Ian Hamilton Finlay
The Boy's Alphabet Book
Toronto, Canada: Coach House Press, 1976
60 pp., 19.7 x 20.3 cm,, softcover
Edition of 1000 copies
According to materials in the archives at the University of Iowa, this title took over five years to produce. Ian Hamilton Finlay sent three letters in 1971, seeking help in publishing the book. He wrote to Michael Harvey, Udo Breger, and bp Nichol.
Nichol replies in June 1973 that Coach House Press may be interested in publishing the book, and follows up a month later indicating that things are moving forward. He acknowledges receipt of the manuscript and photographs (Dave Paterson) in November 1974. It would be another two years before the slim volume was produced.
The title was advertised as "one of the lengthiest works to date by the internationally renowned poet Ian Hamilton Finlay. The extended form of the traditional primer allows full range for the demonstration of Finlay's abilities as craftsman, toymaker and word-shaper.”
The work consists of an A-Z of pictures of Finlay's model boats, airplanes, weapons and kites, accompanied by texts by the legendary artist and poet. The texts range from the poetic to the merely descriptive.
The book features photographs from Dave Paterson and was edited for the press by bp Nichol. This copy was initially owned by artist Greg Curnoe and is now in the collection of Bill Clarke.
Below are two one-off gelatin prints (40cm x 30cm) produced before publication. The models for the boats illustrated were made at Little Sparta in Finlay's workshop and are part of a larger number of similar models made for the same purpose.
Finlay was born on this day in 1925.
“For a number of years now Ian Hamilton Finlay has been building up a body of work whose importance is becoming clearer and clearer to an ever larger, ever more appreciative audience. Always precise, always demanding, Finlay is the ultimate craftsman who is unafraid of working with other craftsmen to achieve the full expression of his vision. Through an absolute focus on what at first appears to be simply surface, he has led us deeper and deeper into a respect for, an awe of, language and its relationship to the images it names. A Boy’s Alphabet Book is one of his longest works to date. The extended form of the traditional primer allows him full range for an exploration of a doubly referential world: names (descriptions) to images and images (the toys Finlay has created) to the things they image.
lan Hamilton Finlay was born in the Bahamas in 1925. He has published short stories, poems & plays, designed sundials, toys & various. poem/objects. For over fifteen years he has been a major figure on the international poetry scene. He lives with his family in Scotland. He publishes much of his work thru his own press:
Wild Hawthorn Press
Stonypath
Dunsyre
Lanark
Scotland”
- dust jacket blurb
