This text is from a collection of Queneau’s texts called ‘Morale Elementaire’.
Hopscotch is found under various names in countries of Anglo-Saxon culture. The hopscotch court can present variations from country to country as to how the boxes are numbered or even the names given to certain parts of the court. For example, ‘Paradise’ in France becomes ‘Home’ in the American version.

The British say that Hopscotch began on British lands during the Roman Empire.  It was originally a means of training for  Roman soldiers. Children imitated them, creating a hopscotch court corresponding to their needs and inventing their own rules. The game then spread throughout Europe.” – Sharoff.  A fascinating item structured to represent the game of Hopscotch.

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v. Ketelhodt writes: “Space in architecture. Architecture in space. The space assumed by a book. The space inside the book: layers of opaque and transparent paper – creating new space. Twenty-two photography fragments show sections of the architecture from the Museum für Kunsthandwerk in Frankfurt am Main, conceived by Richard Meier. The black-and-white photographs were taken in 1985, the year the museum opened.”

Text fragments are by Le Corbusier, Demokrites, Theo van Doesburg, Naum Gabo, Hans Hollein, Yves Klein, Rob and Leon Krier, Richard Meier, Antoine Pevsner, Hans Poelzig, Mies van der Rohe, Werner Ruhnau and Louis Sullivan.

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The poets are Donald Justice, W.S. Merwin, Carolyn Kizer, May Swenson, Dana Gioia, David Barton, Robert Bly, Jared Carter, Amy Clampitt, Laura Gilpin, Judith Hamschemeyer, Barbara Howes,Ted Kooser, Sidney Lea, Howard Moss, Robert Pack, Jay Parini, Franklin Reeve, Alastair Reid, Louis Simpson, Radcliffe Squires, May Swenson, David Wagoner, and Richard Wilbur.  Exceptional papers were located or commissioned for each poem. In every case vital elements of the design resonate with the text.

This collection was printed between 1983 and 1985 by James Trissel, Professor of Art and founder of The Press at Colorado College. Alastair Reid, an editor for The New Yorker, now retired, and Dana Gioia, then director of the National Endowment for the Arts, served as editors for the collection. Trissel designed the broadsides in response to each poem and printed them with the aid of his students..
These Broadsides have been exhibited at universities and libraries across the United States.

An outstanding portfolio of broadsides. Highly recommended.

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(Satié, Alain) Ple? Plon Sca Screlonu Ipilore Plisou. Hé? On T’a Reconnu Isidore Isou. Avec une suite de 8 photographies ciselées de l’auteur. Publications PSI. Paris. 1985. 13.5″ x 10.5″. Original photographs, colored by Satié, of the female nude with the artist’s furniture forming a sculptural backdrop. Mixed techniques incorporating hypergraphics, collage, rubber stamping, and letterism. Each photograph mounted and signed by Satié. Portfolio of gray-blue paper wrappers; paper title label on front. No. 9 in an editiion of 25 copies. Fine.

“Alain Satié was born on January 20, 1944 in Toulouse, France. After technical studies, he enrolled in the Fine Art School of Toulouse. Later, he established himself in Paris, where he joined the Lettrist movement in 1964. He soon became one of the central figures of Lettrism, both through his personal art works in many disciplines and through his activism on behalf of the movement.

“Painter, writer, architect, photographer, poet and critic, Alain Satié is also a professor of art history at the University of Leonardo da Vinci. His specialty is the study of the specifics of the current avant-garde, seeking to clarify its confusing state. In the visual arts, Alain Satié has explored an evolving collection of rigorous works that he continues to develop and enrich. His visual art is represented in numerous museums and private collections.” – Official website of Alain Satié.

“The graphic virtuosity of Alain Satié, who was educated as an industrial designer, helped him to construct a very personal vision of Roman letters. He reshaped them into acrobatic forms, paroxysmally bent above each other … Satié synthesized many human faces with his electronic-component-like signs, contrasting with particular care the highlights and the shadows. A fascination for the third dimension drove him finally to quit the canvas to cut his inscriptions and struggling letters into wood panels so that real shadows could project themselves onto the wall. He also glued on books, various objects and canvases, where they formed colored suns, myriads of the tiny letter-pasta that one can use to make soup with.” – Jean-Paul Curtay, Letterism and Hypergraphics, The Unknown Avant- Garde 1945-1985.

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Susan Stewart wrote The Elements, this long poem in four parts, in collaboration with artist Enid Mark, who created the book’s visual form. The poet, author of three previous books of poetry and a MacArthur Fellow, called on the long Western history of myths and literature on air, fire, earth, and water; in the end she created a sequence unified by the themes of love and strife traditionally associated with the elements. … The poem unfolds in time as a meditation on time and mortality.
“Each of the sections of The Elements – Air, Fire, Earth, and Water – is defined by a visual image. This image is introduced as a horizontal band that has its own rhythm, fading and increasing in dimension and intensity as the pages turn. On the final page opening within each section, three-color lithographs bleed over the four edges of the … spread of the book. Throughout the work, the concrete forms of the sections of the poem, unique to the volume with its wide format, become an integral part of the visual imagery.” -Prospectus.
Susan Stewart received the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, for Columbarium, a trade edition published by the University of Chicago Press. Columbarium features Air, Fire, Earth, and Water from The Elements.

