Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Friday, September 24, 2010

The graphics works of Arthur Boyd (4 Jul 1920–24 Apr 1999) part 2



Arthur Boyd was one of Australia’s most widely respected and prolific artists. He was born in 1920 in Melbourne, Victoria and was part of a dynamic generation of artists and thinkers, which included Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, and Joy Hester. Boyd was brought up in a lively family of practicing artists, with whom he studied and developed his painting and printmaking.
My favourite of his pieces are collaborations with one of my favourite poets fellow Australian Peter Porter, whom he collaborated with on 4 books during 70s and 80s.
Jonah 1973, The Lady and the Unicorn 1975, Mars 1988 and 
Narcissus 1984 ( images shown below)


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Narcissus, Seckers & Warburg London 1984


"But what Arthur & I was trying to do in Narcissus was sort of turn upside & like the rest of us when you look in the water we are turned upside down. that we wanted to produce, of really really how the Natural world doesn't . . . we don't see ourselves in the Natural world. The Natural world, in fact, enters us and becomes ,well, becomes really a kind of life, it has a pilgrimage through us. "
Peter Porter




A wonderful collection of drawings and prints



Thursday, September 16, 2010

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Maurice Scève (1501-c.1560)...Delie ...Emblems of Desire 1544



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Delie object de plus hault vertu was first published in 1544 in Lyon by Sulpice Sabon for the bookseller, Antoine Constantin. The subsequent 1564 edition, published in Lyon by Nicolas Du Chemin, follows the first edition closely, but moves the initial huitain (“A SA DELIE”) to the very end of the volume and includes an index of figures and first lines. The woodcut figures present significant changes from one edition to the other. The Délie has a mathematical layout; many suggestions have been made about its significance and about the relationship between text and image inasmuch as this work has a visual and spatial component. The Délie is composed of one decasyllabic huitain (an epigram of eight lines of verse), 449 decasyllabic dizains (epigrams of ten lines of verse), fifty woodcut emblems (each with a motto and a figure, surrounded by an ornamental border) which appear at regular intervals.



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Paris : Nicolas du Chemin, 1564.

Scève’s Délie is a syncretic work, which bears the mark of the poet’s erudition and high concept of poetry. The work conveys the thoughts and feelings of a lover suffering from unrequited love and striving for perfection. Throughout the Délie, love is an obsessive and complex experience in which the sacred and the profane are intertwined. The question of Délie’s identity has tantalized critics; some have assimilated her to the Lyonnese poet Pernette Du Guillet, whose posthumous Rymes sometimes echo Scève’s Délie. La Croix du Maine, in contrast, saw the name “Délie” as the anagram of “L’Idée” (Idea), and stressed the Neo-platonic aspects of the lover’s quest. Yet, Délie eludes any attempt to define her; her composite persona combines references to Petrarch’s Rime Sparse and Petrarchan poetry, the Bible and Christian literature, classical texts and iconography, mythology, French and Neo-Latin sources. The concise quality of the dizains, and their convoluted syntax contribute to the complexity of this fascinating work.


from the Gordon Collection at the University of Virginia


* * *

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43

The less i see her, the more i hate her:
The more i hate her, the less anger i feel.
The more i adore her, the less it means:
The more i flee her, the more i wish her near.
Love with hate & pleasure with pain,
The two arrows fall on me in a single rain.
And the love i great which thereby gains
As hate sinks in & cries out for revenge:
Thus my vain desire makes me detest
The one my heart so infallibly requests.


* * *


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163

For this kindness let me at least commend you,
Of which i note both occasion & site
Where, all atremble, you heard me undo
This mortal knot into which my heart was tied.
I saw you, like me, now grown tired
Of my travail, more out of compassion
Than any sense of this great passion
I still feel, though less so than at the start.
For as you extinguished my affliction,
You secured this burnt offering of my heart.

* * *




Friday, August 6, 2010

The Sphinx...Oscar Wilde & Alastair...1920


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Your lovers are not dead, I know;
They will rise up, and hear your voice,
And clash their cymbals, and rejoice,
And run to kiss your mouth, -- and so

Set wings upon your argosies! 



more on the background of this book and other illustrators  > THE SPHINX 


previous Alastair posts L'Anniversaire de L'Infante







Monday, August 2, 2010

Andrew D. Chumbley... The Azoetia... excerpt...





