Division Leap

Adventures in book life, from a secret and ambulatory rare bookstore and publishing project based in Portland, Oregon, and better motel rooms worldwide. If you're still reading you should probably be on our mailing list. www.divisionleap.com

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We've just released our 25th catalog, available now as a pdf on our website. The print version is delayed at the printer but will follow in a couple of weeks.

Named after a passage from Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, it presents 85 books, manuscripts and ephemera, including material on Benjamin, computing and reproductive technologies, social movements, May 1968, feminism, tattooing, incarceration, punk zines, music, literature, art and film, and more than 20 complete runs of periodicals, 12 of them punk zines, many of which we’ve not previously seen assembled.

Numerous additional images are available by request or on the website. We welcome your questions. Please email or call (917-922-0587) to reserve.

Division Leap on the Road: The WFMU Record Fair Brooklyn Expo Center Friday, Apr 28, 2017 - Sunday, Apr 30, 2017

Thanks for reading - Adam, Kate and Jack.

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Michael Myer’s linocut for the rare first edition of Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Ladies, published by the Zephyrus Image in 1977. Those familiar with the story will know that the cleaning woman is removing coke stains from the ceiling. Never has a short story been brought into this world with more empathy, brilliance and attention - a model for what an artists’ book of prose can achieve. More images and the whole story can be seen today on Archive & Survive. 

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Various Little Blue Books, published by Haldeman-Julius in Kansas from 1919 onward - one of the most sustained, diverse, committed and unfailingly interesting publishing projects in American history. Most of the titles were truly pocket sized as well, and could actually be put in a shirt pocket. We have a category on our website devoted to the series, and in recent weeks have begun to catalog some of the hundreds we have a stock. You can even sign up for a weekly email to see the new titles we add every week. Happy reading. 

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Unattributed woodcut of Maldoror as an octopus, preparing to attempt to eat God. From Pedro Leandro Ipuche’s obscure and exuberant pamphlet on Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, published in Montevideo, 1926. Ipuche was associated with the Nativismo movement in Uruguay, and was also a friend of collaborator of Borges during his Ultraist period, when they worked together on the little magazine Proa. For more on this strange work, check out the post on the DL blog. And if you know the artist or source of this woodcut, please get in touch. 

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Images from Pinto de Cavalho’s Historia do Fado, published in Lisbon in 1903 and probably the first full length study of the genre. The cover of the book reproduces a striking drawing of fadista Maria Severa, 

More on the book today at the DL Blog. 

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"That was the time when Berkeley was liberating the world so we thought we’d work on Berkeley too.” - Holbrook Teter, quoted in Alastair Johnston’s Zephyrus Image: A Bibliography. 

More.

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Images from the English edition of the 7th book in Petite Planète series, created and directed by Chris Marker. One of the best in the series, it was written by Joseph Rovan, Marker’s friend and early employer and editor at the DOC and Esprit, where Marker published his early works. Rovan was born in Germany and was imprisoned at Dachau for his efforts in the resistance, and he and Marker took trips back to Germany in an effort at cultural reconciliation. The book features a number of Marker’s own photographs, and his ironic juxtapositions and playful influence on layout are everywhere throughout. 

Read more about the book today at the DL Blog, where we’ll be profiling other installments in the series in the coming days. We will also have limited copies of some of the books available at DL. 

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Lately I’ve been making a systematic effort to read through the volumes of Chris Marker’s Petite Plànete series, and marveling all over again at what a profound détournement of the by-then moribund travel guide format they are. With the exception of William Klein’s Life is Good and Good For You, there seems to have been very little that has been influenced by them, or bears much an affinity with them, at least that I’ve been able to discover. A notable exception is this remarkable travelogue as photobook by Chris Marker’s friend, Agnes Varda.

The inventive layout, sly humor and mixture of Varda’s own photographs with found imagery from advertising and historical ephemera is remarkable. There is even a Giradoux quote in the foreward.

One reason for the obscurity of the title might be the fragility of the binding. Most copies seem to have detached pages. Perhaps someday someone will reissue the book. In the meanwhile, track down a copy to put on that lonely shelf with all of your little planets.

