Rare Books Room: Collection Spotlight by Discipline

Poetry chapbook published as part of the 2018 Krupskaya Series. Cover features art from Cybele Lyle.

"Introducing his five stories and a one-act play, Kenny ( The Mama Poems ) says that writing these kinds of narrative is ``an exercise in ridding poetry of the statement of prose.'' Regrettably, this disappointing collection suggests that the exercise also strips his tales of poetry, the element that may have lifted them above the mediocre. In ``And Leave The Driving to Us,'' a teenager rides a bus from Denverstet no state to San Jose, Calif., in search of the father he has never encountered. ``Wet Moccasins'' describes a man who refuses to take his wife hunting, returns empty-handed that evening, yet still has fresh rabbit--the one his wife shot in the backyard--for dinner; he eats it, one assumes, with a side dish of crow. A group of Pueblo Indians dances to bring an end to the dry spell, but the cultural and religious event yields tourists and vendors as well as ``Rain.'' In the one-act play set in a shabby hotel room, two men who met in the El Paso bus station decide to become ``Buddies,'' but the hotel clerk breaks up their friendship when he sics the police on them." - Publishers Weekly

"An Indian's views of Indian affairs; Young Joseph's translated narrative. With an introduction by Dee Brown & wood-engravings by Gillian Tyler" - National Library of Australia.

Thirteen legends of the Pacific Northwest Indians collected to preserve their vanishing culture.

This remarkable collection of poems explores the conjoined cultures of Indian and European, the revisions the conquered race must face, and the disruption that results from the attempt to combine divergent cultures in a single being. These poems speak from a four-cornered world: Cherokee and white, Christian and conjuring. They attempt to retrieve fragments of language from a nearly erased culture. At times, they speak in the spirit of the remembered language with the new language that is not fully formed in the understanding of the narrator.

Print portfolio of handmade prints addressing migrant issues from Justseeds and CultureStrike.
[Contributing artists]: Lalo Alcaraz -- Santiago Armengod -- Felipe Baeza -- Jesus Barraza -- Shaun Slifer & Janay Brun -- Kevin Caplicki -- Melanie Cervantes -- Irina Crisis -- Raoul Deal -- Emory Douglas -- El Mac -- Molly Fair -- Thea Gahr -- Art Hazelwood -- Ray Hernandez -- Nicolas Lampert -- Josh MacPhee -- Oscar Magallanes -- Fernando Marti -- Colin Matthes -- Cesar Maxit -- Dylan Miner -- Claude Moller -- Oree Originol -- Diane Ovalle -- Roger Peet -- Jesse Purcell -- Favianna Rodriguez -- Erik Ruin -- Julio Salgado -- Meredith Stern -- Mary Tremonte -- Kristine Virsis -- Pete Yahnke Railand -- Imin Yeh -- Ernesto Yerena Montejano -- Bec Young.

Full color posters from the Cuban Revolution compiled by Dugald Stermer, with an introduction by Susan Sontag.

Poetry chapbook published as part of the 2018 Krupskaya Series. Cover features art from Cybele Lyle.

"Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (Havana, 1955) is one of Cuba’s most noteworthy contemporary writers. He is a poet, journalist, literary critic, translator, and scholar. Among his books are Cayama (1979), Con raro olor a mundo (1981), Noticiario del solo (1987), Cuarto de desahogo (1993), Los poemas de nadie y otros poemas (1994), El último a la feria (1995), Oración inconclusa (2000), Actas de medianoche I (2006), Actas de medianoche II (2007), tareas (2011) and reversos (2011). His Selected Poems has come out in many countries, most recently Todo buen corazón es un prismático (2010) in Mexico, and has been translated into English, French, Italian, and Swedish. In addition, a wide selection of his poems has appeared in another twelve languages. His poetry has been awarded major prizes, such as the David (Cuba, 1980), the Plural (Mexico, 1983), the EDUCA (Costa Rica, 1995), the Renacimiento (Spain, 2000), the Leonor (Spain, 2006), and the Rincón de la Victoria (Spain, 2010). During the eighties he wrote for and was the editor of El Caimán Barbudo, one of Cuba’s leading cultural magazines. He has compiled three anthologies that have defined his poetic generation and published various essays on Spanish American poets. Among his translations are books by John Kinsella, Margaret Randall, and Mark Strand. He divides his time between Gambier, Ohio, where he is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba." -the publisher Toad Press