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The Assumption of the Azoetic Magical Self - Andrew d. Chumbley




By Arte enchant and fascinate the Portals to open, revealing those whom

the Stars veil. Sing out their Passion in the War and Feast that is Thy Self!
Taste ye of the sweet and secret wines of Heaven - the Ocean of Ichor
spilt from the broken idols of Gods and Demi-gods. Carouse ye with my
Satyrs and embrace the Succubi raised from Thine own Desires; swoon
ye in rapture, in the nimbus of fever billowing over the lily field of the
Night. Yet be not overcome! Fall not! Tire not of Pleasure, but seek ye
the Ever-virgin Joys that hide beneath Medusine Veils.

Amidst these blossoms cavort and dance!
1 cap! Your skin aflame in peacock-iridescence!
Your eyes like black fire at the heart of the storm!

For these are the Splendours of the Infinite, wrought in the Images and
Effiges of I




"Speaking for myself, books like Azoetia are mystical love-letters to stangers whom I would not otherwise meet. "ADC


Friday, July 30, 2010

Kitab al-Bulhan ...Book of Wonders...Part 2



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Kitab al-Bulhan at the 

Iblis... 14th century Devil..Kitab al-Bulhan ....part 1



From one of my favourite books

aptly named  'Kitab al-Bulhan' (Book of Wonders
 A composite manuscript in Arabic of divinatory works, dating principally
from the late 14th century A.D., containing astrological, astronomical
and geomantic texts compiled by Abd al-Hasan Al-Isfahani, with
illustrations.




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Wednesday, July 21, 2010

A Season in Hell...Arthur Rimbaud & Robert Mapplethorpe




 ....
A Rimbaud
A SEASON IN HELL [Une Saison en Enfer] (1873)
SECOND DELIRIUM: THE ALCHEMY OF THE WORD

I only find within my bones
A taste for eating earth and stones.
When I feed, I feed on air,
Rocks and coals and iron ore.

My hunger, turn. Hunger, feed:
A field of bran.
Gather as you can the bright
Poison weed.

Eat the rocks a beggar breaks,
The stones of ancient churches' walls,
Pebbles, children of the flood,
Loaves left lying in the mud.

* * *

Beneath the bush a wolf will howl,
Spitting bright feathers
From his feast of fowl:
Like him, I devour myself.

Waiting to be gathered
Fruits and grasses spend their hours;
The spider spinning in the hedge
Eats only flowers.

Let me sleep! Let me boil
On the altars of Solomon;
Let me soak the rusty soil
And flow into Kendron.



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It is recovered.
What? - Eternity.
In the whirling light
Of the sun in the sea.

O my eternal soul,
Hold fast to desire
In spite of the night
And the day on fire.

You must set yourself free
From the striving of Man
And the applause of the World
You must fly as you can...

- No hope forever
No orietur.
Science and patience,
The torment is sure.

The fire within you,
Soft silken embers,
Is our whole duty
But no one remembers.

It is recovered.
What? Eternity.
In the whirling light
Of the sun in the sea.

from LIMITED EDITIONS CLUB- A. RIMBAUD & R. Maplethorpe A Season in Hell. 1986






Thursday, June 24, 2010

Books...Religio Medici ...Thomas Browne



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William Marshall-bookplate



In the Religio Medici, Browne wrote that 'At my death I mean to take a total adieu of the world, not caring for a monument, history, or epitaph, not so much as the bare memory of my name to be found anywhere but in the Universal Register of God'.



 

Monday, May 10, 2010

Lettice Sandford, née Mackintosh Rate, (1902-1993) ..illustrations




Lettice Sandford was born Lettice Mackintosh Rate in St Albans, Hertfordshire. She was one of the foremost female wood engravers of the between-the-wars engraving boom, and illustrated many fine press editions; her husband Christopher Sandford was proprietor of the Golden Cockerel Press one of my favourites along with Black Sun Press.
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from Song of Songs


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from The Golden Bed of Kydno 

more Lovely Books

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Robert Fludd... primordial darkness... 1617



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The primordial darkness of the universe at the moment before creation, as represented in a plate in Robert Fludd’s 1617 Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica, atque Technica Historia (The Metaphysical, Physical, and Technical History of the Two Worlds, Namely the Greater and the Lesser). The words Et sic in infinitum (“and like this to infinity”) are written on all four sides of the square. Courtesy Wellcome Photo Library.