Provenance: Sydney Cockerell, with his manuscript annotations and separate notes discussing this work.

This is one of the first manuscripts or printed books that I acquired. It captured the thrill for someone like me, a neophyte with a curiosity that far exceeded my knowledge, to actually hold something like this in my hands and anticipate the many dozens of questions that would follow, many still unanswered.

This manuscript of sixteen leaves is comprised of two sets of riveting, fantasy-based images, which in their contempt and sarcasm came to represent the excesses and evils of the papacy during the Great Western Schism, and then foretell the future of a church ruled over by an angelic pope. Visually, it struck me at once as a mirror of the oppressive, fear-mongering tactics of the church. The bizarre, prophetic meanderings of the text has been attributed to the mystic Joachim di Fiore (b. Celico, c. 1132) and became the inspiration for radical movements among fourteenth-century Franciscans that led to excommunications and those movements being declared heretical.

The two groups of drawings are by two different artists, and in his manuscript notes in the endpapers, Sydney Cockerell refers to the first of these sets as the more compelling, noting that “Bernard Berenson regards these pictures as the work of an artist 'between Giovanni di Paolo and Vechietta.’”]]> Siena, workshop of Vecchietta, principally Benvenuto di Giovanni, ]]> Ned O’Gorman was a child when he:

"decided I could write a poem. I told myself that if what I wrote pleased me and was a poem, I would be a poet. I took up a pencil and wrote. Snow beyond, sunlight on the carpet. The intricate and delicate carvings of vines and fruit along the edge of the table, the green baize center like a little lawn. The warmth of the Franklin stove, the icicles hanging from the windows. My hand on the pencil, writing. I was there in my enclosed garden. I finished my poem, looked at it, and what I read I determined was a poem." (The Other Side of Loneliness, 2006, 86.)

He published seven books of poetry and was awarded the Lamont Poetry Selection from the Academy of American Poets for his first book of poetry, The Night of the Hammer, in 1959.

Eventually he began painting, making collages, small sculptures and artist’s books. The visual art reflects the same lyric imagery, primary colors, playfulness, despair, and desire one finds in his poetry. “… I bring you flaring squares, circles, perpendiculars and trapezoids; I bring you color from the sun. I bring you folderol….” (“L’Annunciazione from Bellini,” in Five Seasons of Obsession, New and Selected Poems, 2001, 18)]]>
This 449-page specimen book describes the typefaces available at the De Vinne Press, “diligently gathered from leading foundries of this country and Europe to please the tastes of many customers.” Never one to miss an opportunity for instruction, De Vinne made it a compendium of typographic information. The volume was produced at an important moment, just before his firm was incorporated in 1908 as The De Vinne Press (which it had long been called).

It is open to Great-Primer No. 4 from the Conner Type Foundry, the face used in two large and famous De Vinne Press productions, as the page explains.]]>
I set out to read Herman Melville, not collect him. After hearing the writer Robert Penn Warren read the poem “Shiloh,” I resolved to read all of Melville's works. Inevitably I became a collector as well. When I began, I was frequently told that all of the great material was in institutions. Acquiring this volume convinced me to go forward; later experience has shown the naysayers were wrong. This is a presentation copy of Melville's first book, and one fraught with irony. In a special full morocco binding, it is inscribed “Henry A. Smythe Esq. with the Sincere Regards of Herman Melville, Xmas 1868.” Smythe, an admirer of Melville's works, was the collector of the Port of New York. He had just given the author a job in the Customs House, where Melville later said that he sought to “bury himself alive” for the next two decades. This was a thank-you present for the man who had allowed Melville to turn his back on writing.

Typee was Melville's first book, and a resounding success; this is a sixth edition, suggesting its ongoing popularity. Melville came to hate his most salable work, finding himself typecast as “the man who lived among cannibals.” Still, he chose it for a gift, knowing it would be more appreciated than Moby-Dick.]]> Chromogenic color print, no. 24/100, 9¼ x 11½ in.

Candida Hӧfer’s “photographs are sober and restrained in feel—the atmosphere is disturbed by neither visitors nor users, especially as she forgoes any staging of the locations. The emptiness is imbued with substance by a subtle attention to colour, and the prevailing silence instilled with a metaphysical quality that gives voice to the objects, over and above the eloquence of the furnishings and the pathos of the architecture….” This crisp description of Höfer’s artistry can be found, along with Trinity College Library Dublin I, in her book of photographs, Libraries (2005).

