Eccentricities - Items on Display

Jerome Rothenberg

A poem to celebrate the spring and Diane Rothenberg’s birthday... with a small gift added in by Jody Shields

Perry Township, Driftless, Wisconsin: Perishable Press, 1975

This was the seventy-fourth publication from the press of Walter and Mary Hamady, founded in 1964. The Hamadys undertake nearly all the tasks involved in creating their books, from making the paper to binding many of the finished volumes, on their farm in Wisconsin. This is number 62 of 76 copies, open to show the ‘small gift’.

864.a.270(30)

Our ‘ero ‘Arry (with apologies to Robert Browning)

Leicester: [Leicester School of Printing], 1968

A parody of Robert Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, the text is a humorous portrayal of the Leicester School of Printing at the time of the change from letterpress to lithographic printing.

864.a.234(3)

Seymour Adelman

Help from Heaven

New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Books, 1984

The text is a lecture on book collecting given to the Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Library in April 1981. The scroll is almost eleven feet long and was issued as a limited edition of 300 copies in a plastic canister, printed at the Bird & Bull Press, Newtown, Pennsylvania.

Syn.9.98.115

Henry Morris

The first fine silver coinage of the Republic of San Serriffe; the Bird & Bull Press commemorative 100 coronas

Newtown, Pennsylvania: Bird & Bull Press, 1988

On 1 April, 1977 The Guardian newspaper issued an eight-page Special Report on the Republic of San Serriffe. With the two islands shaped like a semicolon, and the capital city named Bodoni, it was very much a printer’s ‘in-joke’. Henry Morris of the Bird & Bull Press liked it so much that he invented a San Serriffe branch of his press and used it for a few publications. One was a limited edition of 350 copies, but every copy was marked as ‘No.1’.

S492.c.98.6-7

Scrap books one hundred

[Cambridge]: Object Books, 2000

The East Anglian artist/writers Kirsten Lavers and cris cheek work jointly as Things Not Worth Keeping. This ‘volume’ was an outcome of a short course at Dartington College of Art in 1998, in which the first brief to students was to ‘alter the object-status’ of a chosen book.

2004.11.2632