carmine & verdigris

merry measure

2011-12-29T23:48:00.000-05:00

A postal gift dating to sometime between 1932 and 1958, when

for 26 years - ! - the rate for letters was three cents an ounce.

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Faulkner & Eliot

2011-12-26T01:48:00.000-05:00

My holiday postage: 22-cent stamps issued 24 and 25 years ago,
like tiny book covers adorning every envelope. Affixed
while listening to this history of the post office.

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dandies & quaintrelles

2011-11-14T23:48:00.000-05:00

Gathering in Meridian Hill Park for Sunday's third annual D.C. Tweed Ride,
where everybody wanted to be wearing everybody else's clothing all at once.

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agricultural earthscapes

2011-10-25T01:48:00.000-04:00

Even the green-and-white orchard has the implied red of cherries.

Postage stamps to be released next year; preview at Beyond the Perf.

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map & guide

2011-10-18T23:48:00.000-04:00

Edinburgh Art Festival 2011, design by Fraser Muggeridge.

Handsomely hand-drawn map at the designer's website, here.

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portals & fanlights

2011-10-11T16:48:00.000-04:00

York Place, Edinburgh New Town, August.

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red & green fields

2011-10-06T12:38:00.000-04:00

Scenes from Suffolk from my UK correspondent, Thomas Grey.

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carmine & verdigris

2011-10-03T11:48:00.000-04:00

Carmine Branagan, director of the National Academy in New York.

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septembers

2011-09-30T17:48:00.000-04:00

It's the last day of September, which means it's time to write about a film I saw in May:

The Last September (1999), based on Elizabeth Bowen's novel of seventy years earlier. A movie I chose from Netflix's streaming catalog because of my springtime penchant for period films featuring strong women, and which set off a string of great coincidences featuring four novels, three authors, two book covers, and one designer.

Novel #1 was Bowen's, the source material for the film. Novel #2 was the book I was reading at the time: Doctor Copernicus, by John Banville. Banville's name appeared on screen, to my surprise, as the movie opened. It turns out he wrote the screenplay.

The Last September is set in Ireland. Its filmic version is permeated by garnet & emerald hues, emerging from dramatic darkness. While taking screenshots of Fiona Shaw in a party scene, appearing glorious and glowing through the translucence of whirling decorations, I noticed her similarity to the portrait of a woman on the cover of Novel #3, one I had read shortly before:

Dorothy Whipple's Someone at a Distance (1953), shown here in the Persephone Classics edition.

The portrait is of a woman named Pauline, painted by her husband, Sir James Gunn. After a long search for the painting's date, I was happy to come across the website of the cover's designer, Megan Wilson. Megan shared a lovely story with me about having tea beneath Pauline's portrait in the drawing room of its current owner's home, and confirmed my hunch that it was painted in the late 1920's -- in 1929, in fact, the year of publication of Novel #1.

What a wonderful visual and literary alignment, I thought, to find two studies of women arranged in red and green, resembling each other so closely, and representing fictional and actual figures in works completed in the same year. Pauline, I thought, could have fit just as well on the cover of Bowen's novel as she does on Whipple's.

A day after my correspondence with Megan, I stepped into the used bookstore on my street, as one does when one is walking home on a warm evening in early May and curious to see what's new on the fiction shelves. Bowen's The Last September fresh on my mind, I scanned the spines for her name and spotted a match. I pulled it off the shelf to find that on the cover was . . .

. . . another portrait of Pauline! (This one entitled Pauline Waiting, from 1939.) I recognized it instantly from my research the day before, and I purchased it just as quickly. Only once I was out on the sidewalk again did I notice details such as the book's title, and then -- its cover designer -- Megan Wilson.

The visual memory that had led me to connect the filming of a Bowen novel with Wilson's cover of Pauline had, within a day, brought me to another Wilson cover of Pauline, this time on a Bowen novel.

