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. 

George Brecht | Cedille Uhr

George Brecht

Cedille Uhr

Mönchengladbach, Germany: Kunstverein Mönchengladbach, 1973

4 x 4.5 x 0.75 cm. [men's], 3 x 3 x 1 cm. [women's]

Edition of 90 [+5 A.P.] signed and numbered copies

A wrist watch containing a variety of tiny objects. Produced in an edition of 90 copies: 45 men's size and 45 women's.

In 1969, George Brecht and Robert Filliou organized an exhibition titled "La Cédille qui Sourit" at the Municipal Museum in Mönchengladbach. The exhibition referred to their three year stay in France, in a house called "La Cédille qui Sourit" in Villefranche.

In the summer of 1965, Brecht and Filliou placed a yellow awning and chalkboard sign in the window of the house that had previously housed a television repair store and candy shop. They called it La Cédille qui Sourit, or "The cedilla that smiles”, after the diacritical mark added under certain letters to modify their pronunciation (suggesting an S sound rather than a K, under the letter C, for example). The proprietors claimed the store would offer for sale "anything that contained a cedilla, and anything that did not".

The store carried materials from a number of artist affiliated with Fluxus, including titled published by the Something Else Press, Fluxus, and MAT Editions, though it was difficult to discern which items were completed and which were "in-progress”, as the space mostly served as the pair’s studio. 

Filliou later recounted “[It was] a sort of workshop and of shop, of nonshop would we say now, for we were never commercially registered, and the Cédille was always shut, opening only upon request of visitors to our homes.” They viewed it as a "Center of Permanent Creation”, using it to conduct research, write letters, jokes, songs, poems, scores and recipes,  and produce puzzles, games, drawings, and events.

Even as a studio space, its use was questionable, with the artists reportedly more likely to be working in nearby cafes.

In the third year of the store's operation, the Something Else Press published Games at the Cedilla [see below] as their 14th title (it was immediately followed by Store Days, by Claes Oldenburg, whose similar venture operated in New York City a few years prior). The charming book is a compendium of ideas, notations, journal records, correspondence, games, "One Minute Scenarios" and other writings made while Brecht and Filliou tended store.

This watch was produced at La Cédille qui Sourit, and - like most objects created in the three-year span  - bears its name. 

Primary Information Sale

For the next 24 hours, all titles at the Primary Information site are discounted by 50%. 

The above collection of three Something Else Press works is available for only five dollars, for example. The new Fluxus newspaper reprint is only ten dollars. 

https://primaryinformation.org/

Camille's Reports #1

Dick Higgins/Something Else Press

Camille's Reports #1

New York City, USA: Something Else Press, [1965]

8.2 x 13.9 cm.

Edition size unknown

Camille Gordon is the alter-ego of Dick Higgins, and later possibly other artists who worked for the press (Emmett Williams, Ken Friedman, etc.) who found it awkward promoting their own publications. 

In the early days of the press, Higgins was the sole employee, serving as editor, designer, producer, and press strategist. He wrote the newsletters and the dust jacket blurbs for the books. This sometimes put him in the awkward position of having to write effusively about one of his own works. The name Camille Gordon was used to thwart this problem, and also make the press seem less like an outfit operating out of someone’s living room. 

This is the first of twelve "news cards" mailed out by the Something Else Press to advertise forthcoming titles. The format was eventually retired in favour of the newsletters, which “Gordon” also contributed to. 

The character was killed off in Newscard #12 ("killed on Route-1 when her car smashed into a chicken truck”) but then resurrected again in the Something Else Newlsetter, Vol. 1, No. 7 ("It isn't true. She's gone to Afghanistan, to Mazar-i-Sharif, with her fiancé, a folk song collector [...] we're awfully glad to hear she's okay”). 

A second pseudonym used was "Charles Gagnon" whose initials are also C.G. and for Dick Higgins sound like the French adverb ci-gît, which means "here lies.” 

Abebooks lists three copies of this title, between $125 and $250 US. Currently Division Leap is selling the above example on Ebay, with a current bid of $15.00, here. 

"I once played a joke with Dick’s pseudonym. A female photographer friend of mine had been hired by the New York Review of Sex, one of many tabloids that sprang up in the mid-sixties touting the new sexual freedoms, to shoot prostitutes and their pimps in Times Square. While she managed to do this very discreetly, she was afraid of having her name credited in the published spread. I offered, and she used, Camille Gordon. This upset Dick, so I never let on until now that it was my doing.”

- Barbara Moore

Brion Gysin was born on this day in 1916. 

