Recently in Acquisitions Category

GA 2009- in process

I am catching up on past issues of McSweeney’s.

McSweeney’s was founded in 1998 by Dave Eggers on a mission to published only works rejected by other magazines. Ten years later, artists and authors seek out the magazine to present their latest work. Beyond the literary awards, McSweeney’s has won multiple design awards including AIGA 50 Books Award, AIGA 365 Illustration Award, and the Print Design Regional Award.

Every issue has a unique theme and physical format, such as McSweeney’s 28 shown here. The theme is 21st-century fables with text by Daniel Alarcón, Sheila Heti, Nathan Englander, and five others. A different illustrator worked on each volume and the entire set of eight small books is boxed to form two additional images.

Issue no. 19 comes in a cigar box-type container. Inside you find a stash of “recovered works”: pamphlets, info-cards, and letters such as might be pulled from anyone’s closet, except these include T.C. Boyle’s feral child novella and other equally curious stories.

The current issue has art on every page, bound with a die-cut cover and wrapped in several kinds of cloth. To see the run to date: http://store.mcsweeneys.net/
index.cfm/fuseaction/catalog.list/object_id/9772B00C-B37F-4915-88F8-8ED96E79EBF1/Journals.cfm

Jake Zeitlin (1902-198) moved to Los Angeles in 1925 and in only two years, was operating one of the most popular bookstores in the city. Nicknamed At the Sign of the Grasshopper because of the symbol on the front, the shop became a local hangout for writers and artists, who browsed the shelves and enjoyed works of visual art in the shop’s small gallery.

One of the local artists Zeitlin introduced to the neighborhood was Paul Landacre (1893-1963) whose first one-man show was held at the bookstore in 1930 and received a favorable reviewed by Arthur Millier in Prints magazine. The Zeitlin’s and the Landacre’s became good friends and Paul’s wife Margaret even worked as a secretary for the bookshop.

When Zeitlin established his own publishing imprint, Primavera Press, Landacre was asked to illustrate many of the books. The first in 1933 was Marguerite Wilbur’s translation of Alexandre Dumas’ gold rush novel A Gil Blas in California. Pictured at the left is a recently acquired sheet of proofs for chapter headings in this book.

1933 was a busy year for Landacre, who submitted designs for the proposed Limited Editions publication of W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions. Although some proof pages were printed by Grant Dahlstrom, the design was not selected and these chapter headings (top and bottom) were never published. Note, as Jake Wien below reminds us, that Landacre went on to illustrate three future editions for the Club.

For a bibliography of Primavera Press, see A Garland for Jake Zeitlin, on the occasion of his 65th birthday & the anniversary of his 40th year in the book trade (Los Angeles: Grant Dahlstrom & Saul Marks, 1967) Firestone Library (F) 0334.993.37

Guillermo Frommer (born 1953), Relatos espeluznantes [Horrifying Stories] (Santiago, Chile: [printed at the Taller Artes Visuales], 2006). 63 cm. The first volume of the series was published in 2003. This is number two. It is unclear whether there will be others. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Oversize 2008-0025E

The Chilean artist Guillermo Frommer had an international education in printmaking. Both his parents were artists and he made his first prints under their direction in Chile. In the 1970s, he studied at the University of Ottawa, Canada, and then, received a degree from the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. His interest in lithography led to a residency at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Although Tamarind is known primarily for its stone printing, Frommer also worked with xylography, engraving, and silkscreen.

When he returned to Chile in 1987, Frommer joined the Visual Arts Workshop (Taller Artes Visuales or TAV), a printing collective founded in 1974 by artists exempted from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Chile. Today, Frommer is a professor of printing in Santiago and continues to create his own work through the TAV.

Man Ray (1890-1976), Résurrection des mannequins (Paris: Jean Petithory, 1966). 15 gelatin silver photographs. Graphic Arts (GAX) 2008- in process

In 1938, the writer André Breton (1896-1966) and poet Paul Éluard (1895-1952) organized the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris. Each of fifteen artists were given a dressmaker’s mannequin as their canvas and encouraged to transform the figure in any way they desired. The artists included Salvador Dalí, Óscar Dominguez, Marcel Duchamp, Leo Malet, André Masson, Joan Miró, Wolfgang Paalen, Kurt Seligmann, Yves Tanguy, Marcel Jean, Max Ernst, Espinoza, Maurice Henry, Sonia Mosse, and Man Ray.

