In their broadest sense, the book arts are at the core of our inventory. To be sure, the category encompasses the specialties that you see on our homepage, such as Fine Printing, Fine Binding, and Illustrated Books. However, it also includes such things as writing books and calligraphy, fore-edge paintings, books on papermaking, and leaf books.
Read more about one of the book arts, Fore-edge Painting
c. 1970. Pen-and-ink on three leaves measuring 8 1/2 by 11 inches. The first sheet, on pale yellow stock folded into fourths, contains a panel of six roughed-out storyboards, a more detailed drawing of what became the cover of the published work, and in the upper left, a series of..... More
Boston: Bromer Booksellers, 1996. Small quarto. 26 pp. From an edition of 2,000 copies, this is one of 200 copies signed and numbered by Edward Gorey. Bromer special holiday catalog with previously unpublished, full-color cover design by Gorey, who created the artwork originally for a Nieman Marcus holiday catalogue. When..... More
NY: Putnam; Putnam; Congdon & Weed, 1972-1983. First edition. The first three Amphigorey anthologies—Amphigorey, Amphigorey Too, and Amphigorey Also—presenting a selection of Gorey's prolific output. Amphigory Also is signed by Gorey. All bound in boards with original dust wrappers. All fine with dust wrappers fine, save for intermittent creasing at..... More
NY: Abrams, 1996. First edition. Contains an interview with Gorey, analysis by art critic Karen Wilkin, and 200 illustrations. Very fine in illustrated dust wrapper. More
San Francisco: Word Play Publications, 1996. First edition. One of 226 copies, signed by Gorey and by the authors. This illustrated reference work includes ephemera and collectibles, dramatic productions, a list of pseudonyms, and more. The first true Gorey bibliography. Bound in cloth-covered boards. Fine in near fine dust wrapper..... More
(N.p.): Press of the Woolly Whale, 1934. 32mo. 18pp. Signed and dated by the author. A short treatise on the essentials of book design. Bound in blue paper over boards with title stamped in black. Some toning to spine, else near fine. More
1971. An original illustration capturing a moment of protest by the black community, showing a young Black man raising his fist in a timeless and insistent gesture of power and belief. Jarring in its continued relevancy, the illustration is finely executed in mixed media, including tempera, watercolor, conté crayon, pen..... More
Amsterdam: Aschenbach Galerie, 1989. Penck’s signature raw, “primitive” style, which takes cues from graffiti and hearkens to the concurrent pop art movement championed across the Atlantic by Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, both embodies and communicates the anxious selfhood of one living in Germany during the Cold War. Penck repeats..... More
![Item #30175 Das Antlitz der Stadte [The Face of the Cities]. Armin T. Wegner](/pictures/thumb/30175.jpg?v=1667508560)
Berlin: Tyslander Pres, 1989. Octavo. (60)pp. One of forty deluxe copies issued with a separate color woodblock print, signed by the artist, Felix M. Furtwangler, both on the colophon and on the print. Furtwangler's disturbing woodcuts, brash in their direct confrontation with violence and raw in their emotion, underscore the..... More
Octon, France: Verdigris, 2005. Rothchild’s illustrations—two mezzotints, one of which has been broken up into eight fragments—communicate the pensive darkness of the writer’s desk, laying it, as Bishop does poetically, before the reader in pieces and as a whole. Bishop’s poem was originally published in Geography III in 1976. Her..... More
(Iowa City): Naughty Dog Press, 2002. Five folding wallets, each of which uses a Jacob’s ladder format that allows it to open either from the left or right side. On the internal panels of each wallet Emily Martin has printed opposing statements—”I am a patriot/You are a traitor,” “You have..... More
Seattle: Windowpane Press, 2004. A cube of 42 notched cards, twenty-six of which bear a democratically-minded alphabet. The letters are printed in red and overprinted in black ink with words expressing central tenets of democratic government, with all its positives and negatives. The remaining cards are devoted to calls for..... More