A Something Else Reader

[Various Artists]

A Something Else Reader

New York City, USA: Primary Information, 2022

368 pp., 6 x 9.25", softcover 

Edition of 4500

It’s difficult to quantify the impact of the Something Else Press, a publishing venture started by Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, in 1964.1 The press published about fifty titles in the decade that it was operational, including books by some of the most important artists in a variety of disciplines, including music (John Cage, Henry Cowell), dance (Merce Cunningham), Pop Art (Claes Oldenburg), Concrete Poetry (Emmett Williams), found poetry (Bern Porter), literature (Gertrude Stein), Mail Art (Ray Johnson), Happenings (Al Hansen), philosophy (Marshall McLuhan) and Artists’ Books (Dieter Roth). 

The publisher’s most radical contribution to the history of Artists’ Books is somewhat invisible now: the use of traditional book binding rather than the experimental formats favoured by many “book artists” working in the late sixties and early seventies. Other than two boxed works2, the press eschewed the alternative bindings of Fluxus (bolts, hinges, plastic boxes) and the more delicate hand-stitched, handmade paper offerings common at the time. This approach allowed them to effectively infiltrate libraries and bookstores, and for them to survive being passed down from owner to owner. 

Maybe the best measure of their ongoing influence is not an individual title, but the press as a whole. Contemporary publishers of Artists’ Books invariably take cues from the SEP, and perhaps none more so than Primary Information. 

The publisher of A Something Else Reader first came to prominence with their reprints of the Something Else Press Great Bear pamphlets series. Long out of print and often much more difficult to acquire than the books published the SEP, the series included text scores, essays, manifestos, performance documentation and other artists' writings. The Primary Information reprints were lovingly recreated in facsimile, and beautifully housed in printed wooden box. 

Even more difficult to track down now are the Something Else Press newsletters - broadsides that coupled catalogue entries and forthcoming titles with essays and writings by Dick Higgins and others. The newsletter was where Higgins outlined his mandate for the press and where his influential essay “Intermedia” was first published. 

Primary Information made the complete set available as downloadable PDFs, a year after the Great Bear reprints. They can be found on their site, here. 

Facsimile reprints of two other Something Else Press titles followed, in 2013 and 2015: Emmett Williams’ An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, and Fantastic Architecture, compiled by Dick Higgins and Wolf Vostell. 

I suspect these undertakings extend beyond a shared interest in the material, to a shared mandate. 

In addition to publishing Artists’ Books, the Something Else Press also produced facsimile reprints of out-of-print material. 

The Press reprinted The Dada Almanac for the book’s fiftieth anniversary in 1966, the first trade edition reprint of any of the early 20th century avant garde movements either side of the Atlantic.3 The Great Bear pamphlet series included a reprint of Luigi Russolo’s 1913 Futurist manifesto The Art of Noise.

Dick’s 100 Amusements is a reprint of an 1873 compendia of parlour entertainment that Higgins recognized as proto-Fluxus4 (and probably also liked the shared name of the title).

Six volumes by Gertrude Stein were reprinted, amounting to over ten percent of the Something Else Press' output. These may have been partly due to the fact that they were in the public domain and that their sales might help support recent work5, or to stave off criticism of a lack of originality.6

But many of Gertrude Stein's works were either only available in abridged forms7, or not at all. And they were too costly on the secondary market to get into the hands of the general reader. 

“Something Else Press was selling books in supermarkets and had door-to-door salesmen,” Primary Information co-founder Miriam Katzeff told Bomb Magazine, in 2014. “For us, our target audience isn't collectors who are dominating so many other parts of the art world. It's our peers: artists, students, historians.”8

The desire to make important texts available again and at affordable prices is at the core of Primary Information's agenda. Like the Something Else Press, they produce titles in large editions (there were 4500 copies of A Something Else Reader produced, for example). And Primary Information takes it a step further, even, by reportedly selling their books at cost. 

They also publish works from a third category (alongside contemporary Artists' Books and classic reprints), titles which Katzeff calls "historical material that has never been printed in book form before"9. Fittingly, A Something Else Reader is a bit of a hybrid. The contents have all been previously published - in book form - but not as here, and not with Dick Higgins' introduction. 

The book was originally intended by Higgins as a primer which he pitched to Random House, hoping a larger publisher could introduce the material to a wider audience. They passed, but suggested that he publish it himself. However, the Something Else Press was already hemorrhaging money and re-categorization from the IRS made continuing the enterprise untenable. After ten years, the press folded in 197410. 

