It's Fine Press Friday!
For this fine-press end of the week we present an artists-book rendition of Edna St. Vincent Millay's 1921 poem Low Tide by our very own Melissa Wagner-Lawler. Melissa is an Associate Lecturer in the UW-Milwaukee Department of Art & Design where she teaches 2D Concepts, Printmaking, and the Book Arts.
Low Tide was produced in Milwaukee in 2022 in an signed edition of ten copies. The type is Charter Roman and Italic and the pages were printed letterpress using photopolymer plates on Rives BFK heavyweight and lokta papers. The triangular book is bound using a wire-edge method invented by Massachusetts binder and structuralist Daniel Kelm. This type of binding allows for maximum flexibility where each page may be turned in opposite directions and allows the entire book to be opened and laid flat.
The first half of the poem is printed twice on both sides. On the exterior side, the poem is easily read, with each line or stanza flowing across the shoreline. On the interior side, the tide has receded and has washed the poem away. This half of the poem reads:
These wet rocks where the tide has been, Barnacled white and weeded brown And slimed beneath to a beautiful green, These wet rocks where the tide went down Will show again when the tide is high Faint and perilous, far from shore, No place to dream, but a place to die,— The bottom of the sea once more.
The book rests in a triangular cavity that is inset into a tray housed in a custom box. Removing the tray reveals an hexagonal trough where the book may placed as an hexagonal pyramid. Inside the trough is the remainder of the poem, which reads:
There was a child that wandered through A giant's empty house all day,— House full of wonderful things and new, But no fit place for a child to play.
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