"This book addresses the Muxes in an exploration of the cultural, sexual and personal identity of the author and of this community in Oaxaca, México. Since pre-Hispanic times the Zapotec culture accepts homosexuality, gives it an active role and an open position within society, much more relevant than anywhere else in Latin America. The Muxes are organically integrated into the social and economic net of the community, commenting on the duality as a deeply rooted feature in this country. Nelson Morales has developed this project for almost eight years, in which he has photographed in his own community on the Isthmus of Oaxaca. Muses Muxe, as in a movie, is built from the process of creating the work in itself. Throughout the time, Nelson Morales tackles the subject, the photographic medium and the way of relating to the Muxes in different ways, creating and recreating the imaginary of the portrayed ones and the author himself from changing perspectives that go deeper and deeper into the multiple layers of the Zapotec culture. Sexuality, identity, and gender as key issues in society. Musas Muxe is the author's quest to glimpse the complexity of the Muxes in the transit of the search for their own identity, confronting themselves in the sensual space, overflowing and disturbing, the Muxe space"--publisher's description.

"Four-color offset lithography printed book was created as a series of two page board book spreads that minimize the visual distraction of a 'gutter' on the panoramic view of each skyscape. The edges of the book are rounded and gilded in the fashion of religious breviaries or missals." -- artist's statement at Vamp & Tramp Booksellers website

Photographs of remains and personal effects of migrants who have died in the deserts of southern Arizona while attempting to cross the border; much of this material procured by the Pima County Forensic Science Center.

" ... a book of three novels and one translation. In their original form the novels were sent through the mail as a postcard series ..."

"This small publication came out of an essay and longer publication I am working on about land restoration work and the ever hardening of the rural-urban continuum that sustains my life. I felt the need to do something that didn’t take me months or years to complete and that held some urgency I feel about the situation. The booklet is a bunch of questions about the uses of land that strip the land of health and make life in cities possible. The relationships in the questions are ones every person is responsible for. They deserve everybody’s consideration and reflection. The questions in the booklet may seem simple, but the answers can vary depending on the conditions of the land and its use that you encounter. Most people, but especially those in cities, do not know how to gauge the health of the landscape, let alone begin to ask questions about its conditions. This is one of the major problems that undergirds climate breakdown. Do you know how to ask if the land is healthy?" -Brett Bloom

"Hettinga has long been interested in putting text and image together, from published photobooks to artist’s books. Hettinga states, 'My love affair with the pixel is longstanding. 4 3 2 CRY brings together—satellite mapping, oil/gas mapping, digital photography, Wacom drawing, design, hand binding, and more to create the structural whole—an artist’s book.' 4 3 2 CRY mediates parallel narratives of personal and environmental loss, exposing the effects of hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas upon families, land, air and water. It is a lament and a goodbye for the material/physical place that Hettinga dearly loved in Northern Colorado." -Kathy T. Hettinga, artist statement

"Posters for Change is the kind of project that the world needs right now." – Shepard Fairey

A foreword by Avram Finkelstein, a designer for the AIDS art activist collective Gran Fury, looks at the crucial role of graphic activism in the current political climate.

"C.R.E.A.M. locates the intersection of a specific fantasy of racial exclusion and containment in the mutual investments of real estate development and the prison system. Hollywoodland, the segregated community founded in 1923 and once advertised by the original version of the now iconic sign that sits atop the hills of Los Angeles, and Ironwood State Prison come together in the imaginary of IRONWOODLAND, a sign Smith installed on the High Line in New York in 2017. Mining personal archives, pop cultural references (with the book's title an homage to Wu-Tang Clan's 1993 eponymous song), and research materials, Smith's Cash Rules Everything Around Me spins out to consider the constant threat of police violence against Black and queer bodies, the prison system and its attendant procedures and regulations, and the interior, emotional landscape of personal trauma and memory. With writing by Sable Elyse Smith, poetry by A.H. Jerriod Avant, and an essay by Jessica Lynne." -- artist's website

Dark Prospects takes as its source material issues of People, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report. While retaining the form of the magazine, the artist dismantles the medium’s visual language by blacking out all references to corporate branding, time (both textually and visually), textual references to location, and facial features of the magazines’ featured stars and advertising props. What’s left is an unforgiving and stuttering sequence of detonated images and textual fragments supporting a skewed visual narrative of lifestyle and politics—modern life stripped bare.

Maryann Riker: "This artist book celebrates the unnamed and unknown women photographers who ran portrait studios, documented landscapes and took selfies! The only documentation are the photographs they left behind. Entrepreneurs and selfie takers documented their world while giving women the chance to use the newest technology!"