The proposal and assembled table of contents for A Something Else Reader went into Higgins’s archive, where it was found by scholar and curator Alice Centamore, who compiled the works and assembled the book for Primary Information. 

The title includes selections from both The Something Else Press titles and the Great Bear pamphlets from a wide variety of artists including Eleanor Antin, George Brecht, Pol Bury, Augusto de Campos, Clark Coolidge, Philip Corner, William Brisbane Dick, Robert Filliou, Albert M. Fine, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh Fox, Buckminster Fuller, Eugen Gomringer, Brion Gysin, Richard Hamilton, Al Hansen, Jan J. Herman, Dick Higgins, Åke Hodell, Ray Johnson, Allan Kaprow, Kitasono Katue, Bengt af Klintberg, Alison Knowles, Richard Kostelanetz, Ruth Krauss, Jackson Mac Low, Robert K. Macadam, Toby MacLennan, Hansjörg Mayer, Charles McIlvaine, Richard Meltzer, Manfred Mohr, Claes Oldenburg, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Charles Platt, Bern Porter, Dieter Roth, Aram Saroyan, Tomas Schmit, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Ellen Solt, Daniel Spoerri, Gertrude Stein, André Thomkins, Wolf Vostell, and Emmett Williams. 

At $25, I can't recommend the title strongly enough. You can purchase it here. 

Better still, for only $45, you can buy a 'bundle', which includes the excellent Fantastic Architecture, A Something Else Reader and nine Great Bear pamphlets, here. Unless you need it for food, I can't think of a better way to spend your money. 

1. Fluxus artists Emmett Williams and Ken Friedman served as Editor-in-Chief and General Manager, respectively. 

2. Robert Filliou’s Ample Food For Stupid Thought and de-coll/age happenings by Wolf Vostell. Notably, the Filliou title was also issued as a hardcover book. 

3. Peter Frank. The Something Else Press: An Annotated Bibliography. McPherson & Company, 1983. Page 14. Frank also notes that the Almanac’s author, Richard Huelsenbeck, was a friend of Higgins’ family, making securing permissions a lot easier. 

4. Higgins also authored a book called Pattern Poetry, which traced the roots of Concrete and Visual Poetry back centuries. It’s still available from Amazon, here. 

5. “New masters” as Higgins called them in a newsletter essay entitled “Why Do We Publish So Much Gertrude Stein?”

6. In her 2020 thesis Something Else Press as Publisher, Rachel High unearths a note from Dick Higgins to Peter Frank, indicating that the purpose of the reprints was also to “head off the kind of criticism that led off, ‘you can’t do that—the dadaists did it all before,’ [or ‘Stein’].’”

7. A quarter the length, in the case of The Making of Americans, which the Something Else Press reprinted in full, all 925 pages.

8. "The audience that we are trying to serve aren’t the people who can afford the one of the five remaining copies of a legendary artist’s book," she told Brooklyn Rail. 

9. An excellent example being Lee Lozano's Notebooks. See earlier post here. 

10. Primary Information - which was co-founded by James Hoff and Miriam Katzeff in 2006 - has already outlasted the Something Else Press by six years. 

Primary Information

The previous post concludes a week of Primary Information titles. Fourteen posts are, of course, not enough to do justice to the publisher, and there are several glaring omissions: 

Fantastic Architecture and An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, which I never bought as I have the original Something Else Press titles. Both are essential. 

James Hoff’s TopTen, which I was also lucky enough to get the original, pre-PI version. 

The box set of Great Bear Pamphlets, which deserve a full week themselves. I’ll try to get to them next month. 

Women in Concrete Poetry, which deserves a deeper dive than I can accommodate right now. 

Tony Conrad’s Writings, which I need to finish reading. 

Avalanche, which I missed out on and which is now sold-out. 

Visit Primary Information here. 

Primary Information Sale

Primary Information have just announced a sale lasting 48 hours, during which all of their available titles are being offered for 50% off the list price.

Founded in 2006, the Brooklyn-based nonprofit quickly established themselves as an essential publishers of artist's books and editions. In addition to new titles by both emerging and established artists (Sarah Crowner, James Hoff, Fia Backström, Cory Arcangel, etc.) their mandate was to make long out-of-print titles available again to new audiences. These include facsimile reprints of classic bookworks from the Something Else Press (Fantastic Architecture, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, the Great Bear Pamphlets), essential titles from Lee Lozano, Carolee Schneemann, Tony Conrad, Constance DeJong, etc., as well as collections of influential artist periodicals (Art Rite, Real Life, Just Another Asshole, Avalanche, Yeah, Destroy All Monsters) and vinyl LPs (the UJerks, Allan Kaprow's How to Make a Happening, The Guerrilla Art Action Group).