And this Bowen novel, Novel #4, The Heat of the Day (1948), takes place again in September -- so far, in the Septembers of 1940 and 1942. Of the first, on page 100 of the Anchor Books edition:

"In that September transparency people became transparent, only to be located by the just darker flicker of their hearts."

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2011-08-06T03:48:00.003-04:00

Red & green pies I have loved

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Winner
Strawberry-rhubarb pie. Made by Grandma.

Runner-up
Key lime pie with raspberry sauce. The conclusion of an afternoon dedicated solely to sharing desserts at four different restaurants, ten summers ago.

Untried but intriguing
Gooseberry pie.

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Pies in Brooklyn and San Francisco photographed by Evan Sung (top) and Drew Kelly for the New York Times.

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a momentary interlude of politics and soul

2011-07-31T19:48:00.000-04:00

I. INTRODUCTION By way of 115 years of red-and-green(ish) design

Above, poster and typeface design by Anthony Mercer

Below, a detail of Louis Sullivan's stenciled design (1893-94) for the walls of the Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room, now held at the Art Institute of Chicago

and a 1966 poster for three nights of Otis Redding live in San Francisco.

II. A LAMENT

. . . Americans affluent and struggling, young and old, Democrat and Republican look at the struggle over the debt ceiling with a sickened feeling, like gawking at a crash on the highway.

They're appalled by politicians who seem to view compromise as defeat, amazed that the people they elected to lead do not seem to be up to the task and frustrated that the powers in Washington don't understand that Americans want one thing above all else from their government: security.¹

III. INDEED & APROPOS

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¹ Marc Fisher, 2011, "In Rockville: Anger at the government tinged with angst about the future,"
The Washington Post (Sunday, July 31), page A1.

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edin-bird exhibition

2011-07-31T03:48:00.000-04:00

A handmade envelope from my correspondent in Edinburgh. Inside, postcards from a retrospective of work by Elizabeth Blackadder at the National Galleries of Scotland:

Still Life with Gerberas, Moonlight, 2004

Chinese Still Life with Arum Lillies, 1982

Each in a private collection, oil on canvas

122 x 122cm, 100 x 112 cm, respectively

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day suits, dancers, diamonds

2011-06-04T14:48:00.003-04:00

Everyone Says I Love You, directed by Woody Allen (1996)
Scene: At Harry Winston, Edward Norton sings "My Baby Just Cares for Me"
Video here.

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red & green(field)

2011-06-02T11:48:00.002-04:00

Cover design by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich.

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across sunset

2011-05-31T19:48:00.006-04:00

Mallowy red in the night sky tonight, just before dark, brilliantly offset by what can only be described as a stripe of pistachio green. I can think of any number of abstract painters who might have longed to re-create such a juxtaposition -- it was gone within seconds.¹

Kenneth Noland, Across Center (1966) ²

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¹ William Boyd, Any Human Heart, (Penguin, 2010), 456. First published 2002.
² Twenty feet across, according to Rosalind Krauss in her early 1966 essay, "Allusion and
Illusion in Donald Judd," reprinted in Perpetual Inventory (MIT Press, 2010), 99-100.

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early summer

2011-05-29T05:48:00.005-04:00

West Cornwall, Connecticut, July 2005.

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international postage

2010-12-01T23:48:00.001-05:00

Ordering vintage stamps and paper goods online means that sometimes, the thoughtful composition of the delivered envelopes is as wonderful as what's inside.

These postage stamps arrived uncancelled on an envelope sent to me from England, containing a postcard written, addressed, and sent in 1914. I chose the card on ebay for its photograph of the companion square to the garden square where I once lived in London.

At first, Elizabeth "1st" looked like a mossy green to me. Turns out she's a sparkly gold. An ambiguity suitable to the copper patina of the category "verdigris". I'm letting the color scheme take me where it will.

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read & green: art book fair, part one

2010-11-13T19:48:00.000-05:00

via Drawn & Quarterly

Amidst the zine-iness and scene-iness of the New York Art Book Fair at PS1, I spent time last Friday with several books in the upper range of outstanding-ness.