The Black Sparrow Press companion to the seminal John Cassavetes independent film Minnie and Moskowitz. Book includes original film script and stills from the motion picture.

"Defining the art of Harold Balazs isn't easy. Encompassing prints, sculpture, architecture, jewelry, and installations, his work crosses boundaries and changes shape with a force that has arrested viewers since the 1950s. His art is a full-blown manifestation of his vision in diverse media and scale. Balazs summed up his art and his approach best when he said, "I make stuff because it’s easier than not making stuff." No other Northwest artist has cut quite as wide a swath through the regional culture over the past fifty years as Balazs, who has been called the people’s artist of the Northwest. His free spirit, boundless energy, and meticulous eye for detail have shaped the region’s art. Balazs’s work can be found in public and private collections from Spokane to Seattle, and he has been called the most important liturgical artist in the nation. His fine skills as a teacher can be seen in the work of many of his students, now artists and architects themselves. The voices of a dozen of these former students as well as admirers and friends are found in this book, the first publication to honor Balazs’s extraordinary gifts. His career is captured here in remarkable candor that speaks to the artist’s humanity, humor, and love of life."--Amazon.com viewed July 8, 2022.

A TV set reaches out and grabs a child for dinner.

“The Artist’s Book Ideation Cards deck was designed as an aid to the book artist, to jump start a new project or inform one in progress. There are two decks in the set: Category Cards containing approximately eight cards in each of the seven categories (text, image, structure, paper, layout, technique and color) and 54 Adjective Cards of which three are ‘wild cards.’ Choosing a card randomly from each of the seven categories and five cards from the adjectives offers an unexpected recipe for a project”–23 Sandy Gallery website.

"And how to resist the hilarious collages of the Dutch Chantal Rens? A man who puts his nose in the coat of a cat (photo above), a child who hits sausages or a bather who serves as a perch for a parrot are the protagonists of his visual saraband. She has just self-published a collection of collages called Common Sense Is a Hungry Bitch." (…) © Impairs de ciseaux by Clémentine Mercier / Libération 23.09.2018

"Exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with show held September 15, 1996 - January 5, 1997. Text by Nancy Princenthal. Artists in the exhibition are John Baldessari, Karin Davie, Dawn Dedeaux, David Diao, Nancy Dwyer, Gregory Green, Komar & Melamid, Sowon Kwon, Annette Lemieux, Claudio Matzko, Nam June Paik, Alan Rath, Scott Richter, Veronica Ryan, Mira Schor, Peter Schuyff, Beverly Semmes, Allyson Strafella, and Pae White. Book well-illustrated in black-and-white. Comes in small, pictorial folder. Includes 19 full-color postcards plus a book with essays and black-and-white images." -specificobject.com

There are few topics that evoke so many different notions and images as do farmers and agriculture. The publication "Images of farming" explores the production of these images in the fields of culture and myth formation, publicity and the sciences, the cultural heritage, and the finearts. myvillages.org is an international artist initiative, founded in 2003 by Kathrin Böhm (Ger/UK), Wapke Feenstra (NL) and Antje Schiffers (D). The interest of this international foundation is the rural as a space for and of cultural production.

"In Pay Dirt, J.I. Rodale tells us what is wrong, and why, from his own experience, and that of a great many of the world's leading farm experts, horticulturists and soil biologists and how organic farming and gardening change the picture. Compost, you may not know, has displaced, in the last few years, the use of chemical fertilizer, entirely on many of the largest tea plantations in India and Ceylon, on the great ranches of South Africa, and in the large coffee plantations of Central America, as well as on hundreds of thousands of small farms and gardens in many countries of the world. Pay Dirt is the first book devoted completely to this way of farming and gardening to be written and published in the United States." - Google Books

"A Poultry Piece was designed & printed in an edition of two hundred and fifty copies at Warwick Press in February 1978. The type is Jan can Krimpen's Spectrum, the paper is Mohawk Superfine. All copies were hand bound with paste paper over boards. The four illustrations were hand watercolored."--Colophon.

Presents a facsimile of a book the author created after the death of her brother, and includes poetry, family photographs, letters, and sketches that deal with coming to terms with the loss.

"The Dead Lecturer, collection of verse by Amiri Baraka, published in 1964 under the name LeRoi Jones. The collection marked a separation for Baraka from the style and literary philosophy of the Beats, with whom he had previously been associated. In the poem “Rhythm & Blues” he used the structures of jazz and blues to forge a new, distinctly African American voice. Poems such as “Black Dada Nihilismus” and “An Agony. As Now.” reveal the anger and despair of a black man trapped in a white middle-class society." -Britannica

Broadside by the legendary American poet.

