The Bowler Press of North Vancouver, Canada, is about to undertake a huge printing project (with your help): a hand-printed, letterpress edition of Pride & Prejudice in three volumes. Jarrett Morrison, proprietor of Bowler Press, will hand-set the text in Fournier typeface, with the accompanying italic. It will be cast from English Monotype matrices at the Bixler Letterfoundry in Skaneateles, NY. The paper--all 5,600 sheets of it--will be Zerkall mould made paper. A dozen of Morrison's wood engravings will illustrate each volume. They intend to produce 138 copies, to be bound by Alanna Simenson, of the Mad Hatter Bookbinding Co., in both standard and deluxe editions.

Here's where the "help" comes in: the Bowler Press is using the crowd-funding site Indiegogo to reach out to subscribers and other lovers of good print. Currently, donations amount to just over $8,300 of their $20,000 goal. There are "perks" for donations of $10 and up, so if you're an Austen fan without the $1,500 needed to purchase the standard edition, you can still help the press achieve its goal and come away with a letterpress-printed invitation to the Netherfield Ball.

To see and hear more about this project, watch as Morrison explains:

 

Last week Tom Phillips celebrated his 75th birthday and the release of the 5th edition of The Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, a watershed in the latter-day history of artists' books inspired by Surrealist methods in cutting, pasting, and heavy duty reassembly and collage. The work takes the text of A Human Document, by W. H. Mallock and effaces the pages in every which way: scraping, painting, pasting images, and obscuring huge swathes of text. As Phillips 'writes' on the title page: "I have to hide to reveal."

 

 

Unlike the Surrealists, and unlike anyone else working in 1966 when Phillips began the book, The Humument was not a one-off but something he wanted "to spend the rest of [his] life working on", "sometimes mining, sometimes undermining" and constantly remaking. So the work is not one story but many, with 80 new pages in and a few alterations of the original 367 treated pages, Phillips explained to a packed basement at the Review, an independent bookshop in Peckham, southeast London.

It was a fitting location, close to the spot where the great-grandaddy of DIY bookmaking, William Blake, hallucinated a tree full of angels, and more recently close to the (now-defunct) antique shop where Phillips first came across the book he would transform into The Humument. The shop was Austin's Furniture Repository, the price was a thruppence, another far cry from the present day, as Phillips pointed out that in 46 years using 15 copies of The Human Document in his art, Mallock's original has "seriously appreciated in value" to around £100-£200. 

If the celebratory launch of the 5th edition was a chance for Phillips to reflect in good company about what has changed in his life since 1966 (for instance, The Humument's archive is now established at the Bodleian Library, Oxford), his selected readings from the new edition spoke to what has changed about life in general. For starters, the artist admitted that he has improved over time in cutting out words and sentences, shapes and shadows, from the book, a temperamental medium. The visual style has also evolved to include other interests on Phillip's part, for instance his extensive postcard collections. Among the additions to the story, Bill Toge, the "forced" protagonist of the novel, "condemned to appear, to be apart of the story whenever the word 'together' or 'altogether' occurs", experiences the horror of 9/11 ("nine eleven, the time singular, which broke down illusion") and the rise of social media. This is the first edition of the book where it is possible for a character to check her facebook profile on an app to find pictures of Bill Toge. And never merely a source for commentary, Phillips has already adapted the late 19th century work to the times in big way: as of 2010, it was translated into an app for iPad - with an added feature allowing readers to use the book as an oracle, combining bibliomancy with social networks (you can post your results on Facebook and Twitter).

As an oracle for the future of artists' books Phillip's Humument brings tidings from a world where digital apps complement rather than replace the works they represent, and where repetition is always an enriching experience ("your weaknesses become your strengths," Phillips noted when asked by a member of the audience why he was so repetitive). As Daniel Traister writes: "collage, a shaky assertion of stability, orders materials with no obvious or stable basis for their relationship into a framed composition". What was true for Dadaists and Surrealists, and each edition of The Humument, is now one way of thinking about the relationship between books and their digital counterparts: they are the new components of collage, of making meaning, and of creating stable links between otherwise unstable media.

Does the death of an author have an immediate impact on his or her "collectability"? The question came to mind when AbeBooks announced last week that its second most-expensive sale for May was a signed 1963 first edition of Where the Wild Things Are, which sold for $25,000. Sendak passed away on May 8. Other notable Sendak sales at Abe last month included a signed copy of the same book, published in 1964, for $4,195, and five other editions, all selling for more than $500 each.

Helen Younger of Aleph-Bet Books, who specializes in antiquarian children's literature, told me she sold twelve Sendak books and prints the week he died. "That's never happened before," she said. "The reaction to Sendak's death was definitely out of the ordinary."

At Between the Covers, a general antiquarian bookshop, Dan Gregory reported that they sold three "low priced" Sendak books immediately following his death, but that didn't beat the four "moderately priced" books they sold back in January. Gregory explained, "Author deaths usually do create a sales bump of one kind or another (as can media mentions while the author is still alive), but the bump usually is greater for figures who've been somewhat neglected or overlooked for some time."

So book collectors could gamble on octagenarian or nonagenarian authors, particularly those who experienced some critical acclaim or won an award at some point in their careers. But, as Gregory noted, you shouldn't bank on the bump. It isn't usually large, and "doing so would be pretty creepy, sleazy, and somehow disrespectful."  

Catalogue Review: Sophie Schneideman Rare Books

The latest catalogue from London dealer Sophie Schneideman is dedicated to the Ashendene Press. So we're are talking about beautiful books -- fine paper, typography & bindings.

The books offered here were once a part of the collection of Clarence B. Hanson, a newspaperman from Birmingham, Alabama. Hanson, a Grolier Club member, was a major collector of private press books in the 1960s and 70s, acquiring Kelmscott, Doves, and Ashendene Presses. The former two were featured in another recent Schneideman catalogue, but here we concentrate on the latter. It includes every book and minor piece created by the Press except the tiny Dolls House Horace.

For bindings, my favorite is the one done by Stikeman & Co. for Ashendene's first illustrated volume, The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (£4,500). The blue morocco is set off by spaced gilt letters that seem to float like stars in a sky. The design is repeated on the back cover with gilt flowers.

For typography and page design, Ashendene's Song of Songs is breathtaking (£45,000). Hand-pained by Florence Kingsford, this lushly illuminated volume is one of only forty copies, all on vellum.

The "masterpiece" of the Ashendene Press, Tutte le Opere di Dante Alighieri, is here in the original morocco-backed laminated oak boards, plaited leather and silver clasps, and plain paneled spine lettered in gilt (£45,000). It is, says the catalogue, the "rarest of the three magnum opi of the English Private Press movement." A very handsome book.

In the 'minor pieces,' a beautiful Christmas greeting, publication announcements, specimen pages, and a wedding booklet printed by Hornby for his son's wedding.

Be dazzled for yourself. Download the catalogue here.