It’s Fine Press Friday
In 1946, a year after the United States detonated an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the New Yorker magazine planned to run a series on the attack and its aftermath over four issues. Instead, they dedicated an entire issue to the extensive report by journalist John Hersey (1914-1993). Today we feature a 1983 edition of Hersey’s Hiroshima, published by Limited Editions Club in New York City, and featuring original eight silkscreen prints by Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), and a new poem by Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989). Lawrence’s prints were produced at Studio Heinrici. Robert Burlen & Son bound the edition, and the text was printed by Bruce Chandler and Daniel Keleher at Wild Carrot Letterpress. Golgonooza Letter Foundry set the type in Optima Medium. Our copy, part of a limited edition of 1,500, is signed by Hersey, Lawrence, and Warren.
Jacob Lawrence selected Hersey’s essay, after Limited Editions Club commissioned his art for a book in 1982. The original eight paintings, from which the silkscreens were derived, now live in the permanent collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Lawrence served in the Coast Guard during WWII, as part of a racially a segregated regiment in Florida, and then as a Coast Guard Artist in Italy, Egypt, England, and India. He laments here that in addition to the “great geniuses” of the arts and sciences, “we have in the meantime developed the means to destroy, in a most horrible manner, that life that is our God-given right.”
This edition of Hiroshima came two years after the release of 1981 compilation of damages caused by the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In his afterward, Hersey describes and lists the “grim disorders” linked to exposure – especially among those who were children at the time, and those who had been in utero. These maladies “were not yet observable” at the time of the essay’s original publication. Such new documentation warrants, or course, the new edition and consideration of the work. But so too does the worry on which Hersey concludes: “civic memory has a dreadfully short half-life.”
--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern
