Kitazawa Yoshio, Hamada Masuji, Wantanabe Soshu, Tatsuke Yoichiro, et al. Gendai Shogyo Bijutsu Zenshu.  (“The Complete Commercial Artist”). 24-volume-illustrated series (each vol. approx. 100-150 pp. including plates).  4to.  Wrpps.  Tokyo (Ars) 1927-1930.  (46209)

Over the past five years or so, a loose cadre of visual data miners at blogs including BibliOdyssey, 50 Watts, but does it float, Accidental Mysteries, Agence Eureka, and La Boite Verte (to name but a few) have collectively developed an on-line pictorial archive of inestimable value to artists and graphic designers who wish to renew their powers in the streams of history.

So where did the creative class seek inspiration before the internet?  Books and magazines, of course, some of them eerily prescient of today’s digital resources.  F.A. Bernett has recently acquired the complete run of a 24-volume graphic art and commercial design series from 1920s Japan that bears a striking resemblance to some of today’s graphic design and visual art blogs in its serialized, taxonomic format.

Gendai Shogyo Bijutsu Zenshu(“The Complete Commercial Artist”), published from 1927 to 1930,  is one of the foundational documents of modern graphic design in Japan.  Known in English as the Ars series for the imprint which published it, Hamada Masuji’s magnum opus combines theory and history with thousands of examples of completed designs and design proposals arranged precisely by topic, from theatrical playbills in issue one, to product display windows in issues three and four, to billboards and product posters in issue six, and so on.

The sometimes wildly contrasting designs from Russia, Germany, Great Britain, the United States and elsewhere provide the reader with a Japanese perspective on emerging modernist aesthetics in the global print culture of the late 1920s.

According to scholar Gennifer Weisenfeld, (see her excellent essay, “Japanese Modernism and Consumerism: Forging the New Artistic Field of Shōgyō Bijutsu” in Being Modern in Japan. Edited by Elise Tipton and John Clark. 2000), Hamada’s careful documentation of the international scene had a profound effect on Japanese design practices, from typography and page design to retail display practices.

The final volume closes with a 100-page essay that gives expression to his theories of commercial design as a natural culmination of modern currents in industrial production and fine art.

One could easily craft an individual blog post for each issue. Its richness as a reference resource is incredible. Instead I’ll humbly close this post with a selection of graphic highlights, culled somewhat at random from the course of its complete run.

(If your RSS feed reader is anything like mine, this post is but a minor tributary to the rushing torrent of visual discoveries you’ll probably scroll through today.  One can only imagine that if he were alive in our time, Hamada Masuji would delight in capturing and cataloging the most eye-catching among them.  In which case the Ars series would be one hell of a graphic arts blog.)

For more information about Gendai Shogyo Bijutsu Zenshu please contact us. FAB Item I.D. # 46209.

                          

Anarchy.  A Journal of Anarchist Ideas. Vol. 1, no. 1 (Mar. 1961) – vol. 10, no. 12 (Dec. 1970) [Alternately numbered nos. 1-118.] (entire first series). 118 numbers in ten consecutively paginated volumes.  8vo.  Illus. wrpps.

In the early 1960s, the editors of Freedom Press, those stalwart protectors of the anarchist tradition in Great Britain, scented change on the wind.  Young people, many of them students, were looking to the libertarian left to make sense of vast social upheavals in post-war London and other urban centers.  The anarchist movement’s anti-authoritarian principles and clearly articulated positions on affordable housing, social justice, and inviolate personal freedom carried a strong resonance. Suddenly, the imprint’s brand of politically-engaged anarchism was no longer the métier solely of bearded Kropotkin scholars.

At the time, however, British anarchism’s most visible organ, The Freedom Newspaper, was anything but youthful.  Founded in 1886 (by Kropotkin himself, no less) Freedom was decidedly stodgy in format despite its radical message.  In 1961, one of the paper’s younger editors, Colin Ward, proposed a separate magazine designed to spark dialogue with new readers. The legendary serial Anarchy: A Journal of Anarchist Ideas was born.  Ward encountered illustrator Rufus Segar at Malatesta Pub that same year, and the two cemented a working relationship that established a new voice and graphic identity for the UK anarchist movement.  Segar lent his considerable talents to the magazine’s production team for the duration of its entire first series, creating all but a few of its 118 covers.  His eye-catching designs telegraphed each issue’s core themes with bold directness and a healthy dose of graphic experimentation.

Having recently acquired a complete set of the first series in remarkably well-preserved condition, we’re pleased to share a selection of our favorite Anarchy cover illustrations with our readers.

In our opinion, Segar’s dramatic approach to the interplay between the front and back wrappers and his incisive use of text as a graphic element make Anarchy’s covers as fresh today as when they were first printed.  Apparently we’re not alone.  While working on this post, I’ve discovered that S1gnal: A Journal of International Politics and Culture recently interviewed Segar about his work for the magazine.  Read an excerpt of the excellent interview here, and see a few more examples of his work for the magazine.)

For more information about Anarchy: A Journal of Anarchist Ideas, please contact us.

FAB Item I.D. # 46623

                          

Sem (pseudonym for Georges Goursat).  Sem au Bois (title stamped in gilt on front cover).  N.p. (Paris?) ca. 1908.   Signed and dated 29/4/08 in pencil on the last plate; 6 other plates with the artist’s printed insignia.  [45958]

Caricature from “Sem au Bois,” identified by Prof. Pau Medrano Bigas as Jagatjit Singh Bahadur (1872-1949), Maharadjah of Kapurthala State under British Colonial rule.

“And if you happen to be an historian of Belle Epoque Paris (clever you) and recognize anyone among the caricatures, please let us know in the comments field…”

– UPDATE, May 2011:

When first I wrote about Georges “Sem” Goursat’s 1910 leporello Sem au Bois about a year ago, I ended the post with an invitation, asking readers to share any insights they might have as to the real-world identities of the faces caricatured in Sem’s well-heeled crowd of Boulogne woods revelers.

Last week, Pablo Medrano Bigas, Associate Professor of Design and Image at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Universitat de Barcelona answered the call.  Clever him, indeed, and lucky us. Not only has he positively identified several of the processional’s key figures, he’s also supplied a wealth of historical background information to further our understanding the illustration’s form and content.

According to Pau, Sem au Bois gently skewers the members of the Jockey Club de Paris, a private sporting society that opened in 1834 as “La Société d’Encouragement pour l’Amélioration des Races de Chevaux” (the Society for the Encouragement of the Improvement of Horse Breeding.) It quickly established itself as a magnet for the social elite of Belle Époque.  (Proust’s fictional character Charles Swann was member.)  From 1863 to 1913, the Jockey Club was headquartered above the Grand Café of the Scribe Hotel, where on December 28, 1895, the Lumière brothers debuted their invention, the Cinematograph (lending credence to my earlier speculation that Sem’s use of the leporello format was in nod to the famous film makers…) The location was convenient to the group’s principal races at Longchamp.

What follows is a slightly edited version of Bigas’ e-mail, with a selection of his composite illustrations comparing Sem’s caricatures with photographs and illustrations of luminaries from the era.  Take it away, Pau…

“This genre of illustration — showing group portraits of the era’s more prominent personalities — was a popular trope.  In fact, ‘Sem au Bois’ is similar in many ways to works by Michel ‘Mich’ Liebeaux, Marius ‘O’Galop’ Rossillon, Bernard ‘Moloch’ Collomb and other well-known caricaturists for popular satirical magazines of late 19th & early 20th centuries. Sometimes they made a supplemental income by inserting caricatures of well-known people (including presidents and kings of foreign countries) into advertising illustrations, often implying an improbable product endorsement.”

“About the portraits  shown in your original blog post, these are clearly members of the Jockey Club de Paris.  It appears as if they’re headed through the Boulogne woods to the races at Longchamp, with one carriage ferrying the ‘Comissaires’ (judges), and several others the staff or owners of different newspapers and magazines, including Fémina and Journal, along with a host of well-known society figures. Here are my hypotheses about several of the specific figures shown in the drawing.  Perhaps I’ve made a mistake or two, but I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible!”

“This plate shows a self-portrait of the artist, Georges Goursat, aka “Sem.” He was well known to readers of Le Journal, Le Rire, Le Gaulois, Les Modes, Le Figaro, L’Illustration, La Vie au Grand Air and other magazines of the era.  With him in the carriage are Henri Letellier, director of the newspapers Le Journal and Les Sports and Marthe Fourton, Mr. Letellier’s wife. For reference, see the accompanying images, published in Femina on  October 15, 1904 and Le Journal Amusant, on August 18, 1923.”

“The woman at left is Mademoiselle Madeleine Carlier (1885-1972), well-known in her time as both an actress and fashion model. She was a beautiful woman, portrayed in many drawings, paintings and photographs of the era. She was often featured in editorial fashion spreads for magazines including  Les Modes.  See the accompanying images for examples.  As to the woman at her right, Mlle. Néri, I have no information to offer!!”

“In the red coach to the left, we have  Louis Philippe (1869-1926), the Duke of Orleans, pretender to French throne as “Philippe VIII” (which was impossible, as you know, since France was a Republic by this time…)  He is riding in the company of Mr. Charlet, who was director of Mercedes car company in France, which had a luxurious showroom on the Champes-Elysées.”

“I have no idea as to the identity of this old lady with the camera, called “Miss Kodak” on the plate.  Perhaps she was a well-known photographer for the society magazines?  But clearly Sem drew her costume in homage to the firm’s trademark ‘ Kodak Girl,’ who appeared widely in their corporate advertisements from the early 1900s to the 1950s… As you can see in the accompanying images, the most remarkable characteristic of the girl is that she is always wearing a blue-white striped dress.”

“And here we have Jagatjit Singh Bahadur (1872-1949), the Maharadjah of Kapurthala State under British Colonial rule.  He made his first trip to the Occident in 1893, visiting the U.K. to attend the Duke of York’s marriage, also traveling to Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, and the U.S., to see the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.  He married several times and eventually settled in Paris with his fifth wife (a Spanish woman named Anita Delgado) in 1908.  At this time he had several children (as the Sem caricature shows).”

“Marie Joseph Robert Anatole, Comte de Montesquiou-Fézensac (1855-1921), was an aristocrat poet and supporter of the avant-garde.  He was a real dandy in every sense of the word, openly gay, with famous lovers including Gabriel de Yturri.  He was close to Antonio de la Gándara, Sarah Bernhardt, Ida Rubinstein, Giovanni Boldini (painter of the accompanying portrait), and also a favorite of Sem, who portayed him often.”

“‘Mademoiselle Lantelme,’ i.e. Claire Geneviève ‘Ginette’ Lantelme (born Mathilde Fossey; 1887-1911), was a famous vaudeville actress and fashion model. She died tragically at 28, only two years after her marriage to Mr. Alfred Edwards, publisher of Le Matin.  Here she is depicted sitting in a “Galliette,” which was a special two-seater version of the standard Gallia electric-car model (typically mono-place, with room only for the driver), produced by the Société Française l’Electrique.  This car was extremely popular in France between 1905-1908.”

“Finally we have the infamous ‘Polaire,’ a.k.a. Émilie Marie Bouchaud (1874-1939), a very famous singer and actress in music-hall cabarets, the stage and silent movies.  Next to her sits the scandalous Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954), best known for her novel Gigi and the Claudine stories, published under the name of her husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars (aka “Willy”), with whom she shared a celebrated erotic triangle with Polaire.  The couple divorced in 1906, so Sem obviously didn’t place him in the scene!”

—

How intriguing it is to find Colette in an all but forgotten album of caricatures by the artist who, fifty years later, would inspire Cecil Beaton’s art direction of the Academy Award-winning film of her most famous novel.  Our sincerest thanks to Pau for bring the procession of Sem au Bois to life in such vivid detail.  We had a hunch that each character in the thirty-foot long illustration represented a known figure from the era, but we lacked the resources to put names with the faces.
We can only repeat the original post’s invitation:  Are there any other recognizable faces in the crowd?  For those who care to look more closely themselves, here are the remaining panels of Sem au Bois (which we e-mailed to Pau for his help with this post), thus completing the initial set of illustrations we publicized a year ago:

Panels 13 through 15 of Sem au Bois.

Panels 16 through 18 of Sem au Bois.

Panels 19 through 21 of Sem au Bois.

Panels 22 through 24 of Sem au Bois.

For example, who is the “le Riche Étranger” riding in “Le Char De l’État?”  If you have any guesses, please add them to the comments section, or contact us by e-mail.

FAB Item I.D. # 45958

                          

The First Flight from New York to Paris by Colonel Ch. A. Lindbergh. Lavish privately printed presentation album commemorating Lindbergh’s solo crossing of the Atlantic, this copy extra-illustrated with a large silver print photograph of the Spirit of St. Louis in flight over Paris, signed by Lindbergh and tipped onto front free endpaper.  Thick, square folio.  Orig. brown morocco  gilt by A. J. Gonin.  N.p. (Paris) (Vacuum Oil Co.) n.d. (1927).  One of 13 copies. (45963)

In 1919 Raymond Orteig had famously offered $25,000 to any aviator who could accomplish the seemingly insurmountable feat of crossing the Atlantic in either direction alone and non-stop.  Charles A. Lindbergh’s 33 hour flight on the Spirit of Saint Louis from Roosevelt Field in New York to Le Bourget Aerodrome in Paris on May 20–21, 1927 not only won him Orteig’s prize money, it changed the course of aviation history.

Then an unknown 25-year-old U.S. Army Reserve officer, Lindbergh raised funds for the project with the help of backers in St. Louis and designed his plane with Ryan Airlines using a Wright J-5c engine.  In the months prior to his team’s effort, six aviators before him had perished in the attempt.

The primary challenge was the enormous amount of diesel needed for such a long flight, essentially converting the plane into a flying fuel tank.  In fact with a large extra container at the front of the plane, Lindbergh was prevented from having any forward view.

Despite this and many other obstacles, Lindbergh’s crossing was successful.

Given the commonplace nature of transatlantic aviation today, it’s difficult to fully grasp the excitement stirred by Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris.  Contemporary accounts record that more than 150,000 spectators stormed the air strip to hoist Lindbergh out of his cockpit to carry him on their shoulders, showering him with champagne and kisses for more than thirty minutes until French police were able to battle through the crowds to his rescue.

Suddenly, the continents were connected by more than telegraph cables and ocean liners.  In fewer than 36 hours, a man could fly cross the ocean and walk the streets of a foreign metropolis.  In essence, space and time were collapsing.  The world was becoming modern.

Of course, the refinement of petroleum products played a significant role in humankind’s ability to master intercontinental travel.  It is no small coincidence that one of Lindbergh’s most generous supporters—and certainly his most lavish commemorator—was the Vacuum Oil Company (called ExxonMobil today), which supplied the engine lubricants that enabled The Spirit of St. Louis to operate continuously without defect for the duration of the flight.

F.A. Bernett Books recently acquired one of the rarest and most spectacular publications to celebrate the crossing.  Commissioned by the French arm of Vacuum Oil and published in an edition of only thirteen copies, The First Flight from New York to Paris by Colonel Ch. A. Lindbergh weighs in at a whopping 26 pounds and measures 16.5 x 14.5 x 4.25 inches, with tooled & gilt brown morocco covers, silk moiré doublures, marbled front- and rear-free endpapers, 76 mounted machine print photographs (most approx. 6 1/2″ x 8 1/2″) each cut to the edge of the image and mounted on an individual cream card backing sheet surrounded by a brown card mat, and 20 folding facsimiles of the front or relevant pages of newspapers and journals all dated May 22nd or 23rd, 1927, each also mounted on an individual cream card backing sheet.

One can scarcely imagine a more exhaustive or extravagant memento of Lindbergh’s feat.  In terms of its sheer size, heft, and opulence, The First Flight from New York to Paris possesses a quasi-liturgical quality, as if it were part of an effort to canonize Lindbergh.  Indeed it may well have been.  The handsome and heroic young aviator held unprecedented potential as a celebrity spokesman for the Vacuum Oil and other firms eager to associate themselves with the knight errant of Jazz-age modernity.

The tome carefully records images of a technician supplying the Spirit’s engine with Mobiloil B, a Vaccum brand product, prior to its departure for Brussels and London in the days following his Paris landing.

Engineer Mr. H Pagny of the Vacuum Aviation division also examines the plane’s oil filters to detect signs of damage or wear.

In fact, Lindbergh tirelessly used his notoriety to promote the growth of transatlantic commercial aviation over the following decade, before the tragic turn of his eldest son’s kidnapping and murder lead him to move his family to Europe in secrecy.  After “the crime of the century,” as many called it, Lindbergh all but retreated from the limelight, haunted by guilt that the wealth and fame he had sought had motivated his son’s killer to pursue the family.

The album, limited to only 13 copies, was most likely produced for the top executives of Vacuum Oil and was probably never offered for sale.  No name, however, has been filled in on the limitation page in this copy.  We are unable to find any record of this title ever coming to the market, and is unrecorded among institutional libraries.

For more information about this remarkable item,
please contact us.

F.A.B. Item ID # 45963.

                          

Artists’ postcards from the collection of Ulises Carrión, comprised of approximately 900 individual items in 108 small edition sets (most 50-500 copies) by Günter Brus, Stempelplaats, Nickolaus Urban, and Gabor Toth, among others, many signed by the artists and addressed to Carrión.  [44030]

Brus, Gunter "O Wunder, Wunderschone Sonne," suite of four postcard prints, N.p., 1978. Signed and dated by Brus with dedication to Carrión on verso of first card.

Without so much as an envelope to keep their contents private, postcards may be our most casual yet intimate mode of personal correspondence. We send them to our friends and colleagues to boast of our visits to exotic locales, natural wonders and art museums.  The gesture implies fondness and familiarity with the addressee—“wish you were here,” etc.  And though they sometimes depict works of art, we seldom think of them as substantial works of art unto themselves.

However, these very same qualities of lightness and informality happened to make the postcard an ideal medium for a certain stripe of visual artist in the 1970s and 1980s. As the founder of Other Books and So (an artists’ bookstore in Amsterdam), Ulises Carrión championed self-publishing and correspondence art as alternatives to the market-driven, commodity-obsessed gallery system. For nearly two decades prior to his untimely death in 1989, Carrión exchanged self-published books, pamphlets, postcards and mail art with a like-minded constellation of artists and poets scattered across several continents, carefully preserving the material in his archives as it arrived in the post.

GROSCHOPP, Michael. Magdeburg 1983. “The Eyes of the Children” : 9 post cards in envelope.

F.A. Bernett has recently acquired a significant collection of artists’ postcards from Carrion’s repository. Not only does it shed important new light on the collaborative context of his work, it also reminds us that the humble postcard served as an important “exhibition” venue and working medium for some of the late 20^th-century’s most prominent avant-garde artists. From conceptual art multiples to curated sets of artist-designed cards, the collection presents a strikingly diverse cross section of movements and concerns from the time.

NANNUCCI, Maurizio/BIANCOENERO. Florence (Mela) 1979. “MELA POST CARD BOOK”: curated selection of 48 postcards in slip case. (clockwise from upper left): Ed Ruscha, John Cage, Gerd & Hilla Becher, Dorothy Ianone, Ray Johnson, Jirí Kolár, Milan Knizak, Emmett Williams.

LIGGINS, John. Amsterdam (Self-published) 1975. “Elemental Cards”: 4 postcards.

BRAND, Jan. N.p. (Brummense Uitgeverij van Luxe Werkjes) 1974. 3 postcards in envelope.

Carrión participated (or was directly implicated) in several of the correspondence projects, including this mail art set by Franz Immoos, and Jurgen Olbrich’s “Work for a Friend,” below.

IMMOOS, Franz. Amsterdam (Self-published) 1979. 6 original rubber stamped postcards in envelope.

OLBRICH, Jürgen O. Kassel (Self-published) 1982. “Work for a Friend”: 13 postcards in folder. Edition of 100 numbered and signed copies.

And as one might expect, works by Ray Johnson—here the self-professed “Ding Dong Daddy of Mail Art”—appear among several sets.

STEMPELPLAATS. Amsterdam, 1978. 4 original rubber stamped postcards in envelope, incl. work by Ray Johnson.

The exchange of correspondence between mail artists functioned as a parallel universe for many participants, both known and unknown, allowing them to sidestep the concerns of gallery owners, critics and collectors, whom Carrión famously derided as a caste of professionally-minded “specialists.”

BAILLY, Bernard J. Nyon (Self-published) n.d. “Traces Animales. Série A: 50 asticots”: 8 postcards in envelope.

CAVELLINI, Guglielmo A. Brescia (Self-published) 1987.“Serie Artisti Anomali: Cavellini/Arcimboldo”. 7 postcards in folder. (International Postage 333).

BZDOK, Henryk. Katowice (Edition BZZZ Workshop) 1978. 10 postcards, profusely rubber stamped with original additions.

STURANI, Enrico. Roma (Museo del Folklore) 1981. NUOVE CARTOLINE: 42 postcards. Exhibition catalogue.

STURANI, Enrico. Roma (Museo del Folklore) 1981. NUOVE CARTOLINE: 42 postcards. Exhibition catalogue.

Keeping with the aesthetics of the larger movement, several of the postcard works are harshly critical of consumer culture.

KRISTMUNDSSON, Steingrimur E. N.p. (Self-published) 1978. “The Act of Consuming...”: 16 postcards.

Seriograph by G.G. Marx from FERRO, Antonio. Naples (Experimenta) 1977. POST CARDS: Wrpps., unpaginated. 10 original postcards, each one numbered and signed. Edition of 200 copies. (H. Tress, E.A. Vigo, R. Rehfelt, A. Ferro, R. Peli, L. Yurcovic, G.G. Marx, H. Zabala, U Attardi).

Others—including a stunning group of cards relating to the Solidarity movement in Poland—address urgent political and social concerns.

SOLIDARNOSC: 41 postcards in folder. Invitation to the project. Exhibition’s announcement and participants list.

Carrión and his circle understood how a mailed artwork could function as a talisman of its maker, even if he or she might not be able to complete the same journey in person.  Prior to the era of our digital immanence via Facebook, Skype, Twitter and a host of other electronic avatars, this was a powerful magic indeed…

HOFFBERG, Judith/HUGO, Joan. Glendale, CA 1978. “Artwords and Bookworks”: 92 postcards, offset, folder.

SCHNEIDER, Wolfgang. Magdeburg, DE, 1985. "The Dream Creation" : 9 postcards, offset.

Please contact us for more information about the Carrión collection of artists’ postcards, including its price and availability.

FAB Item I.D. # 44030.

                          

Sawada, Yozo. Insatsu Taikan (Great Atlas of Printing).  Unpaginated album.  Sm. folio.  Silk-covered boards, tie-bound.  Osaka (Nihon Insatsu Kaisha) 1915.  [46467]

Following the death of his father, the Meiji Emperor, on July 30, 1912, Crown Prince Yoshihito ascended to the Chrysanthemum Throne of Japan to become the Taishō Emperor. After three years of Imperial preparations, Yoshihito’s public coronation took place in November of 1915.  The leaders of industries which had thrived during the Meiji period of modernization wisely turned out to pay tribute to the young monarch.  Proud of their accomplishments during his father’s reign, Japanese printers and publishers marked the occasion with lavish commemorative publications.  Insatsu Taikan—the Great Atlas of Printing—showcases the remarkable quality and innovation of printing in Japan, ca. 1915.

The work opens with a bold claim by Sawada Yozo, Director of the Japanese Society of Printers, to the effect that a nation’s degree of civilization may be measured by its mastery of the art of printing.  And as the era’s primary means of transmission for texts and images, perhaps it did, much as one might rank the progress of nations today by the development of their tech industries.  Notably written in French, the preface and album clearly constitute a message to the printers in Europe and America under whose Meiji-period tutelage the Japanese had perfected their craft.

And perfect it they undoubtedly had.  With 100 spectacular plates—many in brilliant color, some in relief—Insatsu Taikan impressively demonstrates the technical virtuosity of commercial and fine print in Japan at the time of its publication.  From traditional woodcuts to serigraphs, chromo- and photo-lihtography, pochoir, offset, embossed texts and images on tin, every form of printing imaginable seems to be represented.

Several dizzying plates are devoted to printing efforts on behalf of the Japanese match industry, which also flourished during the Meiji era, when factories were built to provide economic opportunities for samurais who had lost their status after the abolition of feudalism.  In a (quite literally) pyrotechnic symbiosis, the newly established Japanese commercial printing houses produced an eye-catching variety of advertisements for safety match box covers.

Matches and fine printing weren’t the only priorities of the Meiji expansion, however.  Several images also speak to the development of Japanese transportation infrastructure and its military muscle, including impressive warships.

Distant echos of the war in Europe are also readily apparent.

But for a viewer today, the primary impact of Insatsu Taikan is a visceral sense of the excitement that Japanese printers must have felt as they began to grasp the full possibilities of their medium.  Many of the plates seem decades ahead of their time.

The pride in their accomplishments is apparent in the faces of the Society’s members, dressed in a mix of traditional Japanese garb and Western formal wear for their official portraits.

For more information on the Insatsu Taikan, please contact us.

FAB Item I.D. # 46467

                          

De Leeuw, Rudolph M.  Both Sides of Broadway, from Bowling Green to Central Park, New York City.   New York City (The De Leeuw Riehl Pub. Co.) 1910.  [46491]

In 1910, author-publisher-photographer Rudolph M. De Leeuw realized his entrepreneurial ambition of publishing a building-by-building sequential photographic survey of the most famous street in America.  Both Sides of Broadway presented viewers near and far with a novel opportunity to stroll along the great New York City thoroughfare without so much as leaving their armchairs.