Aside from the brilliance of this composition, which presents Trinity College Library as a "chambered nautilus" of receding spaces, I responded to this photograph, purchased at a satellite fair of Art Basel Miami Beach, because of the library depicted. My graduate thesis was on the art criticism of Samuel Beckett. A further expansion of the scope of the topic to include a wide swath of the writer's critical output necessitated investigations into the “systems” of Dante, Bruno, Vico and Joyce, among other great thinkers. This photograph is a reminder to me of the great erudition that informs all of Beckett's oeuvre, and the venerable institution that helped foster his imagination.]]>
I collect early twentieth-century modernist poetry, especially Ezra Pound and writers associated with him. Wyndham Lewis was an avant-garde artist and writer and close collaborator with Pound in pre-World War I London. This book represents the fulfillment (however belated) of Lewis’s 1912 ambition to illustrate Timon of Athens in book form. Lewis created the artwork for Timon and published a portfolio of the drawings in 1913, but could not find a publisher who would produce it using his art. Ninety years later, thanks to the collaboration of Charles D. Jones of LaNana Creek Press and Omar Pound, Timon of Athens was published as Lewis envisioned, taking its imagery from Pound’s personal copy of Lewis’s extremely rare 1913 portfolio.]]>
In 2012, while on safari in Botswana, I found sheets of paper made from elephant dung! Coarse but pliable—and NOT smelly—I tried to envision what paper engineers would make from them and sent a sheet to my dear friend and book artist, Ed Hutchins.

Imagine my surprise when I received an envelope from Ed with a note that said, “You are the only person in my life who has sent me rare poopy paper.” Inside was a greeting card made of the dung paper and was itself an elephant pop-up! He didn’t even know that I also collect elephants. And like an elephant, I’ll never forget Ed and this card, which I treasure.]]> Edition of 35.

The Word Returned is Ken’s masterpiece and arguably the most important artist’s book produced in Britain since the 1930s.

Ken described the facture as “polychrome letterpress and handwork deploying a raised mounting board, lead type, wood-letter, zinc and polymer plates and zinc stencils.” The stencils were never meant to be printed this way and each letter had to be printed individually—66,000 crankings of the press!

This book was a turning point for me. I bought it in America and only then realized that I could have driven to Bristol and acquired it directly from its creator. Meeting Ken and discussing his work made me feel closer to the other visionary artist-printers that I had begun to collect, from Cobden-Sanderson to Hammer to Iliazd. All these ”outsiders” barely register in the broad histories of art and design in the twentieth century.]]> Designer binding by Michael Wilcox (1989). Illustrated with 62 woodcut illustrations by Barry Moser, with an appreciation by Justin G. Schiller. No. 79 of 350 copies, with presentation and pencil vignette by Moser dated 15 January 1986.

My life with books began with collecting The Wizard of Oz and its sequels at age eight and by 1956 (age twelve), a selection from my library was loaned to Columbia University Libraries for its centenary exhibition honoring L. Frank Baum. That was also the year CBS televised the MGM film and borrowed my first edition (1900) for its emcee Bert Lahr to use when introducing the movie; on that occasion I was one of two children on his lap, the other was Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland’s daughter. Fast forward thirty-five years: I first saw this Michael Wilcox binding on exhibit at The Grolier Club in 1990, and when the Elkind Library came up for sale at Sotheby’s New York in 1994, I was fortunate to purchase it.

Whereas Moser chiefly illustrated the Oz text using American political personalities as models, Wilcox adapted famous symbols of popular American culture: the Wizard is Harry Houdini and Shirley Temple is Dorothy, not only MGM’s first choice for the role but also a national symbol of the ideal child. New York in gold outline becomes Oz. The gateway into the city runs along the Manhattan Bridge. Within the two circles are representations of the tower of the Jefferson Court House, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building to the far left. The combination of colors appears like modern motorways with overpasses and underpasses, but only the yellow-colored road leads to the Emerald City.]]> Designer binding by George Kirkpatrick. Edition of 125.

This copy of The Tempest is housed in an extraordinary commission binding by my good friend George Kirkpatrick. But it is the story of how the binding came to be that makes it most special for me.

In 2012, George had a major stroke and was told that he would never work again. To motivate him to overcome this, I sent him the sheets of The Tempest (the text is from the 1623 First Folio) and asked him to bind them and enter it in an upcoming international designer binding competition. He refused, but I persisted, and he eventually conceded.

When I saw the wonderful binding, I grew alarmed because the terms of the competition gave Gordon Getty the right to buy the first- and second-prize winners. So I sent George a second set of the sheets to create an identical binding, except for a personal notation on the rear doublure made of leather. George's binding won one of the third-prize distinguished book awards (he should have won the first prize) and he has now resumed his career as a master designer binder.]]>