(Vancouver, BC): Heavenly Monkey, 2020. Octavo. 112, (2) + 8 proofs bound-in at rear. One of fifteen deluxe copies, bound by Claudia Cohen in full limp vellum, with a matching box and the addended proofs. Initials throughout are simplified variations of Griffo's type for Ottaviano Petrucci's 1513 Paulina de recta..... More
Paris: Three Star Books, 2018. Square folio. (50)ff. One of forty copies, signed by the artist, A.A. Bronson. Fifty identical tearaway posters of “AIDS,” using an appropriative design based on Robert Indiana’s 1967 “LOVE.” The relation of AIDS to love, both conceptually and artistically, and its adaptation into a repetitive..... More
1986. Twenty-seven assorted art pieces, including xerographs, lithographs, mixed-media collages, and prints, accompany nine text pieces to present an alternative catalogue of the early years of the AIDS epidemic. The book supplemented the exhibition, “Art for AIDS: A Creative Response to Crisis,” which took place from October 10 to November..... More
Chicago: Starshaped Press, 2019. Single sheet; folded, the recto provides a synopsis of Farrell’s fraught summer of 2018, when her daughter underwent nearly eight weeks of chest radiation treatments to stem the growth of tumors around her lungs. The side effects were devastating, and the following winter was awash with..... More
Gambier, OH: Unit IV Arts, 2021. Sheffield’s visual and poetic meditation on “lostness” stems, particularly, from an article on Lost Person Behavior, which is the science of applying profiles to know how and where to search for someone, and, generally, from the pervasive and at times either abstract or tangible..... More
Portland, OR: Relay Replay Press, 2011. Wang’s book unfolds through layers of memory in a most literal way, containing within its small self a multitude of images and textures to mimic the scrapbook recollections of a human mind. This particular mind is that of Arnie Metz, one of five seniors..... More
Near Strathcona Park (i.e., Vancouver, B.C.): Heavenly Monkey, 2022. Octavo. 8, (iv)pp., + inserted leaf from from the original publication of this title from the Doves Press. From an edition of thirty-eight copies, this is one of twenty-five bound in paper over boards and with an original Doves leaf facing..... More
(Vancouver): Heavenly Monkey, (2015). Two large quarto volumes. (55); (50)ff. From an edition of thirty-six copies, this is one of thirty, signed by the two authors. Binder Claudia Cohen and book designer Barbara Hodgson, makers of The WunderCabinet, Cutting Paper, and a four-part series on color, come together once again..... More
Vancouver, BC: HM Editions, 2015. Small octavo. 16, (6)pp., + 11 plates, + (4)pp. One of six A. P. copies. Signed by the contributors: Barbara Hodgson (author, illustrator, and designer), Rollin Milroy (printer), and Claudia Cohen (binder). An exploration, in theory and practice, of the intersection of art and science..... More
Vancouver, B.C. Heavenly Monkey, 2019. Tall quarto. 18, (10)pp., + two tipped-in leaves. From an edition of 55 copies, this is one of twenty comprising the "Written" issue, featuring original calligraphy by Martin Jackson on the printed pages. Signed by Jackson on the colophon page. The text is Alfred W...... More
(Vancouver, B.C.): Heavenly Monkey, 2010. Broadside measuring 22 by 15 inches. One of thirty copies—this copy marked "Position proof." Unsigned. With full-page illustration of a hermaphroditic figure, titled "The Botanist," and two smaller text figures of mushrooms, all from drawings by Atsushi Fukui. Sylvian was the former frontman for the..... More
Santa Barbara, CA: Simplemente Maria Press, 2010. Quarto. (13)ff. One of sixty copies. Signed by the artist at colophon, as well as on verso of each pigment print. The prints have been hand-touched with watercolor and are individually enclosed in over-beaten abaca paper folios on which twelve poems written by..... More
(Santa Barbara, CA): Simplemente Maria Press, 2020. Octavo volume and strand of ten paper prayer flags. (22)ff., + 20ff. One of twenty copies, signed by the artist. Mary Heebner's flags bear her five invocations to a distressed planet, with one prayer for each element: fire, earth, air, water, and aether..... More