De Leeuw’s project married a time-honored concept to burgeoning commercial technologies.  City guides with etched views of monuments and landmarks along the path a tourist might travel have been common since the end of the 16th century, when well-heeled young men began to embark on grand tours of the European capitols.  But with cheap print and portable photographic imaging technology, De Leeuw was spared the expense of having to pay a Piranesi or Barbault to illustrate his tome.  He simply walked his camera and tripod “from Bowling Green to Central Park,” per the work’s subtitle, pausing to record scenes of Broadway’s most prominent (and lesser known) addresses, much as the Google Maps Street View car might drive it today.  He was not shy of boasting about the brilliance of the idea and expected to turn a hefty profit by selling advertisements to the businesses along his path.

The resulting collection of images is a testament to the ageless hustle of Manhattan’s main street and an extraordinary record of early 20th-century New York architecture, street signage and commercial zoning.  Who knew, for example, that Broadway between Times Square and Central Park used to house the city’s largest concentration of automotive parts suppliers and car dealerships? A selection of plates appears below, in sequence, beginning with the old Produce Exchange at 2 Broadway and terminating at Columbus Circle.  For the sake of comparison, I’ve included links to  Street View images of the same locations as they look today, a little more than 100 years later.  And in many ways, De Leeuw’s ad-laden view book does bear an eerie similarity to Google’s Street Views business model, with its AdSense promotional opportunities for companies in the user’s search area.

(Street view links beneath captions, please be patient– load times vary considerably.)

Street view of 2-8 Broadway today.

Street view of Pine Street @ Broadway today.

Street view of 173-177 Broadway today.

Street view of Dey Street @ Broadway today.

Street view of City Hall Park from Broadway today.

Before the internet, good signage was still the retail businessman’s most important marketing endeavor.

Street view of Broadway near East 4th Street today.

Street view of Waverly Place at Broadway Today.

Street view of 31 to 41 Union Square West today.

Street view of the Flatiron Building today.

One wonders if The Breslin Hotel once housed a restaurant called The Ace?

Street view of 29th and Broadway today.

Street view of 1205 to 1229 Broadway today.

Street view of 1200 Broadway today.

Street view of 42nd and Broadway today.

Street view of 48th to 49th and Broadway today.

Street view of 59th Street @ Columbus Circle today.

De Leeuw’s dreams of striking it rich depended less on massive retail sales (which he clearly expected, boldly claiming to have published 30,000 copies) than it did on the ad revenues he expected to reap.  In his mind, if not in reality, Both Sides of Broadway was meant to function as the first in a series of visual guides to the other great commercial thoroughfares of New York and cities across the nation, each one a goldmine of promotional opportunities.  Only one thing was needed to make the scheme work:  The Co-operation of the Public.

Sadly for De Leeuw and today’s architectural historians, John Q. Public wasn’t having it.  Given the volume’s relative scarcity in the marketplace and the fact that WorldCat shows institutional holdings in fewer that 20 libraries, his reported print number seems optimistic rather than factual.  Whatever the case, Both Sides of Broadway is the apparently only volume in the series to have been realized.

Time Square at Night today.

Certainly, however, De Leeuw’s publishing enterprise isn’t the only big-shot venture to have been crushed by the city’s craven indifference to the aspirations of Broadway dreamers.  You could even write a song about.  In the meantime, his book remains a much cited resource for the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.  For more information about Both Sides of Broadway, please contact us.

FAB Item I.D. # 46491

                          

Teruhiko Yumura, et al.-. Shinjuku Playmap.  Nos. 1 (July 1969) through 30 (December 1971) (all published in the first series).  8vo.  Wrpps., covers illustrated by Teruhiko Yumura (also known as King Terry and Terry Johnson).  Tokyo 1969-1971.  [46471]

What power is this, indeed?

The global tidal wave of youth culture rebellion and experimentation of the late 1960s and early 1970s did not bypass Tokyo.  Shinjuku ward—home to the city’s municipal government and its busiest commuter rail center—was the local substation through which powerful new currents in music, fashion and visual art flowed in and out of Japan.

In 1969, a free monthly magazine called Shinjuku Playmap launched to help visitors find their way to the neighborhood’s latest and greatest nightclubs, record stores, clothes shops and restaurants, particularly those in the seedier districts north and west of Shinjuku Station.

Shinjuku Playmap also featured editorial content that reflected the neighborhood’s youthful daring.  The magazine became an important venue for artists, photographers and graphic designers in touch with the local scene, among them illustrator Teruhiko Yumura (aka King Terry and King Terry Johnson) and art director Heikichi Harata.  One of Playmap’s most prominent sponsors was Kabushiki Gaisha Bunka Hōsō’s (Nippon Cultural Broadcasting) overnight program Say! Young, which broadcast “new rock” and “underground folk” from 12:30 AM to 3:00 AM.*

To connect with its youthful audience on a visual level, the program took out lavish spreads in the magazine and filled them with cutting edge graphic art, much of it related to fashion or pop music. One features a particularly striking interpretation of the Beatles’ “Long and Winding Road” by Shinobu Ishimaru.

Heikichi Harata’s spreads for Say! Young were equally inspired, featuring collage illustrations that simultaneously recall ukiyo-e and 60′s pop art.

However, if Shinjuku Playmap’s visual sensibilities were to be represented by one artist alone, it would have to be the aforementioned King Terry (Teruhiko Yumura), whose covers for the publication document the evolution of his pioneering heta-uma (literally “bad-good,” meaning ‘so bad it’s good’) style, which continues to exert a tremendous influence on Japanese graphic design even today, as Dan Nadel of Picture Box says, “whether you like it or not.”

The first series of Playmap [nos. 1 (July 1969) through 30 (December 1971)] pulses with the energy of its time and place, featuring dozens of arresting page spreads and images by known and unknown artists.  We could just as easily have mined its pages for an exceptional look at Japanese street and fashion photography from the era.

But for now we’re content to share these wonderful scans from a set we acquired during a recent visit to Tokyo. If you can help identify the artists who produced any of the preceding four images which appear to be uncredited, let us know here in the comments section. For more information about our set of Shinjuku Playmap, please e-mail us.

FAB Item I.D. # 46471

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* Credit for helping me identify the connection between Say! Young radio and Shinkjuku Playmap goes to one “DJmagimix,” on whose blog/website is hosted a fascinating but unidentified Ph.D. thesis (possibly written by one Masahiro Yasuda) about the globalization of 20th century pop music, particularly hip hop. The chapter entitled “Rock, Revolt and Global Economy,” pp. 56-63, provides an excellent general primer on the pop music industry in Tokyo following World War II.

                          

(Fabric weaving manuscript).- Felix, M. & J. Mercier. Cahier de Théorie 4e Année 3e. N.p. (Lyon?) n.d. (circa 1895). [44915]

Though we know little about the person who composed it (“J. Mercier,” seemingly a student in the 4th-year class of  one “Professeur M. Felix”), Cahier de Théorie 4e Année 3e offers a rich window into the world of industrial fabric design in turn-of-the-century Lyon—once  a world capital of silk production.

The folio-size graph-paper notebook contains page after page of sketches and patterns for elegant fabrics accompanied by 74 fabric swatches and the student-designer’s painstaking notes in a careful hand.

To an expert in the history of textile design these pages would no doubt speak volumes about the industrialization of the loom and the translation of warp-and-weft handwork into modern machine processes. To the untrained eye (or at least my own) the remarkably beautiful designs also suggest complex musical compositions.

Modernist classical composer Morton Feldman (subject of a wonderful 2010 retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art) is said to have looked to textile designs for inspiration.

One wonders what he might have made of the precise repeating patterns and schematic complexity of J. Mercier’s notebook.

For more information about Cahier de Théorie 4e Année 3e (or to share more information about this particular genre of industrial manuscript), please e-mail us.

FAB Item I.D. # 44915

                          

Meier-Graefe, Julius. Felix Vallotton, Biographie: Des Kuenstlers nebst dem Wichtigsten teil seines Bisher Publicierten Werkes & Einer Anzahl Unedierter Originalplatten; De Cet Artiste avec la Partie la Plus Importante de son Oeuvre Editee et Differentes Gravures Originales & Nouvelles. Berlin/Paris (J. A. Stargardt/Edmond Sagot) n.d. (ca. 1898).  Freitag 12821. [41835]

Painter, playwright, critic and man of society—Felix Vallotton applied his talents broadly.  For a single decade at the end of the 19th-century, however, he enjoyed fame above all else as a print maker.  Vallotton’s boldly reductive approach to the woodcut is credited by many art historians of his time (and ours) as having modernized and revitalized the form in Western art.

Like many European artists of the late 19th Century, Vallotton was deeply enamored with the reduced palette and suggestive forms of Japanese woodcuts.  His artfully naive compositions from the period demonstrate the extent to which popular Ukiyo-e prints exerted an influence on his painting. In 1891, Vallotton began to experiment with the medium directly, producing an interpretive woodcut of Paul Verlaine that represented a clear break with the established practices of European printmaking.