"Sid Ghosh is a nonspeaking Autistic poet with Down Syndrome. He is a rebel in pursuit of other similar souls and he is interested in rescuing poets from the quiet clutches of rhyme." -The Evergreen Artist Lecture Series.

"An interactive guide for Black women of all ages, to not only create the creative life they want, but to monetize every aspect of it." -co-conspirator press

"Last Summer in 2014 we drove down to Monee, Illinois to meet Anthony Rayson of ABC 'Zine Distro and talk to him about his work. Anthony has been self-publishing for the better part of 40 years and we were particularly interested in the work he's done to both distribute 'zines to prisoners, as well as to publish their writings, art, and complete 'zines. In addition to interviewing Anthony about his amazing history of publishing-related activism and all of the challenges of dealing with the prison system, we also scanned many examples of the powerful art that prisoners have sent him over the years. This booklet presents an interview with Anthony, prisoners' art from his archives, with seven pages given over to the particularly powerful art of Kevid "Rashid" Johnson, a longtime friend of Rayson's and a prisoner who is currently incarcerated in Amarillo, Texas." -Half Letter Press

5.25 x 8" with 10 pages. Printed letterpress with Goudy and Garmont types on Rives Lightweight and folded into covers of Kuzuryu Green, an endsheet of olive dyed paper, and a label printed on Hagakure Brown. Leaves are accordion folded. With reduction lino cuts by Michaelis.
Text snakes down the page, suggesting the swirling wind and the seed pod descending. Michaelis describes the highly evolved and myriad ways that seeds are dispersed, from winged seeds, like the maple, called Samaras; to water plants with cork in or around the seed to help them float; yet sensual, evoking the unseen circus of the plant world. A variety of linoleum printed seed pods adorn the pages in a natural palette. Falling as they do across the spread of the accordion sheet pages, they illustrate also the wind on which seeds travel. Michaelis takes us on the journey of nature at work. "At first glance it may look as if plants drop their seeds without plan or design; but in fact, the dispersal of seeds is highly evolved." She shows us the carriers of seeds from air to animals and finally the ultimate time traveler. "From tombs of long ago civilizations, archeologists have found seeds that have the power to germinate after thousands of years of dormancy. This is how seeds travel through time." -Vampandtramp.com

This was Darwin's follow-up to his On the Origin of Species, written in response to criticisms that his theory of evolution was unsubstantiated. Darwin here supports his views via analysis of various aspects of plant and animal life, including an inventory of varieties and their physical and behavioral characteristics, and an investigation of the impact of a species' surrounding environment and the effect of both natural and forced changes in this environment. Volume 2 contains the index for both volumes. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Includes directions for Crazy eco, Eco rummy, and Eco poker. The goals of the game is to learn a theory of tropic ecology and the roles of particular species, to learn about characteristic organisms in different biomes, and to learn about food chains in different biomes. The game contains cards for four biomes: Puget Sound marine, taiga, tropical rain forest, and chaparral.

"This book was completed in September 2001 by Lucia Harrison in Olympia, Washington and is based upon her observations of her neighbors on Cooper Point." -Lucia Harrison

"This book consists of illustrations of types of leaves with their corresponding names and various plant illustrations printed on wood veneer laminated to paper. When fanned out the reverse sides of the pages create a medicine wheel." - University of Washington Libraries

Dr. Alcorn was a Professor Emeritus of Biology at the University of Puget Sound and Director and Curator of Bids at the Slater Museum of Natural History. Silent Wings is a beautifully illustrated guide to owls.

"Art and science are merged in Venet's work: drawings are constructed with mathematical formulae and performances are conducted by the artist in collaboration with nuclear and solar physicists. The book is a series of photographs from performances punched and bound on notebook rings with pull out diagrams on graph paper." -- Description taken from Printedmatter.org.

"A Three Thousand Light Year Journey explores the concepts of time and space by constructing an accurately scaled 3D computer model of a section of the sky, created by the artist with CAD software and creating a musical composition using astronomical data." -thomasparkerwilliams.com

"Periodic Serialism is a musical composition with parts for strings and piano that were derived by using periodic trigonometric functions to determine the pitch and duration of the notes.
Seven mathematical equations were used to produce graphs of the functions and the the graphs were overlaid with a standard five-line music staff. Where the staff position intersected the graph, a note was placed. The resulting diagram was used to create the sheet music." -thomasparkerwilliams.com