The sale ends on January 30 at 10:00am EDT.

Visit www.primaryinformation.org for more information.

Ken Friedman on Dick Higgins

Fluxus artist and sometimes Fluxus historian Ken Friedman shared this message with friends and colleagues today:


"Dear Colleague,

Last November, Siglio Press published a collection of Dick Higgins’s writings titled Intermedia, Fluxus, and the Something Else Press. Steve Clay of Granary Books and I edited it, and Lisa Pearson of Siglio Press realised it in a beautiful edition that would have pleased Dick immensely. The book includes a lovely biographical memoir about Dick by his daughter, Hannah Higgins.

This book meets exacting standards that Dick set in the essay for the Something Else Press 1965-1966 catalogue, “What to Look for in a Book — Physically.” Natalie Kraft’s elegant design moves between well set pages with rich illustrations and Dick’s own scholarly footnotes for some writings with documentary reproductions of Dick’s own publications for key works, as well as for Dick’s cover designs for many works. Martha Ormiston’s cover uses a Wolf Vostell photo of Dick performing Danger Music, a reminder of just how lively and musical Dick Higgins was.      

In the half year since the book was published, it has been the subject of reviews in Artforum, Artist’s Books & Multiples, Brooklyn Rail, Glasstire, Hyperallergic, Kirkus, Leonardo, Svenska Dagbladet, White Hot Magazine, and more. Many of the reviews offer a deep, reflective look at Dick’s contributions to the arts of the late 20th century — and the shadows he continues to cast on the arts of our time. Siglio built a terrific web page for this book, and it allows you to link direct to most of the reviews, with essays by Natalee Harren, Dave Dyment, Jennie Waldow, Michael Galbreth (of the Art Guys), James Gibbons, Jack Ox, Mark Bloch, and Bengt af Klintberg, the Fluxus artist and a Something Else Press author.

http://sigliopress.com/book/dick-higgins/

To celebrate the advent of May, Siglio is offering a 20% discount on this book. Even if you have the book already, the page is worth a look with its links to some fine reviews.

If you haven’t yet seen it, I invite you to visit the Dick Higgins page at Siglio Press.

Warm wishes,

Ken"


See previous post for an event taking place tonight at Printed Matter.

Something Else Press: A Love Letter to the Future

An oft-repeated truism about Dick Higgins is that his profile is eclipsed by his influence. He remains little-known, despite authoring countless books, coining the term Intermedia, as well as co-founding Fluxus and the Something Else Press, one of the most important publishers of artists' books, ever. In just over a decade, the Something Else Press published almost fifty books by some of the most luminary artists and writers of the twentieth century: Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Ray Johnson, Dieter Roth, Bern Porter, Emmett Williams, Robert Filliou, George Brecht, Claes Oldenburg, Merce Cunningham, Marshall McLuhan, Daniel Spoerri, Brion Gysin, Ian Hamilton Finlay, among many others.

Tomorrow night at Printed Matter - in an event titled Something Else Press: A Love Letter to the Future - three contemporary publishers discuss Higgins' influence and legacy:

James Hoff is an artist and co-founder and publisher of Primary Information, a non-profit arts organization devoted to publishing artists’ books and art historical documents, including two reprints of SEP titles (Fantastic Architecture and An Anthology of Concrete Poetry) as well as the complete Great Bear Pamphlets.

Lisa Pearson is the founder and publisher of Siglio Press, a press dedicated to publishing uncommon books that live at the intersection of art and literature. Siglio Press published the reprint of Ray Johnson's Something Else Press title The Paper Snake, and last fall published the first major book on Higgins since his death in 1998.

Damon Krukowski is a musician (he is half of Damon & Naomi, who themselves are two-thirds of Galaxie 500), poet (Afterimage, The Memory Theater Burned), writer and critic. He has written about sound and art for Artforum, Bookforum, The Wire, and Pitchfork. He is the co-publisher of Exact Change which publishes experimental literature emphasizing 19th and 20th century avant-garde.

The three will discuss Higgins’s influence on their own publishing projects, as well as "the extraordinary lineage of the Something Else Press in the wider publishing community, and how SEP continues to ignite an expansive field of possibilities."

The event takes place April 30, 2019, from 5 to 7pm.

This week on Tumblr

This week on Tumblr: books, multiples, ephemera, mail art works, flags, clothing, prints and other works by George Brecht (1926 – 2008).

http://artistsbooksandmultiples.tumblr.com/tagged/George-Brecht