The work was a critical success, and Vallotton went on to produce idealized portraits of other major figures in the arts and letters, all but abandoning the tonal cross hatching techniques other print makers in the West had used to create modulated areas of light and shadow.

Vallotton’s mature style embraced stark contrasts and dramatic tension.  He used the woodcut to explore various facets of fin de siècle Paris, from political intrigue and urban street life to shifting gender roles.  Julius Meier-Graefe, the eminent German art critic who helped to establish Pan, took an interest in the work.  In 1898 he published Felix Vallotton, Biographie, a dual translation French/German monograph on the artist that included a broad selection of the woodcuts and a compelling endorsement of his innovative style.

The monograph features imagery drawn from The Demonstration, Vallotton’s celebrated series from 1893-1895, which recorded the social unrest and anarchistic violence of the era, depicting assassins and anarchists,  executions and suicides.

Biographie also showcases the tender side of his work, including sensual female nudes, family scenes, and private moments between men and women.

Vallotton married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques in 1899 and his attention largely returned to painting, with a focus on domestic scenes and landscapes.  He enjoyed continued popular success as an artist, becoming a mainstay of the Paris Salons and other major European venues, and later, serving as a commissioned artist for the French army during the First World War.

Vallotton died of complications from cancer just one day after his 60th birthday, on December 29th, 1925.  But the graphic influence of his woodcuts endures, with artists including Aubrey Beardsley, Frans Masereel, Lynd Ward and Raymond Pettibon showing hints of his characteristic style in their works. We’re pleased to offer a copy of the Meier-Graefe Biographie—from which all of the images in this post are drawn—in generally excellent condition. Click through the following link or e-mail us for more information.

FAB Item I.D. # 41835

                          

Brussels. Galerie Smith. My Shit and My Love: Ting. 1961. Signed by Ting on inside front cover; limited to 1099 copies. $250 [46359]

Walasse Ting died at the age of 80 on May 17, 2010. He is remembered as a mischievous bon vivant, prodigious womanizer and prolific artist who recognized few boundaries between his practice in the studio and life at large. In light of his recent passing, one couldn’t ask for a more forceful testimony to his irrepressible spirit than the beautiful and incendiary 1961 book, My Shit and My Love.

At the time of its publication, Ting was a young ex-pat who had fled the Communist purges of 1950s China to make a home for himself in the literary and artistic circles of New York and Paris. Redolent with echoes of the American Beat movement and French existentialism, the slender-but-oversize volume’s 10 verses cartoonishly exaggerate his appetites for food, drink, sex, creation and destruction.

The paintings which accompany them bridge between the gestural abstraction of CoBrA painters like Alechinsky, with whom Ting was closely associated, and the more controlled brush work of traditional Chinese calligraphy.

The book’s high quality print production (credited to Maurice Beaudet and Georges Girard) with its various texture and effects, including two six-color lithographs, produces a satisfying counterpoint to the manic intensity of its words and images.

In the title poem, Ting portrays himself as superficially youthful though emotionally ancient, “30 year in face 800 year in heart,” tempering his lustful embrace of the avant-garde with a nostalgia for the solidity of centuries-old traditions.

My Shit and My Love is a portrait of an artist at the crossroads of his most elemental extremes.  One can’t help but feel a little awed by its breathless immediacy.  Sometimes youth isn’t wasted on the young. And clearly, Walasse Ting relished every moment of it.

Apropos of the first large-scale retrospective of Ting’s work and legacy, From Heroic Expression to Resplendent Color, on view at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum through February 13th, 2011, the Taipei Times recently published an excellent profile of the artist. If you can’t make it to see the exhibition in person, F.A. Bernett Books is pleased to offer for sale a limited quantity of signed, first-edition copies of My Shit and My Love in fine condition. Please contact us for more information.

FAB Item I.D. # 46359

                          

Unique Dossier.- “Propaganda; British Frontier Service / 511.  Vol. II: Opened 30-2-65, Closed 18 Jun 69.” [46337]

Front of DDR aerial propaganda leaflet: Alles Hat Seine Grenzen! Es gibt sie beim Minirock... (Everything has its limit! Even miniskirts...)

In the mid 1960s, a heated barrage of artillery over the inner German border (separating the Soviet and Western occupation zones) delivered neither explosives nor shrapnel, but aerial propaganda leaflets. This was, after all, the cold war, and neither side wanted to risk an incident that could lead to World War III.  From Lübeck and  Schmidekopf, British Frontier Service operatives deployed to monitor and ameliorate tensions between the two sides kept a tidy, no-nonsense record of the exchange, thereby documenting its remarkable absurdities.

Back of DDR aerial propaganda leaflet: Und selbsverständlich, auch in der Politik. (And self-evidently, also in politics.)

F.A. Bernett Books has recently obtained a dossier marked “Propaganda; British Frontier Service / 511.  Vol. II: Opened 30-2-65, Closed 18 Jun 69,” containing examples of leaflets fired in large and small “propaganda rockets” and “metal coconuts” into Federal territory from the DDR, paired with “occurrence reports” documenting the time and place of ordinance. Other instances of cross-border incursions, including Nationale Volksarmee (NVA) defections and propaganda broadcasts delivered by vehicles equipped with loudspeakers are also duly noted.

Restricted Occurrence Report, 16th June 1969.

In a 1966 article entitled “Britons Who Help to Keep Frontier Peace,” the Times of London noted that “with its fleet of patrol cars, carrying built-in radio telephones and Union Jack badges, and its military language (“That’s the drill, Arthur”), the BFS brings to mind some imperial field force of the 1880s, nearer-flung than of yore, for whose members, perhaps, the Elbe is a faint substitute for the Nile, the Zambezi or the Irrawaddy.”

Joint British Army / British Frontier Service patrol on the inner German border between Helmstedt and Wolfsburg. Photography by Sanderson Rowe.

The Demarcation Line itself was a viscerally ugly physical marker of the high-voltage ideological tensions in play along the border. An information card produced by the German authorities outlined the features of “the prohibited belt of the Soviet-occupied zone” and their inherent dangers for visitors.

Information for the Visitor

BFS officials, who worked closely with members of the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) and West German Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS) border protection officers, also kept visual identification charts to help them distinguish friendly troops and military equipment from intruders.

Although the BFS archive contains few examples, the West Germans, too, fired propaganda rockets and directed balloon launches with aerial leaflets into the East. One apparent BRD propaganda leaflet compares the smiling visage of champion figure skater Gaby Seyfert, whose Olympic performance was a P.R. victory for East German socialism, with its menacing opposite, a scowling bulldog named Hilde Benjamin, East German Minister of Justice and principle architect of its Stalinist penal system.

Front of BRD aerial propaganda leaflet: Anerkannte DDR: Gaby Seyfert. (Acknowledged DDR: Gaby Seyfert.)

Front of BRD aerial propaganda leaflet: Hilde Benjamin. (Unacknowledged DDR: Hilde Benjamin.)

The BFS made careful note of East German military protests concerning the Western propaganda balloons, as well its in-kind response. A report filed on 16th May 1967 documents a typical exchange across the Demarcation Line.

Restricted Occurence Report, 16th May 1967.

Perhaps most brilliantly, the DDR printed and fired massive canisters of propaganda leaflets into West Germany with the slogan “Schluβ damit!” (Enough of that!), urging citizens of the Bundesrepublik to stage protests calling for the end of Western propaganda leaflet incursions into the East.

Schluβ damit! (Enough of that!)

This was a textbook case of a pot calling the kettle black, as the BFS dossier records an unbroken fussilade of DDR propaganda rockets during the same period, including the following choice examples.

Wie Sie Gleichen, Die Worte, und die Ziele. (How They Compare, the Words and the Goals.)

Der Streifenführer Meldet (The Sergeant Announces.)

Volk Unterm Helm (People under the Helmet.)

One of the most striking reports on file concerns an actual firefight between two defecting NVA soldiers and gun positions in a DDR observation tower along the Eastern perimeter of the Demarcation Line. The two soldiers made it to safety, and no one was injured in the exchange of gunfire.

NVA defection, incident report, 17 May 1967.

And among the strangest documents in the dossier are five issues of a serial named Contra, produced by the DDR in an effort to undermine BGS morale and solicit West German defections to the apparent socialist paradise which awaited them on the other side.

Contra Magazine

The tabloid was a kind of proletariat skin magazine, with breezy articles boasting of superior Soviet weapons systems, East German sports prowess, and goofy cheesecake photographs of scantily dressed women.

15-Uhr Nachrichten: Dieses Mädchen gefällt uns. Ende der durchslag. (3 pm news: We like this girl. End of the interruption.)

Kleines Malheur beim Karneval! (A little misshap at the Carnival!)

A regular feature also claimed to convey “warm wishes from the DDR” to current BGS troops on behalf of West German military defectors, who, judging by the photographs, were clearly enjoying the superior charms of these East German swimsuit models, along with the professional services of expert tailors and barbers.

Herzliche Grüsse as der DDR (Warm wishes from the DDR.)

In 1972 the two Germanys signed a treaty normalizing their relationship and recognizing each others’ autonomy, significantly reducing tensions along the Demarcation Line. England interpreted the move as a signal that its border patrol services were no longer needed and the BFS forces were dramatically reduced. Formally, the Service wound down its official monitoring operations in 1974. You can read more about its history here.

+~+~+~+~+

UPDATE, 12/16/2010:

A Journey Around My Skull (Will Schofield’s excellent blog) provides extended coverage of Contra!, the DDR tabloid for the BGS border patrol pictured above. Click through for more hot socialist cheesecake, big Soviet missiles, and Brian Jones in a Nazi uniform stomping on your little dolly…

+~+~+~+~+

F.A. Bernett is pleased to offer this unique dossier and its extraordinary contents.  Please contact us regarding price & availability. FAB Item I.D. # 46337.

                          

Damage. No. 1 (July 1979) through no. 12/13 (June 1981) (all published). [Title from masthead, Damage: An Inventory.]  San Francisco (Damaged Goods Co.) 1979-1981. [46316]

Damage: An Inventory. Issue number 4, January 1980.

A pronounced regionalism prevailed in the American underground music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s.  In California, the micro-climates of Los Angeles and San Francisco each nurtured a distinctive local take on punk rock. Local fanzines reflected this, with publications like Search & Destroy celebrating the eclecticism of the Bay Area while Slash Magazine spoke to the angular defiance of Melrose and Silverlake.  Brad Lapin’s Damage: An Inventory represented itself as a partisan of both communities, and furthermore, sought to connect West Coast punk to developments in Tokyo, Paris, London and elsewhere. The interest in other scenes was not in itself unusual for a punk fanzine, but Damage‘s coverage of the movement’s regional and cosmopolitan outposts was remarkable for a publication of its scope.  Issues regularly featured in-depth reports on developments in Japan, England and continental Europe, promoting a sense of connectedness to the global underground among its readers.

European Report

Damage also chronicled the minutia of punk and new wave happenings in Northern and Southern California through the eyes of local correspondents (among them later White Trash Debutante and Punk Globe editor Ginger Coyote.)

"Local Newz LA / Local Newz SF"

The Western Front Festivals of 1979 and 1980 sought to strengthen California’s connections to global punk and new wave movements. Its 1980 presentation drew dozens of obscure and well-known bands from the region as well as acts from New York, Canada, and the U.K. for 10 days of performances, films and openings at Bay Area venues. Damage co-sponsored the festivals and devoted special issues to each year’s events.

"Riot on the Western Front!"

The magazine and its cohort participated in cultural events well beyond the club scene.  Notably, during the 1980 election cycle in San Francisco, Jello Biafra (lead singer of the Dead Kennedys) registered as a candidate and actively ran for Mayor of San Francisco. Lapin, Coyote, and staff writer Tony Rocco took part in the effort to promote his candidacy as  a popular media spectacle and satire of corrupt local politics.

Biafra 6591 Votes (3%) !!

"Time for New Wave Government!"

In advance of San Francisco Zine Fest 2010, (in part organized by the excellent ‘zine dealer Matt Wobensmith of Göteblud), Lapin issued a statement about his work with Damage that eloquently encapsulates the magazine’s ethos, and its enduring interest for collectors and scholars of the punk era:

“While I trust that the magazine speaks for itself, both for good and ill, I suppose I could say by way of explanation that, beyond all the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, that is, beyond the pure visceral FUN of punk and life in the underground, there were also deeply serious issues of politics, of social justice and, above all, of aesthetics that connected and inspired the many people involved in the Damage project. Because these concerns were particularly articulated in the scene as it existed in San Francisco three decades ago, Damage’s importance today, like that of the other zines, is as a kind of constant witness to an unique time, place and circumstance; one that spoke and one hopes still speaks to the immanent primacy of youthful idealism and to the notion that there is a deep and abiding value in a radical, even desperate rejection of the commonplace, the accepted, the normal.”

You can read his entire statement here, on Mondo X, The Brad Lapin Weblog.

Damage, issue nos. 12/13 (final double issue), cover detail.

F.A. Bernett is pleased to offer a scarce complete set of Damage in generally excellent condition.  Please contact us regarding price & availability. FAB Item I.D. # 46316.

                          

Once again this autumn, The NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 promises to be among the most energizing and eclectic book-related conferences of the calendar year. Now in its fifth incarnation, the program attracts art book publishers, print makers, librarians, book dealers and collectors from around the world for 4 days of special exhibits and events. Clicking on the image above will take you to the Fair website for more details.

This year, F.A. Bernett Books is proud to participate as an antiquarian exhibitor.  If you’re able to attend, please stop by our booth in the dealer’s section on the first floor.  We’ll be located in space number D01.

Printed Matter, Inc. presents The NY Art Book Fair
November 5–7, 2010

Preview: November 4, 6-9 p.m. (Free and open to the public)

HOURS AND LOCATION

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave at the intersection of 46th Avenue
Long Island City, NY
Thursday, November 4, 6-9 p.m.
Friday, November 5 and Saturday, November 6, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.
Sunday, November 7, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

Admission to all fair events, except the conference, is free of charge.

Download our catalog of special offerings here (or by clicking the image below), or pick up a printed copy at the exhibit.

Our booth will feature 64 items you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else, including an original copy of Die Blutorgel, printed for the inaugural Vienna Actionist happening at at Perinetgasse 1 in 1962

as well as the first three issues of the Dutch new-wave periodical Het Bestaan

the macabre celebration of nightlife habitués in Jazz-age Paris, Eh bien, dansez maintenant!

and a handful of spectacular books related to the Zero Group, including Otto Piene’s  Werkverzeichnis der Druckgrafik 1960-76, which includes 57 hand-pulled screen prints.

We’re happy about this opportunity to share these items with new clients and old friends in New York and those of you who may be in town for the event or one of the other print fairs that weekend. If you’d like to make an appointment, please e-mail me.  Otherwise just stop by and browse.

And if you need more reasons to get excited about this event, visit Opening Ceremony’s month-long blog profile on dealers and exhibitor at the fair here.

See you at PS1!

                          

Arrenbrecht, Wilhelm. Der Schriftenmaler.  Internationales Schriften-Vorlage-Werk. Cologne, ca. 1895.  [46260]

"Caractères Réclame."

Once upon a time, merchants hoping to make a good impression on potential customers didn’t hire graphical user interface consultants, they hired top-flight sign painters.  Elegant hand-painted lettering in a shop window announced to passers-by that the proprietor had class and sophistication.  Based on an exceedingly rare portfolio of lettering samples we’ve acquired, Wilhelm Arrenbrecht seems to have been the go-to guy for tasteful mercantile announcements in the better windows of central Europe, circa 1890.

From simple prismatic font kits to baroque alphabetical fantasias, Der Schriftenmaler offered his clients (and presumably, clients of any sign painter who purchased the portfolio) an inspired range of lettering options.

Arrenbrecht , Wilhelm. Der Schriftenmaler. Internationales Schriften-Vorlage-Werk.

40 of them to be exact.  Here are a few of my favorites.

"Caractères Blocs Prismatiques."

"Caractères Anglais."

“Caractères Blocs Lapidaires.”

“Caractères Fantaisie.”

It’s worth noting that Arrenbrect clearly intended to address an international audience.  The work is titled in German, but the plates are labeled in French.  Furthermore, several of them supply lettering appropriate for specific languages, including Cyrillic and Hebraic characters.

"Charactères Italiques."

"Charactères Allemands Anciens"

"Caractères Russes."

"Charactères Hébraïques"

If any of our readers are clever enough to repackage these plates as digital font kits, we imagine they could make a killing. I, for one, would love to see how “Recto|Verso” would look rendered in Arrenbrect Caractères Réclame.

UPDATE, 9/7/2010:

Cult London-based graphic designer Arnoud Verhaeghe granted my wish.

Recto|Verso in Arrenbrect Caractères Réclame. Thanks Arnoud...

Amazing!

FAB Item I.D. # 46260.

                          

Stein, Aurel.  Serindia.  Detailed Report of Explorations in Central Asia and Westernmost China. 5 vols.  Oxford (Clarendon Press) 1921.  [46224]

Serindia, Vol. IV, Plates: Silk painting (Ch. xxviii 006) representing thousand-armed Avalokitesvara (Kuan-Yin) with attendant divinities, from 'Thousand Buddhas', Tun-Huang.

