Ken Nicol | XXX

Ken Nicol

XXX
Toronto, Canada: Nothing Else Press, 2012
32 x 6.5 x 6.5

Edition of 30, each unique

Never made available for sale, this multiple served as the Nothing Else Press Christmas card that year, sent to friends and clients. It consists of a 750 ml bottle of red wine, with labels designed and hand-typed by the artist. I now wish we kept more than one for ourselves. 

Toy Typewriters

Off topic, but on theme: vintage toy typewriters we spotted the other day while visiting an antique store en route to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. Already regretting not getting one. 

Peter Finch | Typewriter Poems

[Peter Finch, editor]

Typewriter Poems

Cardiff, Wales / Millerton, USA: 17 Second Aeon Press / Something Else Press, 1972

52 pp., 21.5 x 14 x 0.5 cm., softcover

Edition of 1000

Few titles from the Something Else Press - my all-time favourite publisher of Artists’ Books - have appeared on this site because I imagine one day taking a month off and writing comprehensive entries for their entire unrivalled output. I have amassed a collection that is nearly complete - missing only the two boxed works which are far out of my price range. 

Typewriter Poems is perhaps the least characteristic of their output, given that it was a co-publication, and the input from proprietors Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles appears to be minimal, possibly just a financial contribution. 

Second Aeon was a British literary periodical published from late 1966 to early 1975. It ran for 21 issues and was edited by Peter Finch.  Second Aeon Publications was a spin-off of the magazine - a series of booklets, broadsheets and bound volumes that eventually reached 100 in number.

"As far as I know it was the very first book to anthologize typewriter work," Finch told me in 2014. Unlike Anthology of Concrete Poetry [see below*], the slim Typewriter Poems concentrated entirely on British artists. The slim volume gathers together twenty-two practitioners of the art of the typewriter poem, including Alison Bielski, Paula Claire, Thomas A. Clark, Bob Cobbing, Michael Gibbs, John Gilbert, and many others.

Higgins had not been informed that the anthology was entirely British and was reportedly dissatisfied with the end results.  He was said to have suppressed the American run, possibly even destroying many  copies. 

Printed Matter has one available for the low price (very low, compared to other titles from the publisher)  of $15.00, US, here, calling into question this account. 

*Another co-publication for the Something Else Press, the Anthology of Concrete Poetry features a textual cover graphic that serves as another precedent for the XTC album cover [see post earlier this week]. It is available from Printed Matter, here, for $225 US. 

Maurizio Nannucci | M 40/1967

Maurizio Nannucci

M 40/1967

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Edition Multi Art Points, 1976

184 pp., 8.25 x 6 x .075", softcover with dustjacket in box

Edition of 1000

One of my favorite artist's books, made as a tribute to the Olivetti typewriter M 40, consisting entirely of single-character typewriter grids. Given the experimentation with typography and the concrete poetry of the day, the work is remarkably restrained. It's also beautifully produced in an elegant white clamshell box. 

I'm not sure what the year 1967 in the title refers to, as the M40 was produced twenty and thirty years prior (in '67 the Olivetti Diaspron 82 was released). It’s possible that the work was typed in ’67 and not published until ’76. 

Of the one thousand copies produced, 250 are signed and numbered and also include three graphics.

The auction photographs below suggest that the clamshell box is flimsy and easily destroyed, but this is not the case, unless two versions were produced. I received my copy directly from the artist and it remains in pristine condition. The box is safely reinforced. 

The above spiral-bound spread is from Nannucci’s 1999 monograph Where to Start From? (still available from Printed Matter for only $66.00 US). The work is listed as from 1969 here, also. 

"Nannucci subjects words to an analytical cataloguing. M40, 1967, is the model number of an Olivetti typewriter used to fill up the 90 sheets of paper that constitute the work. Each sheet contains a letter that is repeated until it fills the entire surface. This rational stance is accompanied by a fondness for paradox—the photographic sequence of the hand that attempts to write on water—or the inclination to produce tautological propositions. Moreover, paradox and tautology are the rhetorical figures that most effectively make the limits of language emblematic. Beginning with this awareness, Nannucci adopts neon writing to “name” language and in particular color, a principal element of artistic expression.”

- Giorgio Verzotti, Artforum

Anni Albers | Study made on the typewriter

Anni Albers

Study made on the typewriter

The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 2018

27 x 16.9 cm.

Edition of 5

As part of her weaving process, Anni Albers experimented with different materials and means, such as twisting and puncturing paper, and using corn kernels and metal shavings. 

For Study made on the typewriter she used the typewriter keys and black ink to create a pattern reminiscent of a textile. 

 

In 2018, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation released a high quality printed reproduction of the work, in an edition of five, as a fundraiser for the Tambacounda Hospital Maternity & Paediatric Unit. 

