#finepressfridays

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It’s Fine Press Friday!

Gypsy is a collection of several poems by James Baldwin (1924-1987), published by sculptor and printmaker Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press in Searsmont, Maine in 1989. The book contains a portrait of Baldwin etched by Baskin (1922-2000), printed on blue paper from the original copperplate. This copy is also signed by Baskin. The type is Centaur, cast by Harold Berliner's Typefoundry. The red pomegranate is one of the Gehenna Press's printer’s marks. Though Gehenna often worked collaboratively with poets, this collection was published two years after Baldwin’s death in 1987.

Speaking with The Black Scholar in 1973, Baldwin traced a mid-century shift in black culture in America, as part of the generation born in an urban, northern environment after the Great Migration: “It had become clear,” he explained, “that one could no longer live by the so-called standards of white civilization.” His writing embodies an intense, and honest excavation of history and its implications on the personal, the psychological, the emotional, the spiritual. “History is a very strange crucible and I don’t pretend to understand it; but I do understand at least in my own mind that you are lucky if you are forced to understand your own history.”

To grapple with reality and history through art: Baldwin here speaks to Baskin’s own artistic motivation. A vocal critic of “the irrational and accidental,” Leonard Baskin saw these approaches as the “denial of history.” Sidney Kaplan (1913-1980), an editor at Gehenna, scholar of African American history, and activist, explored Baskin’s portraits of artists:

“The true issue of mastery—the bold and conscious exploration of the past as a past of total reality, the discriminating and weighing of its necessities, the courage and intelligence to use the past without being used or used up by it, the endless desire to know man again and again in all his avatars of flesh and art…all this is what has led Baskin to look hard and long at the deathless faces of those who, for him, have been masters of man’s changing image.”

See other posts highlighting Leonard Baskin.

Check out our Black History Month posts.

--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

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It’s Fine Press Friday!

Maxine Hong Kingston’s (b. 1940) Hawai’i One Summer was published at Meadow Press in San Francisco, CA in 1987, in a limited edition of seventy-five. Leigh McLellan printed the text in Times New Roman on Korean Kozo Paper, assisted by Tracy Davis. MacKenzie-Harris Corporation set the type, and was adjusted by hand. John Prestianni designed the lettering for the title page and text initials. Watercolor and woodcut artist Deng Ming-Dao (b.1954) illustrated the book, and McLellan made the vibrant paste paper cover. The Davey board case binding is by Klaus-Ullrich Roetzscher. The copy is signed by the author, illustrator, and printer.

In 1988, American Craft Council concluded a three-part series on book arts in the United States, with a profile of McLellan, and her work on Kingston’s text. Noting the rich use of color, W. Thomas Taylor suggests the book works to capture “graphically, the elusive quality of Hawai’i” – a concern shared with Kingston in her introduction. Taylor wonders at the purpose of such books as works of art – since, more often than not, they end up in institutional collections. But he recounts the experience of reading this Meadow Press edition of Hawai’i One Summer with his wife, slowly, aloud, in bed. The book, he argues, the experience, is not just beautiful, it “stimulates an appreciation for the purposes of the author by its very presentation of her words.”

This book comes to us from the estate of Dennis Bayuzick.

See more books from Dennis Bayuzick.

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Check out more beautiful Fine Press Friday books!

-- Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

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It’s Fine Press Friday!

Incomplete, by interdisciplinary artist Ker Thao, was published in a limited edition of eleven copies by Weeping Willow Press in Stevens Point, Wisconsin in 2012. A design student at UW-Stevens Point at the time, Thao crafted the book from a single, folded sheet of mould-made paper, with letterpress and relief pressure-printed images. Thao dedicates the work to his “loving parents who through all the hardships and obstacles of assimilating into an unknown world, stayed strong, and reminded me to follow my dreams.”

Thao, a Hmong-American artist, now works as a design specialist as part of Women’s World Banking. Special Collections is proud to display Incomplete as part of its current pop-up exhibit in celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, along with exhibits throughout UWMs other Distinctive Collections. The exhibit runs through May 30th, 2025.

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--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

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It’s Fine Press Friday!

Our fine press selection this week comes out of the summer “High Jinks” of The Bohemian Club – an elite and exclusive social club for men based in San Francisco. In the summer of 1940, surrounded by redwoods, a group of prominent white men put on an original play for other prominent white men. Saul was written by Benjamin Allen Purrington (1894-1960), and draws from the struggles between Samuel and Saul in the Old Testament – struggles, he suggests, “analogous to those of our own unhappy times.” The book contains notes on the music by composer Charles Hart, as well as several illustrations by Albert J. Camille (1904 - 1981). San Francisco’s Grabhorn Press printed and bound the book in a limited edition of 1,300 copies. The typeface is Lutetía and the text is printed in black with red marginal captions. The decorative board binding displays a pattern of male figure in blues and purples.

In his biography of the Grabhorn Press, Roby Wenz indicates the high honor it was when Edwin Grabhorn was elected to The Bohemian Club – and how this meant the Press was now part of The Club’s establishment. Printing each summer’s “High Jinks” was now a yearly responsibility, though it was “seen usually as a piece of annual drudgery, seldom if ever worthy of the Press’s best efforts” (102).

The Club was formed in 1872 by a small cadre of newspaper men, who, according to a 1980 profile in American Heritage, “imagined themselves, on no substantial evidence, to be the artistic elite of a provincial city.” Before long however, the organization “succumbed to an irresistible urge” to admit capitalists, and was soon “led by men who would never before have called themselves ‘bohemian,’ much less have fraternized with newspapermen.”

Saul contains an extensive list of credits, highlighting all the men who performed the play, danced or sang in the chorus, played for the orchestra, assisted in constructing sets or designing costumes, or contributed in numerous other ways. One woman also appears! A Miss Betty Horst is thanked for help with choreography, though it is unclear if she was welcomed at the production.

Occasionally select women are invited to attend or become “honorary members” of The Bohemian Club. After a lawsuit, the company was forced to allow women to work for The Club, along with all the other employees allegedly falling victim to wage theft.

Recent guests and members include Sam Altman and Harlan Crow.

Read more about The Bohemian Club and its significance through an extensive study by UC Santa Cruz Emeritus Professor G. William Domhoff.

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-- Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

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It’s Fine Press Friday!

On this first Friday of the New Year, we’re delighted to highlight the work of book artist and UWM Art & Design faculty member Melissa Wagner-Lawler. In Solitude was printed by Red Thread Letterpress in June of 2023 as part of the In Cahoots Residency in Petaluma, California, in a limited edition of 30 copies signed by the artist. Wagner-Lawler created both the text and images, which were letterpress and relief printed. The font is Optima 14.

The spare prose cuts across the images; images and phrases wrap around pages; ideas linger (mostly) unpunctuated, unresolved, “existing in expansiveness.” The central signature folds out in a long accordion revealing a verdant, abstract solitude. The book lives in a turquoise clamshell box. In the colophon, Wagner-Lawler explains that the book was created “in an old horse barn” at Macy Chadwick’s In Cahoots Residency. (Back in December we featured some of Chadwick’s work produced at In Cahoots.)

Wagner-Lawler studied printmaking at both the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. At UWM she teaches in the Printing and Book Arts area of Art & Design, as well as the First Year Program. Her work is featured in collections across the country, including the Smithsonian American Art & Portraiture Library, Yale University, Stanford University, Library of Congress Rare Books Collection, and, of course, UWM’s Special Collections.

Watch a brief exploration of another Wagner-Lawler book by Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.

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--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern