An Intimate Cosmogony - Cosmogonie Intime (Signed)
Santa Cruz, California: Moving Parts Pess, 1992.
Limited Edition. Softcover.
#44 of a limited edition of 96 copies. Signed by the poet, artist, translator and book designer. With drawings by Ray Rice. English translation by Elizabeth R. Jackson. Bookwork by Felicia Rice. Letterpress printed using Janson types and photo engravings on Fabriano Artistico paper. Numbers 1-12 were hand-painted by the artist, number 13-97 were colored by pochoir. Two identical prospecta laid in with critical commentary by Rosemary Loud, then Rudy Professor of French and Italian at Indian University Bloomington. Each prospecta has French and English versions bound back to back,
Yves Peyre is a French poet and one-time Director of the Bibliotheque litteraire Jaques Doucet, the French government’s library of first editions, manuscripts and publications of modern French literature. Peyre has composed five poems here, “a sequence that carries the poet himself and his generation through time and space, touching base regularly to evoke a familiar name, a place, a far-gone era. These poems are at once intimate and universal, offering readers insight, revelation and passage on a poetic journey that illuminates our common ground. The pen-and-ink drawings by Ray Rice are enriched with multiple colors using the pochoir or stenciling process” (from the prospectus).
This was the last project for Bay Area painter, mosaicist and animator of experimental films, Ray Rice. Rice, father of the book designer and printer Felicia Rice, died in 2001 after completing his contributions to the book but before it was fully realized and published in 2005.
The Moving Parts Press burned to the ground in the devastating CZU Lightning Complex Fires that started in August 2020 in San Mateo and Santa Cruz Counties in Northern California. An unspecified number of copies of the work still on hand at the press were destroyed.
Item #902470ISBN: 0939952246
10 x 15 inch accordion-fold book that extends to 18 feet. The binding adheres to the model of the artist’s book; the bookblock rests in a printed paper cover wrapped in glassine. It is housed in a paper slipcase and a cloth-covered clamshell box. On eighteen of the twenty sheets that make up the book, long narrow text and drawings mirror one another, the verso English, the recto French, the drawings running to either side of the gutter, two prospecta - both in English and French - are laid in.
Two tiny specks of staining to glassine wrapper, else as new in original glassine, publisher's plain paper slipcase, and original cloth covered clamshell box.
Price: $2,400.00