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In the early 1900′s a pickpocket was arrested in the German town of Mainz. This was in itself an ordinary occurrence, but in his belongings were discovered a notebook full of drawings, many of them categorized by profession, along with vials of red and black ink and wooden needles, all housed in a spectacle case. Luckily the judge in Mainz took an interest in the kit and the pickpocket, and published an illustrated essay on it in an obscure periodical devoted to criminology. Read the story at the Division Leap Blog. 

From our upcoming list dedicated to the history of tattooing. 

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The DL Rare (Tattoo) Book of the Day: details from Erhard Riecke’s essential 1925 work Das Tatauierungswesen im Heutigen Europa. More images from the book, and the story of Dr. Riecke up today at the DL Blog. 

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Illustrations by J. F. Horrabin for Do Your Own Thinking, a pamphlet published in the 1920′s by the Plebs League. More at the DL Blog. 

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The Division Leap rare tattoo book of the day - the painter and ethnologist Guido Boggiani’s Tatuaggio o Pittura? Studio Intorno ad una Curiosa Usanza Delle Popolazioni Indigene Dell'Antico Peru, published in Rome in 1895. 

From today’s new arrivals. For more about this book and the strange fate of Boggiani’s head and camera, visit the Division Leap Blog. 

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Flyer for this 1979 show at the Earth, in NW Portland featuring an unbelievable line-up. The Earth was between Hoyt and Irving on 21st, and is now a nail shop and spa. - Division Leap

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The first edition of this unusual anthology, in which short stories and excerpts from larger works (including a piece by Isaac Babel) are collaged together and commercially packaged into a convenient narrative of female decline. The cover features an illustration by the illustrator Lou Marchetti, who lent his distinctive style to many crime fiction and western pulps of the era.  Mark Merrill was a pseudonym of David Markson, and this is his first published book. The anthology was re-released in 1963 under the less titillating, but perhaps equally convenient title Great Tales of Old Russia.

While the primary motive behind the book may have been financial, as with his other early detective novels, the collage aspect of the book and the excellent selection of Russian works are the beginning of a trajectory that would culminate in Markson’s great, last collage novels.

I never knew Markson well, but when I worked at the Strand in the early aughts I sometimes used to talk to him about books in the evenings when he would come in and make his rounds. This wasn’t unusual; Markson’s well-known affection for the bookstore extended to many of the employees. I remember that he was the first person to mention the works of Isaac Babel to me. I was foolish enough to wait a few years to read Babel, just as I foolishly delayed reading Markson’s own work until after my acquaintance with him . Seeing Babel’s work here reinforces that particular regret of reading a book later then one would like.

The cover art of this book has a resonance to me that goes back even further. My first foray into bookselling was at the age of 9. I specialized in Louis L’amour books, a natural decision because at the time he was my favorite author. I discovered I could buy them at garage sales for 10 cents and sell them for 25 to 50 cents – a significant amount of money in rural Oregon during the decline of the timber industry in the 1980’s. I judged the salability of a western largely on the cover art. Marchetti’s work on the cover of a L’Amour made it eminently saleable. Seeing his work more than a quarter century later, on the cover of a work by somebody who has since become one of the my favorite writers, gives me that particular sense of vertigo one feels when disparate strands of time suddenly elide. This feeling is so often caused by the physical fact of books, and is one of the great pleasures of reading that I don’t think will ever transfer to their electronic counterparts. -Adam Davis

Visit the Division Leap Blog. 

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Ur No. 1. Paris, 1950. 

From today’s new arrivals. All the bibliographic niceties at Division Leap. 

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1971 announcement by Piero Heliczer of his daughter Sabine Heliczer’s birth, in which he also announces the formation of the Museum of the Future and copies of the Paris Filmmaker’s Cooperative catalog. Source: Division Leap.

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On the occasion of Independence Day, we’ve just issued Short List Catalog #27: Occupations. Art, Squatting, and Contested Spaces, 1969-1994. On dispay at Division Leap. 

All proceeds from the catalog will be donated to The Circulating Library to fund printing for their public projects.