STRICKLAND, WILLIAM.
Spectacularly Long Chromolitograph Plate. Published by the Author.London: George Bell.Cambridge: Mr. E. Meadows. (1849). Printed by Day and Son. Tall thin folio, publisher's blind-stamped cloth; gilt lettering within floral border on front cover. Small contemporary trade label from A. Tarrant, Binder and another (later): Restored by Blair Jeary/Burghley House/Stamford on front pastedown. Archival restoration to marginal chips on leaves and plate hinges. Seven accordion folded and hinged chromolithographed plates unfolding to six feet by John Sleigh, reproducing the intricately geometric and pictorial painted wood ceiling of Peterborough Cathedral which dates to around 1230. Julie Mellby, Princeton University: "It is conceivable that such a complex project might have taken ten years to complete; copying the ceiling, transferring the designs to multiple lithographic stones, and printing the plates. The color registration alone is an astonishing tour de force." Not in Ruari McLean, Victorian Book Design and Colour Printing; Abbey, Life; Tweyman, Lithography; or Joan Friedman, Colour Printing in England. Size: Folio
COHEN, ELAINE LUSTIG AND ARTHUR COHEN
Collection of Ex Libris catalogues, New York, 1974-1990, in original wrappers, various formats. Mostly fine and unmarked except where noted. Ex Libris Rare Books was founded in 1973 by graphic designer and painter Elaine Lustig Cohen and her husband Arthur Cohen. They were among the first American dealers in European and Russian avant-garde books and periodicals, issuing catalogues devoted to Surrealism and Dada, Bauhaus, Constructivism and Futurism, German Expressionism, Master of Design, and so on. Designed by Elaine Lustig Cohen and several by Tamar Cohen and one or two in the Rarae Aves series by Trevor Winkfield. Invaluable references for collectors, dealers, curators and design historians. Numbered catalogues: #3, 4, 6 (worn), 7, 8, 9, 11, 11 (12 does not exist), 13, 14, 15, 15 (should have been numbered 16), 17 Miscellaneous catalogues: Zurich Book Fair, 1978; Piet Zwart , 1981; German Expressionism, 1984; Rarae Aves 6, 1984; Herbert Bayer/Piet Zwart, 1987) Short Lists: 1 - 23, 26-31 plus two duplicates of 3 and 28.
BALLETS RUSSES
Folio, green silk over thick beveled boards with large inset color illustration from Natalia Goncharova's design for "Firebird". Endpapers color- stenciled with names of the dances, dancers, composers, and choreographers, and in the center that of the impresario Serge Diaghilev. Silk faded; a little edge wear to bottom of front board. An exceptionally nice copy of this magnificent book. A compilation of the most important special issues of the theatrical periodical "Comoedia Illustré" and souvenir programs for the 1909-1921 seasons of the Ballets Russes, compiled by the program publishers themselves, Maurice and Jacques de Brunoff, Explanatory forewords by the critic Valerian Svetlov. Lavishly illustrated with photographs and black and white and splendid color plates, some heightened with gilt and silver, of the dancers, costumes and stage decor. Work by Léon Bakst, Valentine Hugo, André Derain, Alexandre Benois, Mikhail Larionov. Natalia Goncharova, José Sert, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. Dancers include Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara, Karsavina, Michael and Vera Fokine, and Ida Rubenstein. Léon Bakst's brilliantly exotic and vivid designs for costumes and stage design revolutionized theater and fashion in the first quarter of the 20th century, drawing on Neo-Russian, Orientalist, and ancient Greek motifs. The May 1917 issue is devoted primarily to the ballet "Parade". In his introduction, "Parade et l'Esprit Nouveau", Guillaume Apollinaire coins the term "surrealism", laying the foundation for this movement. "Parade" is a collaboration among Erik Satie, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Léonide Massine, and Serge Diaghilev. Picasso's costumes are depicted in two pochoir-colored plates: "Costume de Chinois" and "Costume d'Acrobate". A copy is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (rebound without the original cover plaque by Goncharova) and another copy is featured in the 2019 exhibition "Hymn to Apollo/The Ancient World and the Ballets Russes" at the NYU Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.
LUGRIN, P.
Volume I, Numbers 1-12, 10/1/1904 to 9/1/1905. Complete first year. Folio, publisher's thick tan boards with floral decoration in yellow and black and lettering. Text and designs by Professor P. Lugrin, Geneva. Practical Art Nouveau ornament and decorative arts for the professional crafts person for work in leather, copper, pochoir, embroidery, pyrogravure, and metalwork. Numerous full page and smaller figures in the text of patterns and finished products for boxes, mirror, jardinières, textiles, etc. In a rear pocket, remarkably preserved, are twelve folded guides in color and tints and twelve large tissue paper patterns, some folding, and three in color. Size: Folio
GINSBURGER, ROGER.