Man Ray organized the lighting and photographed the show. Twenty-eight years later, he printed and published a limited edition of these photographs, along with a descriptive text, under the title Résurrection des mannequins. Man Ray designed the binding and pursuaded the great surrealist printer Guy Lévis Mano to design and print the pages.

Princeton’s copy is inscribed by Man Ray to his friend William Copley (1919-1996). In 1947, Copley opened a Los Angeles gallery dedicated to the Surrealists and to Man Ray’s work in particular. When nothing sold, he closed the gallery, purchasing much of the art for his own private collection. In 1979, Copley sold this collection for $6.7 million, at the time the highest auction sale of a single owner’s collection in the United States.

Joseph John Elliott (1835-1903) and Clarence Edmund Fry (1840-1897) founded the celebrated photography studio of Elliott & Fry in 1863. Their business succeeded by offering noted actors, scientists, politicians, and writers a free photographic portrait, which could then be reproduced on hundreds of cartes-de-visite for sale to the Victorian public. By 1886, they had outgrown their studio at 55 Baker Street, Portman Square, and opened a second branch in South Kensington.

Elliott & Fry received a commission in 1870 to provide photographs for a deluxe London guidebook. Twelve portraits of contemporary actresses and actors were chosen to augment a series of steel engravings. Hundreds of original photographs had to be hand-trimmed and pasted onto pages with lithographed borders to illustrate these volumes. A lively descriptive text provides details on contemporary hotels, parks, clubs, theaters, markets, railway routes, and houses of trade.

Henry Herbert, London (Illustrated). A Complete Guide to the Places of Amusement. 8th edition (London: Herbert, 1879). Graphic Arts (GAX) 2008- in process

Alfonso D’Aquino, Briznas: poemas;
ilustrados por Dionisio Pascoe, 1997.

Born in Chicago in 1946, Pascoe was educated in the United States, while spending vacations at his father’s home in Mixcoac, outside Mexico City. He learned the art of letterpress printing at the age of 25 as an apprentice to Harry Duncan at the Cummington Press in West Branch, Iowa. When Pascoe moved full-time to Mexico in 1973, he set-up a print shop with a renovated nineteenth-century R. Hoe Washington handpress and sets of Spectrum and Garamond type, with Castellar for titling and initials. In 1975, Pascoe established his own imprint, named the Taller Martín Pescador (Kingfisher Workshop) at the suggestion of the writer Roberto Bolaño.

Cartel de El Cuento del Venerable Mono, 2003.

From the beginning, Pascoe set all the type by hand, inked and printed each page, and personally sewed each quire into their unpretentious paper covers. As his reputation grew, the projects became more elaborate but the technology remained the same. Authors published at the press include some of the major name in Latin American literature such as Octavio Paz, Gabriel Garciá Márquez, Efraín Huerta, Juan José Arreola, Roberto Bolaño, José Luis Rivas, and Francisco Segovia.

Juan Pascoe, La Mona, 2002

Since 1981, Pascoe has worked in a shop outside Tacámbaro, Michoacán. After years researching and published texts on the history of Mexican typography and printing, Taller Martín Pescador has become the foremost source for traditional Mexican graphic arts as well as innovative Latin American literature and poetry.

Cartel de Los signos del zodiaco: doce textos/ escritos por Francisco Hernandez, 1997

For more information, continue below.

This sales catalogue from the Jarden company of Philadelphia offers 60 leaves of chromolithographic plates presenting 181 labels for hair tonic, face powder, cold cream, perfume, and more. The images are not pasted in but printed directly onto the pages.

Lithography was perfected in Europe during the 1790s but it was in American printing companies, such as Jarden in Philadelphia, where the commercial use of color printing really evolved in the second half of the 1800s. For the first time, relatively cheap color images became possible, surpassing the use of stencil or hand-applied color for commercial applications. Up to two dozen oil-based color inks might be used, each from a separate printing stone in perfect registration, to achieve a density and richness of tone. The integration of golds and silvers heighten the metallic shine of the final chromolithograph.

