet said, “I grew up playing music in Seattle, but abandoned that path … to move to New York and study design. I found that there was a lot of common ground between the rules that go into a good printed composition and those that go into musical ones. I think people have been exploring this overlap for a while (Kandinsky, Cage, and Eno to name just a few) but I don’t think anyone really took it out of the experimental or academic realm and tried to produce some pop culture version of it…”