8vo, striking geometric binding of silver and blue lettering on red background with bands of silver and blue at top and bottom. Spine with red lettering on silver. Fine. Roger Ginsburger (pseudonym Pierre Villon under the Occupation) was an architect and critic and member of the French Communist party and of the Resistance. With 123 photographic plates of work between the wars by Le Corbusier, Lurçat, Mallet-Stevens, Perriand, and his own. Sections on interior design and wood and metal furniture, including that by Le Corbusier, Perriand and himself, hotels, villas, factories, bridges, shops and galleries.
TRIMBLE, ISAAC P., M.D.
American Color Plate Botany. 4to, dark blue cloth with ornamental lettering in gilt on front cover and in blind on back cover. Binding a little discolored, small nick at spine, internal crack. Plates bright with original tissue guards. A practical manual for fruit-farmers by the chief entomologist for the New Jersey Agricultural Society to aid in identifying harmful insects. An in-depth study of the Curculio beetle and apple moth that attack the young fruits of the apricot, plum, nectarine, cherry and apple in an attempt to eradicate them. Eleven lithographic plates, nine colored and two tinted, attractive in a somewhat morbid way, of insect-ravaged fruit, showing fruits at various stages of maturity and decay. Hochstein (Anthony?) was a New York City artist, who specialized in flowers, fruits and insects and worked with several publishers of horticultural texts. Hedrick, page 529: "The plates are rather horrifying examples of all the problems from insects which faced the fruit grower." Bennett, American Nineteenth Century Color Plate books, page 106. Not in Reese, Nineteenth Century American Color Plate Books.
TAYLOR, J.
Fourth Edition, enlarged. 8vo, contemporary boards, worn; original paper spine label worn but legible; front joint worn but holding. An ownership signature dated 1819 and a small later bookplate. Five editions appeared between 1789 and 1821 attesting to the passion for classical architecture. Eleven engraved plates. Eileen Harris, pages 399-400: ".its popularity demonstrates the demand by people of taste and reading for general information not too fatiguing to understand and remember in a volume not so large as to be daunting". "Readers are promised that they will be in step with fashion, assisted in their travels, and even able to sketch any drawing of architecture. from which a workman will readily reduce the smaller parts to the exactness requisite to be worked from. BOUND IN is a rare twelve-page list of J. Taylors architectural books," "A List of Books on the Various Branches of Architecture and Building". Undated. Included are Reptons Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, published in 1816, and the fourth volume of Stuart and Revetts Antiquities of Athens. Size: 8vo
Black cloth spine and color pictorial boards in orange, white and black. Orange endpapers decorated with industrial cogs. Small, closed repaired tear on front endpaper. Remarkable copy of an exceedingly rare book. (A facsimile was printed in 2009 and is widely held institutionally.) With 62 pages; text and illustrations in sharp primary colors on facing pages tell the story of a little boy robot who grew up out of pieces of a wrecked steam engine, an old trolley car and a broken automobile. He has constructed himself out of the wreckage of technology: drill, saws, wheel, pliers, chisel, hammers, etc.Higonnet, Margaret, "Modernism and Childhood: Violence and Renovation" in The Comparatist, Volume 33 (May 2009), University of North Carolina Press. discusses the brilliantly experimental design of three Modernist children's books: El Lissitzky, Suprematist Story of Two Squares, l922; Kurt Schwitters, Die Scheuche (The Scarecrow), 1925; and Mary Liddell, Little Machinery, 1926. "(Liddell's) text plays with punning fonts, typographic layout, a linear frame through which her protagonist's energies pass, and explosive interactions between text and images that seem inspired by Lissitzky's experiments with visual codes for force . Energetic diagonals invoke the speed and energy of (the boy's) work, while images of his materials spill laterally from one page to the next, into the text. Electric sparks speed across the page in jagged lines, and zigzag cuts by Little Machinery's hyperactive saw run across the gutter into the text. Typography and images are tightly interconnected. Letters are composed of nails, assimilating the work of writing to the work of building In spite of their stylistic differences, and in spite of conspicuously distinct politics, each of these books exploits the visual energy of layout on the page to support an idealizing message centered on the utopian child." A copy is held at Princeton, Cotsen Library 21251.
Brown cloth with black corner ornaments and border for large gilt ornamental central lettering. Recased with perfectly matched new spine and new endpapers. Large label on front paste-down retained, reading "This Album is the Property of This Hotel " A beautiful fresh copy. Pictorial lithograph title page and 19 lithograph plates, all signed "G.W. Averell & Co. del & print. N.Y.", facing pages of ads for New York merchants: wine importer, steamship lines, printers, tailors, tobacco and billiard table purveyors, shops selling Chinese and Japanese goods, and many others.Wonderful plates, each including several New York City scenes and characters: Jewish tailors on Chatham Street, Chinese opium den, immigrants at Castle Garden, park scenes, street vendors, Fulton Ferry, horse racing, boxing, theater, an African American and other ethnic types.