The works are priced at £1,000.00 and appear to still be available.  

"Our experience of gaining a representational means through the use of different surface qualities leads us to the use of illusions of such qualities graphically produced, though not by the means of representational graphic — that is, the modulated line. Drawing or print that shows hatching or stippling, rippled or curled lines, etc., and thus has a structural appearance, can be used to produce, if not actual tactile surfaces, the illusion of them. The tactile-textile illusions produced on the typewriter may illustrate this point. These varied experiments in articulation are to be understood not as an end

in themselves but merely as a help to us in gaining new terms in the vocabulary of tactile language."

- Anni Albers, On Weaving, 1965

 

Bob Cobbing | Sonic Icons

Bob Cobbing

Sonic Icons

London, UK: Writers Forum Press, 1970

62 pp., 20.5 x 25.5 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

Sonic Icons is the 9th publication from Writers Forum Press, a group that began meeting in 1952 and continues today, long after the death of Bob Cobbing, its founder. Concerned with the "limits of poetry", the group began publishing in the early sixties. Initially it self-published members writing and later would also publish work by John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, P.J. O'Rourke, Maggie O'Sullivan, Brion Gysin and many others. 

Sonic Icons  is a hand-made collection of Cobbing’s typewriter poems, printed on a variety of coloured papers, with a rubber-stamped cover. The book is considered a landmark in Cobbing's work, but also in visual poetry in general - a moment when concrete poetry gestured towards the performative sound poetry. 

The yellow-page poem Beethoven Today, above, is reprinted in the 2015 book BOOOOOK: The Life and Work of Bob Cobbing. 

Already scarce -I’ve never seen an image of another copy - the provenance of this one makes it particularly noteworthy - it is signed and dedicated by Cobbing to bpNichol, whose name he misspells:  “For Barry, greetings from Bob, 2 Nov 1970”. 

"Bob Cobbing is a senior and major exponent of the international concrete poetry movement in Great Britain. What is immediately impressive about his large body of work, in comparison with that of other poets in the field, is its range, and the published texts, which are freestanding visual poems, are also scores for vocal performance as sound poems. One of Cobbing's titles, Sonic Icons, stresses the interdependence of the two sides of his work through its appropriate anagram. His division of labor between self-publishing and performance ensures the unity of a creative project of great importance, yet his quest for new materials, techniques, and processes remains undiminished in energy and innovation."

- Robert Sheppard

"The publication of Sonic Icons in 1970 signalled a level of sophistication that was to become a trademark of Cobbing's visual and sound poetry from that point onwards. It was another pivotal moment for Cobbing's art."

- Mark Anthony Jackson

"I centre that in Sonic Icons, but one could place it in several other titles—in this case we have the intermediate stages resulting from new properties that Cobbing’s work accreted—for example, the idea of the graphical being readable into utterance; the idea of text on the page as being a landscape."

- Lawrence Upton

"Owning the means of production (the office duplicator, the photocopier) meant that Cobbing could conflate the processes of writing, design and printing. Performing regularly meant that he could heal the split in concrete poetry between those who presented silent icons, most famously Ian Hamilton Finlay, and those who developed the art of pure sound, such as Henri Chopin. Cobbing's anagrammatic title Sonic Icons was emblematic.

[...]

Between 1963 and 2002 Writers' Forum published more than 1,000 pamphlets and books, many of them his own work, but he was also generous as a publisher to younger writers, such as Lee Harwood and Maggie O'Sullivan. He issued texts by John Cage and Allen Ginsberg, and by fellow concrete poets, such Frenchman Pierre Garnier and Italian Arrigo Lora-Totino, both of whom were guests at the workshop in the 1990s."

- The Guardian

Davi Det Hompson | Bound & Unbound, New York, September 21 – October 26, 1991

Davi Det Hompson

Bound & Unbound, New York, September 21 – October 26, 1991

New York City, USA: Bound & Unbound, 1991

[10] pp., 27.7 x 10.6 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

An exhibition catalogue for a 1991 show at Barbara Moore’s Bound and Unbound, produced in the style of the artist’s own publications. 

In the mid to late seventies, Hompson produced over twenty such titles, such as You Know It Has To Be A Hairpiece, Some People Have Funny Ideas and I Would Recommend…. These featured statements and pithy anecdotes such as  

 “A university art instructor, after reading a showing of my writings, lit his pipe and said, ‘Please tell me. Do you think I should continue to paint?’” 

and

“When I was a kid my vision deteriorated so rapidly that I practiced walking with my eyes shut.” 

The cover graphic was also produced as a signed print, titled Sure, Sure, which can still be found at Printed Matter for $30 US, here.