Staff Pick of the Week!
This week I am sharing The Bridge: a poem by Hart Crane with photographs by Richard Benson, printed in 1981 for the members of The Limited Editions Club in New York in and edition of 2000 copies signed by the photographer..
This book caught my eye with its bright blue paste papers wrapping the box and making up the end sheets in the book. The papers are reproductions of the originals made by Carol Blinn. Paste papers are made by mixing pigment with a starch to create a paste that can be painted on a paper to decorate it, the paste mixture allows you to push the pigment around, moving it with different tools until the desired effect is created. Once you have seen some decorated paste papers they are hard to miss. Blinn’s designs suggest a body of rolling waves under blue sky, perhaps they are the waves bustling beneath the Brooklyn Bridge which inspired Hart Crane to write his first long poem.
This edition maintains many of the visual themes of the first edition of The Bridge, first published in 1930 by the Black Sun Press, which is wrapped in a blue paper cover and features photos of the bridge by Crane’s friend Walker Evans.
This book was designed by Stephen Stinehour. The font of the main text is Fourteen-point Monotype Dante, the headings are also Dante in other sizes. The text was set and printed by Michael & Winifred Bixler in Somerville, Massachusetts. The five photographs are by the photographer Richard Mead Atwater Benson and were printed by The Meriden Gravure Company in Meriden, Connecticut. The smooth white papers were produced specially for this edition at the Mohawk Mill in Cohoes, New York. The edition was bound at The Stinehour Press in Lunenburg, Vermont.
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Teddy- Special Collections Graduate Intern