Two volumes. 8vo, polished calf; original spines gilt lettered, decorated and banded with gilt ornaments. Spines rubbed and laid down on later tan calf binding with gilt corner ornaments and rules by Tout. Marbled endpapers, inner dentelles gilt, all edges gilt. Text fresh and clean with no foxing or offsetting. The first volume with engraved frontispiece, 183 wood-engraved vignettes and 100 wood-engraved initials after William Harvey and James Northcote. ∫ | 27 The second volume with 177 wood-engraved vignettes and 101 wood-engraved initials by Harvey and Northcote. Gordon Ray, The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914, #55 and # 56. Mark Ledbury, An underappreciated and courageously eccentric masterpiece . . . Idiosyncratic, personal and visionary . . . . Exhibition at Yale Center for British Art, 2014, Picture Talking: James Northcote and the Fables. David Bland, A History of Book Illustration, page 255: The work throughout is extremely fine and delicate, more like copper than wood, and in the initials which were wholly designed by Harvey we can discern the beginning of Victorian baroque which was such a world away from Bewicks romanticism.
8vo, contemporary 3/4 red morocco over patterned boards and marbled endpapers by Champs, Paris. Spine tips a little worn. One of only fifty copies on Japan paper. An attractive copy with the best possible provenance. Pencilled presentation from Somm to Rodolphe Salis, creator and proprietor of the Montmartre cabaret Chat Noir, an avant-garde community of artists, writers, musicians and performers which mocked contemporary politics, official values and societal norms. This scatological comedy, premiering on Christmas Day 1885, was the first theatrical production in the Chat Noir's new venue. Featuring toilet habits, constipation, puns, in-jokes and racial slurs, it is set in a family-run public toilet and was performed in their small puppet theater designed by Henry Somm and George Auriol. Extra-illustrated with original ink, pencil and watercolors by Henry Somm with an elaborate frontispiece and 44 illustrations, some full page, many head- and tailpieces, many initialed or signed. Somm was an artist, graphic designer, and illustrator who was a transitional figure between Impressionism and Symbolism, friend of Toulouse-Lautrec, and member of Les Incohérents. References: Cate & Shaw, editors, The Spirit of Montmartre/Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905. Grey Art Gallery, Grey Gazette, Vol.2, No.1, 1998.
Color lithograph on paper; 8 1/2 x 12". Titled, signed and numbered 85/1000 in pencil by Robert Venturi. Matted and framed color lithographThe lithograph illustrates Venturi's design for the ceiling of the Knoll furniture showroom. Venturi was the leading designer of the post-modern movement, which challenged modernism's rejection of ornament. His furniture for Knoll, in connection with his partner and wife, Denise Scott Brown, referenced traditional styles of design, applying historical styles to functionalist furniture: in this case, a tribute to Robert Adam, late 18th century Neo-Classical architect, interior, and furniture designer.
Fine copies in original pictorial wrappers preserved in handsome custom clamshell case of black cloth with gilt-lettered spine and front cover in red leather. Vollard has adopted his friend Alfred Jarry’s satirical figure, Père Ubu, in these short plays, mocking the absurdity of World War I. Jarry, dead at the age of 34 in 1907, was a link between the 19th century and the early 20th century avant-garde, influencing the Theater of the Absurd, Duchamp, the Surrealists, Rouault, Max Ernst, and William Kentridge. He coined the term and concept of pataphysics: the science and philosophy of the absurd, using irony and whimsey to examine imaginary phenomena and symbolic truths. LE PÈRE UBU À L'HOPITAL. Two copies: Paris: "Cette Petite Tragédie N’est Pas Mise dans le Commerce", 1917, and Paris: Éditions Georges Crès, 1918. Both with cover, frontispiece, and title page vignette (black in 1917 and red in 1918) by Pierre Bonnard. LE PÉRE UBU À L’AVIATION. Paris: Georges Crès. 1918. Cover illustration repeated on title page and vignette on first page of text by Pierre Bonnard. INSCRIBED BY VOLLARD: AHOMMAGE À L’AUTEUR. LE POLITIQUE COLONIALE DU PÈRE UBU. Paris: Georges Crès. 1919. Cover illustrated by Georges Rouault repeated on title page. LE PÈRE UBU À LA GUERRE. Paris: Georges Crès, 1920. One of 500 copies on holland paper, out-of-series and unnumbered. Uncut and unopened. Shadow of wrappers on endpapers. Cover illustration, title page, and full-page plate by Jean Puy. A GROUP OF FIVE PLAYS WRITTEN BY ONE OF THE GREATEST CONTEMPORARY ART DEALERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