You Are Not My Enemy. Combat Paper Portfolio 4 (Vermont: People’s Republic of Paper, 2008). Copy 8 of 8. Graphic Arts (GAX) 2008- in process

After six years in the army…[Drew] Cameron moved to Vermont and took a $10 papermaking course at a community college. Something clicked. He began practicing the trade out of the Green Door Studio artists’ collective in Burlington. One night back in 2007, Cameron took his old fatigues out of the closet. “I hadn’t put that thing on my body since Iraq,” he says. “I was thinking about it systematically at first. Where do I cut? Well, I’ll start with my left arm. Then I started feeling this overwhelming feeling of empowerment and emotional expression. I started ripping and pulling at my uniform until I was down to my skivvies.” From those scraps he created the first sheet of Combat Paper. http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/articleid/11262

Combat Paper is a publication of the People’s Republic of Paper, a collaboration betwen Iraqi veterans, activists, and artists. This project is conceived & coordinated by Drew Matott, former director of Green Door Studio in Burlington, Vermont, and Drew Cameron, current director of Green Door Studio and an Iraq War Veteran.

Through papermaking workshops veterans use their uniforms worn in combat to create cathartic works of art. The uniforms are cut up, literally beaten to a pulp, and formed into sheets of paper. Veterans use the transformative process of papermaking to reclaim their uniform as art and begin to embrace their experiences as a soldier in war.

For more information on the Combat Paper Project, see: http://www.combatpaper.org/about.html

One of several videos of the project can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUtXYCihavw

The prints and photographs in this album represent some of the earliest images made of Philadelphia. A similar album was given to the Library Company by McAllister’s son, John A. McAllister, in 1886.

John McAllister Sr. (1753-1830) immigrated to America in 1775 and moved to Philadelphia in 1781 where he opened a shop that grew into an optical business specializing in eyeglasses. John McAllister Jr. joined the business in 1807 and listed his occupation as optician. In addition to spectacles, they sold microscopes, spyglasses, magic lanterns, camera lucidas and obscuras, lenses, and other photography equipment. The shop was frequented by the earliest practitioners in photography who became John Jr.’s friends and colleagues.

McAllister was also a noted antiquarian and collector of Philadelphia history. His diary indicates that he hired Frederick Debourg Richards (1822-1903) to photograph the homes of his father and himself, along with other Philadelphia landmarks. Throughout his life, Richards pursued a career as a landscape painter while making his living primarily through photography. He settled in Philadelphia in 1848, opening a daguerreotype studio across from Independence Hall. In the 1850s, like many photographers, Richards made a transition from images on copper plates to paper, forming a partnership with John Betts. Several of the paper prints in this album hold the blind stamp from the studio of Richards and Betts. Other photographs in the album can be attributed to another prominent Philadelphia paper photographer James McClees.

Eight of the restrikes included in this album are from The City of Philadelphia by William Birch (1779-1851), published in 1800. Birch made the engravings “as a memorial of [Philadelphia’s] progress for the first century.” The deluxe edition included hand-colored plates and sold for the enormous sum of $35. Today, this volume is extremely rare and even the loose plates highly collectable. Eight restrikes from his second book, The Country Seats of the United States of North America, published 1809, are also included in this McAllister album.

For a complete list of the salted paper photographs, continue below.

The French caricaturist Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, working under the pseudonym of J.J. Grandville, created a number of plates for French magazines including Le Silhouette, L’Artiste, Le Charivari, and La Caricature. This satirical scene denounces the repressive actions of the French government under Louis-Philippe, which sought to limit freedom of the press and personal expression. The image presents a man being stabbed in the back and pelted with a rain of iconic objects, including pears (representing Louis-Philippe), crutches (Talleyrand, who was then ambassador in London), a parsley pot (Jean-Charles Persil who attacked the newspapers as a prosecutor under Louis-Philippe), guns, chains, keys, bolts, cross, medals, cords, scissors, hats, bell and shoes, each representing members of the government.

This print is part of a recent donation generously given by Dr. William Helfand, president of the Grolier Club and a consultant to the National Library of Medicine, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and other institutions in areas relating to art and medicine. Dr. Helfand has written five books including Quack, Quack, Quack: the Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters, Ephemera & Books… (GA Oversize 2005-0625Q), and The Picture of Health (Marquand Library N8223 .H44 1991) He has also published a number of articles on prints, caricatures, posters and ephemera relating to pharmacy and medicine. This posting shows only a few of the wonderful eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prints coming to Princeton thanks to Dr. Helfand.

Paul Gavarni (1804-1866), Enfant Terrible, 1833. Lithograph.

