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W. C. Baker Rare Books & Ephemera

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THE NEW YORK SCHOOL POETS AND THE NEO-AVANT-GARDE : BETWEEN RADICAL ART AND RADICAL CHIC

Silverberg, Mark Publisher's black cloth, spine lettered in silver, in color pictorial dust jacket. Light shelfwear to jacket, else fine. From the publisher: "New York City was the site of a remarkable cultural and artistic renaissance during the 1950s and '60s. In the first monograph to treat all five major poets of the New York School-John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler-Mark Silverberg examines this rich period of cross-fertilization between the arts. Silverberg uses the term 'neo-avant-garde' to describe New York School Poetry, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Happenings, and other movements intended to revive and revise the achievements of the historical avant-garde, while remaining keenly aware of the new problems facing avant-gardists in the age of late capitalism. Silverberg highlights the family resemblances among the New York School poets, identifying the aesthetic concerns and ideological assumptions they shared with one another and with artists from the visual and performing arts. A unique feature of the book is Silverberg's annotated catalogue of collaborative works by the five poets and other artists. To comprehend the coherence of the New York School, Silverberg demonstrates, one must understand their shared commitment to a reconceptualized idea of the avant-garde specific to the United States in the 1950s and '60s, when the adversary culture of the Beats was being appropriated and repackaged as popular culture. Silverberg's detailed analysis of the strategies the New York School poets used to confront the problem of appropriation tells us much about the politics of taste and gender during the period, and suggests new ways of understanding succeeding generations of artists and poets."
  • $125
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SILENI ALCIBIADIS.* I.E. ARS SANANDI, CUM EXPECTATIONE. OPPOSITA ARS CURANDI NUDA EXPECTATIONE: SATYRA HARVEANA CASTIGATAE. CUPIDUS PRUDENTI USUI: STUPIDIS RUDENTI LUSUI. . .

Harvey, Gideon; Georg Ernest Stahl [10],246 pp. plus frontispiece and two folding tables. In Latin. Early three-quarter vellum and speckled paper over boards, raised bands, manuscript paper title and shelf labels. Early shelf number inscription in front free endpaper, light institutional inkstamp in title page. Lightly rubbed, extremities worn. Very good. George Ernest Stahl's influential Latin edition of Gideon Harvey's ARS CURANDI MORBOS EXPECTATIONE (first published in English in 1689). Stahl published both ARS CURANDI and his own critical response, ARS SANANDI CUM EXPECTATIONE, with a combined title page under the heading, SILENI ALCIBIADIS. The present example corresponds with Waller 4082: Harvey's work alone, issued with the combined title and without a separate ARS CURANDI title leaf. Gideon Harvey (ca. 1640 ca. 1700) served as physician to Charles II and "physician of the tower" to William and Mary. Despite his connection to the Crown, Harvey was never a member of the College of Physicians and, during most of his career, operated in a hostile relationship with it. His ironically titled ARS CURANDI, CUM EXPECTATIONE ("The Art of Curing Diseases by Expectation") presents a series of "random criticisms of medical practice," which the DNB notes "acquired some reputation on the continent, through the patronage of a far greater man, George Ernest Stahl." While the DNB authors interpreted Stahl's approach to Harvey as sympathetic, his publication of ARS SANANDI and notes in ARS CURANDI are at least satirical. His allusion to Erasmus and Plato in the title of SILENI ALCIBIADIS suggests Stahl's view that behind the "ridiculous face" of doctors painted by Harvey was an opposite realitya profession "beautiful, serious, venerable."Cushing S383n. HEIRS TO HIPPOCRATES 455n. DNB XXV, p. 87.
  • $150
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PASSAGES FROM JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE : A FILM BY EXPANDING CINEMA : DEDICATED TO FRANCES STELOFF [cover title]

[Joyce, James; Mary Ellen Bute (script treatment)] 11 x 8 1/2-inch leaves in an 11 1/2 x 9-inch folder. [4],58,[3] pp. Leaves in printed blue metal tab folder. Fine. PASSAGES FROM JAMES JOYCE'S FINNEGANS WAKE was the final film produced and directed by Mary Ellen Bute (1906-1983), a pioneer in experimental film and animation. Bute spent much of her early career developing a style of "visual music" in film, synchronizing abstract images and music. PASSAGES, a film treatment of FINNEGANS WAKE using Joyce's original language, was largely a live-action piece but incorporated animation, double exposures, and various other unconventional visual methods. UbuWeb describes it as follows: "A half-forgotten, half-legendary pioneer in American abstract and animated filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute, late in her career as an artist, created this adaptation of James Joyce, her only feature. In the transformation from Joyce's polyglot prose to the necessarily concrete imagery of actors and sets, Passages discovers a truly oneiric film style, a weirdly post-New Wave rediscovery of Surrealism, and in her panoply of allusion - 1950s dance crazes, atomic weaponry, ICBMs, and television all make appearances - she finds a cinematic approximation of the novel's nearly impenetrable vertically compressed structure. With Passages from Finnegans Wake Bute was the first to adapt a work of James Joyce to film and was honored for this project at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 as best debut." The film was shown in limited capacities until its final release in 1967. Its screening of its first rush print, for which the present volume was produced, took place February 16, 1965, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before an audience of the James Joyce Society in celebration of Joyce's birthday. The James Joyce Society was inaugurated in 1947 at the Gotham Book Bart. Bute dedicates her film to Gotham's founder and owner, Frances Steloff.
  • $40
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THE IMPROVABLE LANDSCAPE