In the early 1900s, Wang Yuanlu, a Taoist priest acting as the self-appointed abbot of the Buddhist cave shrines at Dunhuang, made a startling discovery.  A crack in one of the cave’s brilliantly painted frescoes had revealed a previously walled-up, locked door.  Behind it lay a rock-cut chapel filled with thousands of ancient manuscripts, paintings and printed texts, undisturbed for more than 900 years.  Among them lay the oldest dated example of a printed book known to exist.

Serindia, Vol. II, Text: Wang Tao-Shih (Wang Yuanlu), Taoist priest at the 'Caves of the Thousand Buddhas'.

Word of the abbot’s discovery made its way to the village and from there  spread out along the ancient silk road trade routes connecting the desert outpost to locations in mainland China and India. One of the first Western scholars to catch wind of the discovery was Sir Aurel Stein, the eminent British archeologist and geographer of Hungarian birth who had recently gained renown for an earlier series of fruitful explorations within the region.

As he recounts in Serindia, the monumental scholarly report detailing the movements and discoveries of his second journey through the region between 1906-1908, enticing rumors of the freshly unearthed manuscript hoard reached his party as he was already underway toward Dunhuang (which he refers to throughout the text as ‘Tun-Huang’, consistent with the transliteration of his time) for a survey of its well-known cave frescoes and ancient Buddhist statuary.

Serindia, Vol. II, Text: Rows of cave shrines, some showing decayed porches, near cave Ch. IX, Ch'ien-Fo-Tung, Tun-Huang.

Serindia, Vol. II, Text: Cave shrines near Ch. VIII, 'Caves of the Thousand Buddhas', Tun-Huang.

Serindia, Vol. 5, Maps: Sheet No. 78, Tun-Huang, depicting location of the Magao caves and Dunhuang manuscript hoard.

Upon meeting Wang Yuanlu, Stein approached the topic of the manuscripts with great caution.  He was deeply aware that the cave shrines, far from being forgotten ancient ruins, were very much still active holy sites of great importance to the local villagers.

As he explained to the Royal Geographic Society during a lecture delivered in March 1909:

“…it scarcely needed the experience of a great annual religious fair which drew the villagers and townspeople of the oasis by the thousands to the “Thousand Buddhas’ just about the time of my return, to make it clear to me that the cave temples, notwithstanding all apparent decay, were still real cult places “in being.”

To his great relief, Wang, though anxious at first that he not disturb or remove relics from the holy sites, proved amenable to persuasion through a mixture of good omens and cold, hard cash.  With the assistance of Stein’s guide and interpreter, Chiang-ssŭ-yieh, the two discovered a mutual admiration for Hsüan-tsang (Xuan Tsang), the 7th-century Buddhist monk whose recorded travels had served as the basis for much of Stein’s interest in the region.

In light of their common spiritual patron, the trepidatious priest agreed to show them a handful of sample documents from the vault.  By mere chance he struck upon a finely rendered Chinese Buddhist scroll, the colophon of which declared it to have been brought from India and translated by none other than Hsüan-tsang.  “Was it not Hsüan-tsang himself,” so argued Chiang-ssŭ-yieh “who at the opportune moment revealed the hiding-place of that manuscript hoard in order to prepare it for [Stein], his disciple from distant India, a fitting most antiquarian reward on the western-most confines of China proper?”

Serindia, Vol. II, Text: Cave shrine with view of previously hidden door (extreme right), with manuscript bundles.

Wang Yuanlu agreed that “the quasi-divine hint” entitled his visitors to a first-hand look at the temple library.  Once inside, Stein reveled at the shear magnitude of the cache.  Stacked before him, in a room of close to 500 cubic feet (upon subsequent measurement) was a solid block of manuscript bundles rising more than 10 feet.  Ultimately, it yielded nearly 40,000 texts dating back from the fifth century to the tenth century, with examples of manuscripts in ancient Chinese, Tibetan, Uigher, Central-Asian Brahmi, Turkic and Syriac representing Buddhist, Taoist, Manichean, Nestorian and Judaic traditions.

The stash also contained a variety of silk banners and paintings, stunningly preserved in their entombment from damage by light, heat, moisture or insects.

In the end, Wang Yuanlu was willing to part with all but the most sacred Chinese canonical texts in exchange for approximately 220 pounds sterling in silver ingots.  After paying the tribute, Stein was allowed to gather more than 24 cases of material for removal to the British Museum.  Scholars have since determined that his take included an exceedingly old copy of the The Diamond Sutra in a 5th-century Chinese translation of the original  Sanskrit Mahayan Buddhist text.

Dated on its colophon with the Chinese calendar date for May 11, 868, the document is now considered the oldest printed book to have survived fully intact to the present day.  1,142 years old at the moment of this blog post, it predates the Gutenburg bible by nearly 600 years.

In the years following, Paul Pelliot, Sergei Oldenburg and other European explorers were able to strike similar bargains for the remaining material, and the Dunhuang manuscripts dispersed to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Berlin Library and the Oriental Institute in St Petersburg, among other institutions. Today, The International Dunhuang Project is seeking to digitally reunite the scattered fragments for more comprehensive scholarly access.

Serindia remains one of the most significant scholarly works published on the Magao caves and the Dunhuang manuscripts.  Impressively, however, the incident represents only a fraction of its contents.  Weighing in at 5 vols., including more than 1580 pp. text, 344 photographic illustrations on plates in the text volumes, 59 additional plates in the text volumes showing site plans, a plate volume with 155 additional plates (some in color, some folding), and 95 large folding color maps with exquisite detail showing the full geographical context of the expedition, an early reviewer in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland rightly described the work as “monumental”:

“‘Monumental’ is an adjective that is apt to be abused; but few will question its applicability to the present work, which describes in detail the progress and results of what is perhaps the most fruitful archaeological expedition that has been undertaken in modern times.”

The extremely scarce (and far superior) original edition of the work is rightly considered a high point in the scholarly literature on Central Asia, and overall, a landmark in archaeological publishing.

The 1921 Clarendon Press edition of Serindia. Detailed Report of Explorations in Central Asia and Westernmost China.

F.A. Bernett is pleased to offer a complete set, in generally excellent condition (most pages uncut) of the Clarendon Press Serindia.

Please contact us regarding its price & availability.

FAB Item I.D. # 46224.

UPDATE: Undiplomatic, Gerard Russell’s generally excellent blog on “life after diplomacy” features an intriguing photograph of Stein’s final resting place in Kabul (where Russell recently spent time in service of the British diplomatic corps and U.N.) The post also sheds light on Stein’s colorful contemporaries and predecessors, including Arminius Vambery.

My thanks to Russell for linking to our Serindia post.

–A.F.

                          

Meneeley, Edward. IBM Drawings. New York (Teuscher Editions) 1966.  (Teuscher Editions, 2).  All prints initialled and dated by the artist.  Folio number 10 from a total edition of 15. [45865]

Meneeley, Edward.  Portraits: People and Objects. New York (Teuscher Editions) 1968. (Teuscher Editions, 3). All prints initialled and dated (1967) by the artist.  Folio number 10 from a total edition of 15. [45864]

Edward Meneeley. IBM Drawings. New York (Teuscher Editions) 1966. Print.

In 1959, a machine called the Xerox 914 introduced electrostatic photo-mechanical document duplication to commercial users.  Photocopying—as the technique quickly became known—revolutionized the ways in which texts and images could be reproduced and circulated.  Artists were quick to take notice.  Edward Meneeley, a young painter and photographer living in New York City, was among the first to explore the photocopy as a fine-art print medium.

Edward Meneeley. "Creativity. A Portrait," Portraits: People and Objects. New York (Teuscher Editions) 1968. Print.

In 1964 Meneeley visited the offices of a friend at IBM and found himself fascinated by the Xerox copier his companion used to duplicate a typewritten letter.  As he relates in the catalog for a later exhibition of his electrostatic prints at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, Meneeley was struck by the machine’s unique graphic qualities and decided to employ the medium in a series of illustrations accompanying an excerpt from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons:

Edward Meneeley: The Electrostatic Printing Process as a Legitimate Art Form. Thoughts and Reflections on His Prints 1964-1968. Edward Meneeley interviewed by Christopher Marigny.

Pleased with the outcome of his experiments, Meneeley composed a series of 10 images based on the extemporaneous assemblage of objects laid directly on the Xerox machine’s glass plate. The assemblages were captured by the machine’s imaging sensors and duplicated directly onto cotton rag paper in an edition of 50 signed and numbered prints. Together with gallerist Wayne Adams, Meneeley published the collection as Illustrations for Tender Buttons (New York City, 1965.  Teuscher Editions 1.)