After the painting by Thomas Wyck (ca.1616-1677), The Alchemist in his Laboratory. Engraving, ca. 1700.

Maria G. Pisano, O-Livre-Twist (Plainsboro: Pisano, 2001). Graphic Arts (GAX) 2008- in process

Maria Pisano is a book artist, printmaker, and papermaker who publishes limited edition books under the imprint Memory Press. Many of her projects are represented in the graphic arts collection.

The title Theater of Operations refers to the convention of naming a battle as a theatre and the spiral-bound book unfolds to form a miniature stage. Created in response to the first gulf war, the volume is divided into three sections—W A R—each made up of 8 pages cut into additive shapes with images of war laser printed on acidic paper.

O-Livre-Twist is made from a recycled copy of Dicken’s classic.

Hecatombe 9-11 was created in 2007. Pisano writes, “This memorial book is an attempt to come to terms with an experience that is a constant open wound for the nation. It incorporates all the victims’ names along with photographs of destroyed buildings and the impromptu memorials created by loved ones on downtown walls.”

…the writer is enabled to use it for 10 or 12 hours with the same ease as with a pencil…!

Scheffer’s Penographic, patented in 1819, was one of the first workable fountain pens. Its secret was a flexible tube made of a goose quill and pig’s bladder. Pressure was exerted on a lever and a knob to propel ink into the nib when desired.

Originally published in 1540 with the title, Libro nuovo d’imparare a scrivere, Palatino’s writing manual/encyclopedia of current writing styles became an immediate and popular success. It was reprinted several times and then, in 1545 a new revised and enlarged edition was published with 15 additional plates and more exotic alphabets.

The first printed writing manual was published in Rome by Ludovico degli Arrighi in 1522. The audience for this and others that followed was mostly secretaries. Palatino’s book somehow attracted a wider audience, with its chapter on cryptography and lettera mancina (mirror writing), recipes for ink, illustrations of a variety of writing implements, and so on.

According to Ewan Clayton in his essay “A History of Learning to Write,”

Palatino’s book is interesting for what it tells us about the ordinary writing of that time. Most documents in the sixteenth century were still written in varieties of Gothic cursive and Palatino illustrates examples of such hands from Milan, Rome, Venice, Florence, Sienna, and Genoa. …Writing was not as homogeneous as it is today and there were many different styles in use concurrently.

For other editions and translations at Princeton University, continue below.

Called the father of English watercolor, Paul Sandby (1731-1809) was a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts, London. This album stems from Sandby’s early Scottish period, when he was a draughtsman with the military survey of the highlands. It holds 75 etchings on 27 sheets, assembled and printed by the artist, with dates ranging from 1747 to 1758. The etchings are primarily landscapes, with occassional Scottish street characters intermixed. One holds the comment “etched on the spot P. Sandby 1750.”

The album, with late 18th century half calf and blue/greenish marbled paper covered boards, has no title page. The only identification is a book label reading “Fasque,” which is a Scottish country house in Kincardineshire, built in 1809. The estate was purchased in 1829 by Sir John Gladstone, father of William Gladstone.

This view of Strasbourg, France, set within an elaborate border, includes the arms of the Upper and Lower Alsace. There was once a large wax seal at the bottom center, no longer attached. The inscription reads:

Wir Geschwohrne Ober- und andere Meister des Ehrs. Handwercks derer Steinmetzen, Steinhauser und Maurer in der Stadt Strassburg bescheinen hiermit, das gegenwartiger Gesell Nahmens Johann Samuel Imhoft … .

A guild is an organization of men and women in a particular occupation. Guilds were first formed in the Middle Ages and craftspeople would have been unable to work without being a member of the guild. Members were bound by a code of quality and price, but could also obtain assistance from the guild, such as funeral costs. Guilds oversaw a craftsman’s progress from apprentice to master, maintained the quality and ownership of the craft. A stonemason’s “lodge” was located at the job site and was the place where masons gathered, received instruction, and stored their tools.

Until the capture of the city by France in 1681, the headquarters of the German stonemasons was in Strasbourg (even as late as 1760 the Strasbourg lodge still claimed tribute from the lodges of Germany).

Russell Means (born 1939), The Great Mystery [S.l.]: American Indian Mystery Press, 1997. Graphic Arts division GAX Oversize 2008-0030F.