The detail above is from a botanical illustration entitled "Douglas Maple," painted in gouache by Leanne Shapton. Her reworking of The Native Trees of Canada, first printed in 1917, has just been published by Drawn & Quarterly of Toronto. Selections of Shapton's paintings are visible at design*sponge, at the NYTimes, and at Drawn & Quarterly, where one can download a pdf of six of her leaf-and-branch pictures.

I'm especially drawn to Shapton's renderings of conifer branches, such as those of the Rocky Mountain Juniper and the Jack Pine.

via design*sponge

Each image bleeds off the page and into the gutter. It's a hefty book of color.

Shapton has painted books before, giving new meaning to the term "block book" by cutting blocks of wood to the size of novels and re-painting covers on them:

via Leanne Shapton

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poppy day

2010-11-11T11:48:00.000-05:00

Allusively red. Perhaps a hybrid red-for-remembrance and white-for-peace poppy. Photographed in Hampstead this past June.

On Armistice Day I always find myself thinking about living memory, longevity, and the wavering personal connections humanity has to its own history. It is amazing to me to be alive in the same world as veterans of the first world war -- to share time with people who attest to the incredible length life can achieve, when given the chance.

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~ T w o m i n u t e s ~

Two minutes' silence on the UK singles charts. At guardian.co.uk
Cognitive visualization of the structure and progression of time. At scienceblogs.com

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persephone & omega

2010-11-10T15:17:00.000-05:00

It may seem at first as though this post focuses on the gris rather than the verdigris. The colors step in further below. If you're impatient for pigment, imagine my stumbling across the bookshop in question on a cool, grey Christmas Eve afternoon years ago while sporting a lime green winter coat and red shoes.

27th Feb: Persephone. Photo by scribbletaylor, 2009

Persephone Books is a small bookstore in Lamb's Conduit Street in London. It is warm and welcoming and feels, to my recollection, like a milliner and print shop and early twentieth-century dry-goods store packed into one. All their books are stacked on low, open shelves above worn wooden floors and have identical silver-grey covers. Every book also shares an identical price of £10, so that readers can be unfettered from cost concerns and the distraction of dazzling dust jackets and instead be drawn to what they really like.

Persephone republishes works of fiction and nonfiction, mainly by women, whose copyright has expired, whose existence has been nearly forgotten, or whose manuscripts have never before been printed. In doing so, Persephone re-opens glimpses into the lives of imagined and historical women whose words are still vibrant even as you sense the dust falling from their stories with every page's turn.

Most entrancingly, each novel, anthology, or diary is bound with endpapers reproducing a fabric or wallpaper design that is historically relevant to the time of the book's writing, or to the circumstances of its setting. The snippet of endpaper below comes from a linen fabric designed in 1913 by Vanessa Bell, artist and older sister of Virginia Woolf, in the early days of the Bloomsbury artists' collective The Omega Workshop.

It adorns the inside of Persephone's publication #43, Leonard Woolf's The Wise Virgins, which Woolf began writing on his honeymoon with Virginia in 1912 and completed the next year. I don't know where any of the original fabric is still housed, the detailed circumstances of its creation, or if it even was given a name. One place to start looking for answers may be the catalogue of an exhibition of Omega textiles shown at the Courtauld Institute in 2009. The online summary of the show is quite good.

If only there were a Persephone Fabrics as well, in the business of reprinting the abstract-graphic beauty of the Omega linens!

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~ F u r t h e r r e a d i n g ~

A lovely photographic composition of Persephone + vintage textile, by Rosa Pomar
The success of Persephone Books and my other favorite bookseller-publisher, New York Review Books, in reviving neglected literature. At mediabistro.com
The cookbooks in Persephone's collection. At thekitchn.com
Persephone Books' own blog, The Persephone Post

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garnet-hued jade

2010-11-04T10:48:00.017-04:00

The south wall of my place has ten feet of windows, letting dramatic sunlight fall into the living room from dawn until dusk. Plants love it and I love it -- with that much sun, the room is also the warmest spot in an extremely chilly apartment.

This jade seedling was recently displaced from its side table to make room for a chocolate mint plant. It landed on the ample windowsill and has seemed to be enjoying life -- though I can never be too certain about it, given that it looked like this in our first, happy year of coexistence:

(That little twig growing in the lower left of the terracotta pot was the sole survivor of the inexplicable leaf-dropping plague that hit Jade Mountain in 2009. Evidently in the state of plague emergency I forgot to remove the purple retainer case from an otherwise flattering portrait of the plant in its last days . . . )

In its new windowsill home, the much-reduced jade is growing at a noticeable pace for the first time ever. And as it's growing, it has started showing a red-violet tinge on the underside of its uppermost leaves. The tinge has now become much darker than in the first photo above, taken only a few days ago.

At first I thought the plant was tricking me again, putting on a show of verdancy while sending out flares of warning from below. From what I've gathered, however, this is how jades respond to lots of sunlight. In its striking contrast of color, it looks as though the plant were reflecting the saturated tint of its red container, and communing with the fall leaves outdoors.

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autumn red & green

2010-11-03T11:48:00.002-04:00

Outside one of my local bookstores.

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poppy & prothonotary

2010-11-01T03:48:00.011-04:00

One of my favorite small books: Das kleine Blumenbuch - In vielen Farben. The little flower book - In many colors. Fifty-eight plates of offset prints reproduced from botanical images drawn by Rudolf Koch and cut in wood by Fritz Kredel. Published in 1933 by the Insel-Bücherei, Leipzig.

The Insel-Bücherei was founded prior to the first world war, and from its inception sought to sell, at affordable prices, short works such as novellas, poetry collections, essays, and groups of illustrations. The series has been hugely successful in its 98 years of existence -- this Little flower book has been reprinted at least 27 times.

The early paperboard covers featured geometrical designs, primarily bicolor, as far as I can tell. On the Kleine Blumenbuch's cover, I find the handmade look of the green stripes and the little red stars wonderfully appealing. (The stars are more easily visible if you click on the image to enlarge.) Nowadays, the covers have become more complex in both design and color schematics. The image of the poppy shown above is one of two flowers in a pattern now adorning the latest edition of the Kleine Blumenbuch:

Koch and Kredel are interesting figures, with a collaborative history that began years before the publication of this little book. Koch was in his last year of life when the Kleine Blumenbuch was printed; his student Kredel soon emigrated to the United States, where he taught at the Cooper Union and where his illustrations found wide recognition.

It turns out that yellow has infiltrated all but my very first post so far, though I've set out to focus on red-green phenomena. Because this post is about wildlife in books, I thought I might conclude with a photo of this bright yellow migratory phenomenon -- a photo of wildlife near books -- too bright and handsome to exclude: the prothonotary warbler who till this weekend was making a temporary home outside the New York Public Library.

Photograph by Ardith Bondi, The New York Times.

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golden fleece

2010-10-31T01:48:00.004-04:00

Detail of a postcard on its way across the country to my friend Mike. The tapestry image is a reproduction of Pae White's Sea Beast, on display at Power Plant in Toronto until January. Pulled from a beautifully close-up ad in the October 2010 Artforum.

'M' cut from another, long-ago Artforum: an advertisement for a Jack Pierson show in Barcelona, 2006-07, saved for its typographical interest.

A Sea Beast detail lives up in my page header, too. The original is 290 x 660 cm, cotton and polyester.

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conway & witt

2010-10-29T02:48:00.006-04:00

The image libraries of the Courtauld Institute, London. The Conway boxes hold photographs and cuttings primarily of architectural works. The Witt boxes hold photographs and printed reproductions of paintings, drawings, and other planar images.

The visual archive before the Internet database.

Candida Höfer, Libraries (Thames & Hudson, 2005)

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