The duo went on to produce two additional series of electrostatic prints, IBM Drawings (New York City, 1966, Teuscher Editions 2) and Portraits: People and Objects (New York City, 1968, Teuscher Editions 3) in an edition of 15 sets each.  In the subsequent series, Meneeley further explored the performative boundaries of extemporaneous assemblage for the copy machine, and instead of white cotton rag, he printed the compositions on a mix of silk-screened color paper stocks.  The results remain as vibrant and striking today as when they were first pulled, offering a crisp (yet still somehow ghostly—being true to the limitations of early photocopying technology)  record of the objects and image fragments Meneeley arranged on the machine’s duplicating glass.

IBM Drawings was a direct response to the “industrial chapel” Meneeley encountered at the technology company’s New York headquarters.  He explains that the prints (composed of tapes, ribbons, punch cards and other artifacts of the high-tech corporate environment) signified his attempt to “find the appropriate graffiti, so to speak…that would enable me potentially to seduce the inhabitants of this temple into having an experience quite contrary to the characteristics of that environment.”  The work was accompanied by a text Meneeley also salvaged from the organization’s technical training manuals, consisting largely of mathematical equations used in the computational process.

Edward Meneeley. IBM Drawings. New York (Teuscher Editions) 1966. Print.

Edward Meneeley. IBM Drawings. New York (Teuscher Editions) 1966. Print.

Edward Meneeley. IBM Drawings. New York (Teuscher Editions) 1966. Accompanying text.

Portraits: People and Objects provides a more intimate record of Meneeley’s associations at the time, including a striking portrait of Jasper Johns assembled from fragmentary photographs, a similar image of Gertrude Stein, and other more light-hearted gestures, including a “portrait” of french fries and what may be the first-ever recorded attempt to photocopy human buttocks.

Edward Meneeley. "A Portrait of Jasper Johns," Portraits: People and Objects. New York City (Teuscher Editions) 1968. Print.

Edward Meneeley. "Portrait for Gertrude," Portraits: People and Objects. New York City (Teuscher Editions) 1968. Print.

Edward Meneeley. "Dangerous Foods. A Portrait of French Fries," Portraits: People and Objects. New York (Teuscher Editions) 1968. Print.

Edward Meneeley. "Bottoms Up. A Rear Portrait," Portraits: People and Objects. New York (Teuscher Editions) 1968. Print.

Meneeley’s forward-thinking use of the emerging technology garnered attention for the work, and the portfolios were included along with several of his paintings in a one-man show at Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1971.  Today, viewed through the lens of explosive growth in scanning, printing, and duplicating technologies of all kinds, his electrostatic prints are all the more remarkable for the sense of nostalgia they elicit from the viewer.

Altogether, the Teuscher Editions portfolios comprise a fascinating link in the chain of technological appropriation by 20th-century visual artists.  They also provide a powerful testament to Meneeley’s egregiously overlooked compositional and conceptual talents, as well as his earthy sense of humor.

Edward Meneeley (artist’s website).

FAB Item I.D. # 45864 and 45865.

                          

Album de Fotografias del Decorado, Sant Jordi Mata l'Aranya (detail)

My deepest thanks to Will Schofield, the brain behind A Journey Round My Skull for featuring Recto|Verso in today’s post.  If you aren’t already familiar, A Journey is essential reading (and viewing) for anyone concerned with the lost / secret history of 19th- and 20th-century avant-garde literature and graphic design.  It’s by far one of my all-time favorite places on the internet, and the first link I click in my RSS feed every morning before work.  Go there and subscribe now…

                          

Sem (pseudonym for Georges Goursat).  Sem au Bois (title stamped in gilt on front cover).  N.p. (Paris?) ca. 1908.   Signed and dated 29/4/08 in pencil on the last plate; 6 other plates with the artist’s printed insignia.  [45958]

"La 'MERCEDES'' des Commissaires," panel 1 of Sem au Bois.

A jewel in the crown of Baron Haussmann’s modernized Paris, the Bois de Boulogne opened as a park in 1852.  Funded by Napolean III — who’s said to have been taken with London’s Hyde Park  during his exile there in the 1830s — the “Boulogne Woods” offered the social elite of Belle Époque Paris an ideal grounds for the public display of their accumulating wealth.  In 1908, Georges Goursat, who was known at the time by his moniker “Sem,” caricatured the ensuing parade of bourgeois vanity in a spectacular yet little-known accordion-format panoramic album entitled Sem au Bois.

Nearly 30 feet in length when fully revealed, the work shows a procession of carriages with men in top-hats, women in their finery, and even one horse decked out in high heeled shoes.   It is possible (though we cannot confirm it), that the procession is circular and that the final image is meant to connect to the first.  And although they’re unfamiliar to us, the figures depicted are clearly recognizable individuals, many of them likely social celebrities in their day.

"La 'MORS' du Starter," panel 8 of Sem au Bois.

"'APRES LA COURSE' beaucoup d'attele mais peu d'elus," panel 14 of Sem au Bois

"La Panthere," panel 11 of Sem au Bois.

Readers who’ve seen Gigi may find the images familiar, as the film’s opening credits play out against a montage of Sem’s illustrations for fashionable magazines of the era.   Cecil Beaton — hired by producer Vincente Minnelli as general production designer and visual stylist — is reported to have drawn inspiration for many of the film’s costumes and set dressings directly from Sem’s caricatures, among other sources.  After the Sem-inspired credits set the tone, Gigi opens with an extended view of the pageantry on display in the Bois de Boulogne (with Maurice Chevalier as your guide), including a parade of horse drawn carriages that bear a striking similarity to the ones in Sem au Bois.

(Sorry for the German-language YouTube link, it’s the only one I could locate with footage of the carriage procession…)

Is it likely that Beaton was aware of Sem au Bois and meant to reference it directly?   Quite possibly.  What’s more, the seamless panorama format of Sem au Bois almost seems itself a clever nod to the emerging art of cinema, innovated by the Lumière brothers in 1895 and still very much in its infancy in 1908.  It may also simply be that the film and the album are mutually resonant because they each celebrate and gently mock the follies and exuberant stylings of fashionable society in turn-of-the-century Paris.

The first 12 panels of the album appear below in stitched scans depicting 3 panels each.  Click away for high-res images.  And if you happen to be an historian of Belle Epoque Paris (clever you) and recognize anyone among the caricatures, please let us know in the comments field…

Panels 1 through 3 of Sem au Bois.

Panels 4 through 6 of Sem au Bois.

Panels 7 through 9 of Sem au Bois.

Panels 10 through 12 of Sem au Bois.

FAB Item I.D. # 45958

                          

Members of ARLIS/NA, the Art Libraries Society of North America at F.A. Bernett Books' Boston offices.

This past weekend on a beautiful spring night in April, more than 100 of our friends and colleagues in ARLIS/NA, the Art Libraries Society of North America, joined us for music, food, drink and conversation at F.A. Bernett Book’s humble headquarters in Boston’s historic Leather District.  It was the first time in more than13 years at the location (previously, F.A. Bernett Books was based in New York City and Larchmont) that we’ve thrown a party.  We certainly had a good time and it seems our guests did, too.  A few photographs, and link to a slide show featuring many more, after the jump.

Since we knew we would be having guests, we did our best to put a shine on the 3rd floor loft we call home.

The office lounge, featuring artworks by Larry Malam (right) and Anne Gilson Haney (left).

After exhibits closed for the day and final sessions adjourned, many of our guests walked the scenic 2 mile route from the Seaport World Trade Center to our work space.  F.A. Bernett partner Larry Malam (pictured far left) was happy to offer them a glass of wine straight off the elevator.

Larry Malam appropriately welcomes an elevator load of thirsty colleagues.

Baker’s Best, our caterers, did a laudable job of keeping the drinks flowing and making sure everyone was well fed.

The Baker's Best spread...

Early arrivals put our lounge to test (and apparently didn’t find it lacking).

The office lounge, put to its intended use.

The room filled quickly but was never uncomfortably crowded.

Party in the stacks...is everyone wearing their white gloves?

F.A. Bernett staff members Carrie Pinsker and Arthur Fournier.

Eileen McGowan and Peter Bernett.

Larry Malam and Betsy Peck Learned of Roger Williams University

A small group kept things going well past the party’s stated 9 pm end time—and we were glad to have them.

Old and new friends stuck around for dumplings (Chinatown is only two blocks away) and the tunes on Fournier's iPod as the party wound down.

But as far as we know, no one missed Sunday’s closing sessions or membership luncheon (pictured) because of it…

Members of ARLIS/NA gathered in Boston for their 38th annual society meeting.

For more photos, and there at least 30 additional shots in the set, view our Flickr slideshow, here.

Our thanks to everyone who came out and made the evening such a memorable one.  We look forward to keeping in touch this year and to seeing you again next spring at ARLIS in Minneapolis.

All the best,

Peter, Larry, Carrie & Arthur