When the Oglala Indian Russell Means finished his autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread (Firestone Library (F) E99.O3 M386 1995), he found there were things he left out. In particular, Means wanted to say more about the spiritual side of his heritage, a single creative life force sometimes called the Great Mystery.

Means wrote a series of short commentaries and his hand-written texts were converted to copper plate etchings. The words were matched with Native American portraits by Peter Bogardus and the plates printed in colors in Hadley, Massachusetts at Horton Tank Graphics. The Great Mystery was completed in 1997 but failed to reach a good distributor or a public. More than ten years later, a copy of this obscure project found its way to graphic arts.

For more about Means, see his website and personal blog: www.russellmeans.com. To see other work by Bogardus, see Touba - New York (Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Oversize 2008-0012E)

This print appears to be an admission ticket for a benefit performance of Henry Fielding’s Pasquin, first performed in April 1736. It depicts a stage scene with seven performers, a dog and a cat, and in the background, two tightrope walkers accompanied by an ape; framed with a satyr on either side.

Originally attributed to William Hogarth (a friend and colleague of Fielding), the etching is a forgery. It was later attributed to Joseph Sympson, although that attribution is also questioned by some historians. In particular, Ronald Paulson wrote two different explanations for this print in Hogarth’s Graphic Works, if you look at both the 1965 and 1989 editions (Marquand Library (SA) ND497.H7 A35 and ND497.H7 A35 1989q).

Henry Fielding (1707-1754) was a British writer, playwright and journalist. His satirical comedy Pasquin; A Dramatick Satire On The Times Being The Rehearsal Of Two Plays: Viz., A Comedy Called The Election, And A Tragedy Called The Life And Death Of Common Sense, opened at London’s Haymarket Theatre.

A year earlier, Fielding had taken over management of the Little Theatre in the Haymarket and formed a company he called “Great Mogul’s Company of English Comedians.” That winter, he launched Pasquin to enormous success. His play was a brutal satire of the contemporary British government under Sir Robert Walpole, who retaliated with the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737 and effectively ended Fielding’s brief West End career.

It may have been this political drama that built a market for the forged Fielding ticket.

Frederick Martin Sheldon, The Practical Colorist; a Pathfinder for the Artist Printer (Burlington, Vt., The Owl Press, 1900). Graphic Arts division GAX 2008- in process

A

“Believing that in the heart of every printer there is a strong desire to rise above the common level, out of the lethargic indifference of the past, into the joy of the aggressive artist printer, I have assembled the matter in The Practical Colorist as a means to this end. This book is not a text-book on the science of light and color … The book treats of nothing but the simple details essential to good work, but to one who aspires to success in illuminating, these details are, of all things, most valuable. In fact, The Practical Colorist, from beginning to end, is one earnest plea, by precept and illustration, for simple, plain, neat, and readable type and color effects.”—Preface, Frederick M. Sheldon

B

A/B

C

A/B/C

In 1973, a few months before his death, Neruda wrote over 70 poems based on simple, unanswerable questions. Libro de las preguntas (The Book of Questions) was published the following year. In 2001, printers at the Art Center College of Design’s Archetype Press were inspired to reproduce Neruda’s words as concrete poems in a virtuouso feat of creative typesetting. “This book,” states the introduction, “attempts to portray excerts from Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions, in a manner whereby the form and shape of both typography and the white space of the page combine to enrich the subtle nuances within the poet’s language.”

In which window did I remain watching buried time?

The Scottish environmental scientist Dr. Robert Angus Smith (1817-1884) studied air and water pollution, coining the term “acid rain” in 1852. After working at the chemical laboratory at the Royal Manchester Institution, Smith was named the first Alkali Inspectorate by the Alkali Act of 1863. He went on to publish numerous texts on the control of urban pollution, most notably Air and Rain. The Beginnings of a Chemical Climatology (London: Longmans, Green, and co., 1872). Recap 85083.863

In 1876, an Act of Parliament was passed to attempt to control London’s water pollution. Smith was appointed the inspector to uphold the new laws. His methods for determining the number of microbes in water led to significant development in environmental science and law.

Seven mounted woodburytypes of Smith’s experiments were used to illustrate the 1884 second edition of Smith’s report to the government board. The prints were made by Vincent Robert Alfred Brooks (1814-1885) a lithographer who purchased the patent for Woodbury’s photo-relief process in 1879 and specialize in this method of book illustration through the turn-of-the-century.