The Adventures of a Dreamer: Picture Stories in Colors, Vol. 1
New York: Christine Burgin, 2016.
Paperback.
The 25 pictures in this book comprise the dream journal of “Albert Grass,” founder of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society, a fantastical organization imagined by Zoe Beloff. Beloff created this hand-drawn prototype for a World War II era comic book and cited it as the work of Grass, supposedly done between 1936 and 1939. The Dreamer begins his tale as a comic-book hero in the mold of Superman, but he eventually loses his ability to fly and the work becomes a more serious investigation into The Dreamer’s psyche and his anxieties for the people around him.
The original project began when the director of the Coney Island Museum invited Beloff to stage an exhibition celebrating the centennial of Freud's visit to the Dreamland Amusement park in 1909. "Rather than simply illustrate Freud's visit, I wanted to explore the unconscious of the people who lived, worked and played in Coney Island ... The Society was a framework for this. The fact that I invented it was completely in tune with the setting. Everything in the Amusement Park is a crazy fiction - that is its charm.”
Item #902146
ISBN: 9780977869640
7-3/4 x 10-1/4”, stiff pictorial wrapper, unpaginated, fully illustrated in color, with a foreword “A Life in Dreams” by Zoe Belhoff.
The wrappers illustration is designed to look like a well-journal, but the publication is in very good to fine condition with the interior being bright and clean.
Price: $30.00