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(Laura Wait) Momentum Arbusti: a celebration of trees. Unique Variant artist’s book by Laura Wait. [Steamboat Springs,Colorado.] 2008. n.p. 14.875” x 5.874” x 1”. Woodcut, collograph, handwriting and painting. Sewn on linen cords with green linen thread. Additional sections of thick card were sewn on for boards, and cords laced in. These boards were covered with patinated embossed copper in shades of green and yellow with the copper undertone. Jill Bergman assisted with the binding. Black dropback box with paper title label; gray suede lining. No. 2 in an series of 6 unique variants signed and dated by Laura Wait. New.

This series celebrates the three kinds of trees: Life, Magic & Immortality. A shorrt history of the meaning and importance of trees in world culture is written in the middle of many pages.The book was begun in 2004 with the creation of extra pages of “In the Garden”. Additional imagery was added in 2006-2008 using paste painting, stencils and many layers of handwrriting as text and image. Text is on libretto included with the book.

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(Laura Wait) Open Road: Vol. 1 -The Mountains and Deserts, Vol. II – The Pacific Coast. Artist’s book by Laura Wait. Denver. Colorado. 1997. Accordion fold. 7.5” x 22”. Open -15’. Hand colored lithographs printed on Saunders Waterford paper. Concertina binding on yellow and black cloth bristol boards which hold the prints in place. Title page contains a ‘Legend’ of words having to do with road signs, and as keys for the images. End boards of yellow cloth with hand-colored acrylic stencils of road signs. Black dropback box with recess containing handpainted road signs in yellow and black. One in an edition of 12 signed sets. Fine.

“These images were developed over a twenty-five year time period. I used to draw in the car while driving across the west, and include the mirrors and road signs, as they are an inseparable part of the view. The postcards were collected along the way, or sent by friends. Together, these images provide a better feeling of the journeys than photographs, which are so important in recording modern travels. This book is meant to be traversed: stand it up on a big table and walk along it.” — Wait.

This interesting work contains drawings from sketchbooks, and postcards collected on the trips, the 15’ opening gives some feeling of road travel.

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(Circle Press) Postcards to the Undercliff. Nine Isle of Wight poems by Keith Please with photographic images by Bob Chaplin. Surrey. 1986. 27p. 11.25” x 8.5”. Printed litho duotone on Ikonorex special matt. In tan wrappers, a photo-graph and title on the front cover. One in an edition of 250 copies. Fine.

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An artist offspring of the Washington power-scene returns with her camera to record her impressions of the current environment

Raised by men in suits, (father, uncle, step father, grandfather) through her childhood in Washington DC, the artist returns home decades later to see what’s going on. What are they doing up there? Not doing? Undoing?

Carrying a point-and-shoot in her pocket, Rosamond Casey wanders all over Capitol Hill, following them everywhere they walk, through the streets, in and out of restaurants, hotel lobbies, the senate buildings, poking into offices and chambers in order to capture them as they move about. The book contains hand-pulled photo reproductions of ten mixed media photo/ paintings averaging 48” x 36” in size which the artist made from the snapshots taken on the Hill that day.

We begin the visual query with a piece called “Initiation”, moving on to “Chinese Whispers”, “House of Deliberation”, “Powerstroke: Act one”, “After Thought”, “The Double Tree Hotel Massacre”, “the Passion”, “What Lurked Beneath the Thing he Would Have Said”, “The Flagellation”; and finally in a sort of prayer for redemption, “Enter the Blue Dawn”. The ten images allude indirectly to a Stations of the Cross journey as the artist attempts to piece together an answer to the question, “What happens to these men in suits during this passage through the rock-hard halls of power?”

The clamshell box that holds the book is bound in Versace pinstripe wool with solid brass spine engraved with the title of the work.The interior lining is a fleshy pink silk on the verso and scarlet red on the verso tray. The book is bound in brass channel, the samematerial used to frame the photo/paintings depicted in the book. The box measures 19” x 14”. One of 25 copies.

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(Shirley Sharoff) Yellow Paper. Artist’s book by Shirley Sharoff. [Paris. 2000.] 6.25” x 8.25”. The artist made crushed-paper collages mixed with maps of the region to suggest both journey and terrain, one of which is found in the book. The cover is a scan of this collage. Two other collage scans are among the images as well as photos and map collages on transparent plastic. ‘The star of the book’ – the yellow paper, is the means through which all the elements of the book are viewed. Collaged boards with green paper spine with the same green paper forming an envelope-type wrapper to hold the sheets of the book. Wrapped in thicker yellow paper and tied with blue string. One in an edition of 15 signed copies. Fine.

Sharoff writes: “An artist friend living in Toulon in the south of France showed me a pile of sturdy yellow tissue paper that had come from her great-grandfather’s mill. There were other papers too – anthracite and pink, but I was particularly impressed by this paper with a non-commercial yellow color that seemed to have traversed the century. Sophie Menuet agreed to write a text about how she had used her ancestor’s mill as an artist’s studio, what it looked like and how she had transported this paper from place to place in the Provencal countryside when she changed studios, and that was often.”“…The book has become the final destination of the yellow paper in that Sophie Menuet has moved once again and has decided not to take the paper with her.”

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