5 inches. [34] pp., including 14 full-page illustrations. Original pictorial wrappers, stitched. Prospectus card laid in. Signed by the artist on the colophon. Fine. From a stated edition of 326 signed copies (300 numbered and for sale, 26 lettered and not for sale); the present copy is signed but out of series and unnumbered (one of ten additional copies beyond the order sent to Albondocani Press owner George Bixby by the printer). Edward Gorey's spoof - and near-verbatim recreation - of plates and captions in L. H. Bailey's 1910 MANUAL OF GARDENING : A PRACTICAL GUIDE . . In BORN TO BE POSTHUMOUS : THE ECCENTRIC LIFE AND MYSTERIOUS GENIUS OF EDWARD GOREY, Mark Dery relates that Gorey was first introduced to Bailey's MANUAL by Judith Cressy of Parnassus Book Service near Gorey's home on Cape Cod. When Cressy encountered the book, Dery writes, she found its illustrations "beautifully limned . but '_odd_. There'd be this funny little drawing of . _almost_ symmetrical plantings, but then there was this tree that was in the wrong place and there would be a caption that would say, 'A regrettable vista,' or something. It looked like an Edward Gorey drawing, and the caption was like an Edward Gorey caption. The whole book was full of these Edward Goreyisms that were done before he was born.' When Cressy showed Gorey some photocopies of the book's illustrations, ' he just whooped and rolled up the papers and tucked them in his pocket and ran away. He got it immediately.' The result was THE IMPROVABLE LANDSCAPE . , which Gorey dedicated to Cressy. A note-perfect send-up of Bailey's didactic MANUAL, it's a kind of cautionary tale for gardeners and landscape architects . " (p. 351-352). Toledano A92. From the collection of George Bixby.
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TWO NOVELS FROM THE FANTOD PRESS : THE GRAND PASSION [and] THE DOLEFUL DOMESTICITY [envelope title]

5 1/8 inches. 2 volumes. Both volumes [16] ff., including, after the title page, one illustrated phrase on each leaf, printed on rectos only, plus colophon on rear wrapper recto. Original color pictorial wrappers, stapled, in original printed envelope. Numbered and signed by the artist on the colophons. Envelope light scuffed and toned. Fine in a near fine envelope. Number 414 of a limited edition of 500 copies numbered and signed by the artist. The first publication in book form of two works both bearing the credit, "Englished anonymously from the Conton Dialect (1930) and illustrated by Edward Gorey." The book referred to is a real one: SELECT PHRASES IN THE CONTON DIALECT COMPILED (Canton, China: [s.n.], 1930), a now-scarce 54-page guide to Cantonese words and phrases for speakers of English, from which apparently all of the phrases in the present two works are drawn. The illustrations in both THE GRAND PASSION and THE DOLEFUL DOMESTICITY feature the same couple (plus a child and infant in the latter work) accompanying the phrases ("This flower has opened very beautifully," "That is the bad of it all," "A rat fell into the scales abd weighed itself," "Sweep the cobwebs a way," etc.). Their attire is not Chinese but Japanese, with some western elements. THE GRAND PASSION originally appeared in June 20, 1976, issue of THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, and THE DOLEFUL DOMESTICITY originally appeared in the Summer 1991 issue of THE YALE REVIEW. Toledano A105, A106, and A107.
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TWO EARLY STORIES : THE WAVERING DISCIPLE [and] A STUDY IN OPAL

7 3/4 inches. 54,[2] pp. including six illustrations. Publisher's marbled wrappers, paper cover label. Fine. From a stated edition of 226 copies (200 numbered copies for sale, and 26 lettered and not for sale); this copy out of series and unnumbered. The first book publication of two stories Ronald Firbank wrote during his years at Cambridge, which first appeared in Cambridge's undergraduate magazine, THE GRANTA, in 1906 and 1907. In an unpublished memoir of Edward Gorey and the Albondocani Press, Albondocani founder George Bixby recounts approaching Gorey about illustrating the work: "I thought the Firbank stories would be an ideal project for illustrations by Gorey, told him about the stories, and asked him if he would be interested in making some drawings to accompany them. He was immediately interested. 'Firbank is one of my oldest passions,' he told me. In THE BLUE ASPIC, Gorey s spoof of opera, the hero, 'Jasper went without lunch three days running to buy Caviglia s recording of "Vivi con una mira" from IL FIORE SOTTO IL PIEDE." This title is a translation of THE FLOWER BENEATH THE FOOT, the title of one of Firbank s novels."Gorey initially produced two section title page drawings with title lettering lettering for the stories. After Bixby received the proofs of the of the text from printer William Ferguson in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he observed that because of the breaks in the stories, he was left with four pages that contained only half a page of text. Gorey volunteered to make four additional drawings to fill the spaces. "We had previously discussed a fee for his work, but he told me that since he _wanted_ to do the drawings for these stories he would leave it up to me to pay him whatever I could manage. Since the project was being done on a shoestring budget, I offered Gorey $100, and he accepted my offer without further comment." With a foreword by Firbank biographer and bibliographer Miriam J. Benkowitz. Benkovitz A26. Toledano B52b. From the collection of George Bixby.