CONTEMPORARY BINDERS of LA PROSE DU TRANSSIBÉRIEN

Detail from Dominic Riley Binding

            

Detail from Monique Lallier Binding

  

           

Detail from George Kirkpatrick Binding

           

Detail from Sabina Nies Binding

 

                                                  

October 2, 2021 from 11:00 AM to 1:30 PM PDT, 7:00 PM to 9:30 PM in the U.K. 

 

Zoom Event Sponsored by the Designer Bookbinders, and open to the public.

 

Kitty Maryatt, Creator of the 2018 La Prose du Transsibérien Re-creation, will moderate this event.

 

Meet the U.S. and U.K. binders of the 2018 facsimile by Kitty Maryatt of the 1913 book, La Prose du Transsibérien, by Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay. The binders will discuss their process of designing and executing a binding for the new facsimile of a book that was groundbreaking for its time.

 

The binding by Paul Bonet of a copy of the original in 1963–64 was the inspiration for the idea to commission twenty-five binders to bind the 2018 facsimile, which replicated the original techniques of letterpress and pochoir. The resulting bindings were shown at the exhibit titled Drop Dead Gorgeous, which toured the country starting in San Francisco in 2019, and went to Los Angeles, and Boston in 2020. The exhibit closed in Minneapolis at MCBA on May 9, 2021 and shows in London from October 4 to 25, 2021. An exhibition catalog for Drop Dead Gorgeous is available. 

The Paul Bonet binding from 1963-64 was the inspiration for commissioning
25 fine binders to bind La Prose du Transsibérien Re-creation 

The 1913 book was printed on four large sheets of paper, trimmed, glued into a scroll, then folded in half vertically and folded again into an accordion-fold book. The original binding was a piece of vellum, painted in oils, folded in half, which was to be glued to the top edge of the book. The Paul Bonet binding folded the pages differently from the original; he received the pages unglued, so he decided not to fold the pages in half first; then he folded them into an accordion book. The newly commissioned binders were free to glue and fold the book as they wished, though a few binders were given the book already glued and folded by the original method.

 

The eighteen participating binders will give presentations in groups of five, with breaks in between each of four sessions for brief questions and/or comments. It will be organized alphabetically, so that you can be sure to know when your favorite binders will be presenting. The slides for the missing binders will be presented by Kitty Maryatt. There will be time at the very end of all the sessions for the binders to ask each other questions, and to interact with the audience.

 

Session 1: Kathy Abbott, Servane Briand, Hannah Brown, Coleen Curry, Sue Doggett. Session 2: Samuel Feinstein, Erin Fletcher, Don Glaister, Derek Hood, Susan Hulme, Lang Ingalls, George Kirkpatrick.

Session 3: Midori Kunikata-Cockram, Monique Lallier, Kitty Maryatt, Sabina Nies, Patty Owen, Eleanore Ramsey.

Session 4: James Reid-Cunningham, Dominic Riley, Tracey Rowledge, Haein Song, Priscilla Spitler, Julian Thomas, Jonathan Tremblay.

 

Registration required for this Zoom event.

Drop Dead Gorgeous exhibition in London

Drop Dead Gorgeous was first shown at the San Francisco Center for the Book in the Fall of 2019. 

A catalog of the exhibit is available from SFCB; see details below.

DROP DEAD GORGEOUS, an exhibition of twenty-five fine bindings of La Prose du Transsibérien Re-creation, will finally be shown at Maggs Bros. Ltd. Rare Books and Manuscripts in London from October 4 to October 25, 2021. The exhibit, originally slated for June 2020, had been postponed due to Covid. The exhibit was curated by Kitty Maryatt; Simon Eccles and Toby Schwartzburg are the Co-Curators. Twenty-five binders from the U.S., Canada and the U.K. were commissioned to bind a copy of this facsimile of the 1913 La Prose du Transsibérien by Sonia Delaunay and Blaise Cendrars, published in 2018 by Two Hands Press. The exhibit commenced in 2019 in San Francisco, traveled to Los Angeles and Boston in 2020, and was shown virtually at the Minnesota Center for the Book in 2021. The exhibit is open from 9:30 am to 5:00 pm during the week at 48 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DR.

 

You can still view the virtual MCBA exhibit in “past events.” 

 

There are several events coordinating with the DROP DEAD GORGEOUS exhibit at Maggs in October 2021:

 

1. October 2: Zoom event with the binders of La Prose du Transsibérien Re-creation, 7:00 pm UK time, 11:00 PDT. More details to come on the next blog entry. Registration required.

 

2. October 9-10: Traditional French Pochoir Workshop at St. Bride’s Library, London, 8:30 am to 4:30 pm. Book here.

 

3. October 11: Showing of the hour-long documentary by Rosylyn Rhee, “The Re-creation of a Masterpiece: La Prose du Transsibérien”, at Maggs Bros. at 6:00 pm. Interviews with scholars, booksellers, collectors, and underwriters of the project, and demonstrations of traditional French pochoir technique. Reservations required: ben@maggs.com.

 

4. October 25: Special visit to the Victoria & Albert Museum at 1:00 pm to view an original copy of the 1913 La Prose du Transsibérien, Blaise Cendrars’ La Fin du Monde, and Sonia Delaunay’s 1925 portfolio Ses Peintures, Ses Objets, Ses Tissues Simultanés, Ses Modes. Reservations required: twohandspress@gmail.com.

 

The 110-page catalog for DROP DEAD GORGEOUS, Fine Bindings for La Prose du Transsibérien Re-creation is available from the San Francisco Center for the Book for $50 plus tax and shipping, at www.sfcb.org. You can also purchase the catalog for £45 from Maggs Bros. at www.maggs.com. The catalog includes a fold-out of the facsimile and a section on traditional French pochoir. Photos from the catalog will be forthcoming in the next blog.

 

Binding by Haein Song

Binding by Lang Ingalls

Binding by Coleen Curry

Binding by Tracy Rowledge

Binding by Derek Hood

Drop Dead Gorgeous: Fine Bindings of "La Prose du Transsibérien Re-creation"

We're pleased to announce the following exciting events relating to La Prose: 

1. EXHIBITION

"Drop Dead Gorgeous: Fine Bindings of La Prose du Transsibérien Re-creation"

DATES: September 6 to October 6, 2019

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, September 6, 2019, 6:00–8:00 pm

LOCATION: San Francisco Center for the Book, 375 Rhode Island Street, San Francisco, California.

Debuting in San Francisco, the exhibition will feature the work of twenty-two design binders, including Don Glaister, Monique Lallier, Midori Kunikata-Cockram and Julian Thomas. Tools, materials, and supplemental material used in the creation of Maryatt’s edition of La Prose will also be on display. Upon closing in San Francisco in October, the exhibition travels to additional venues in the United States, Canada and England. See the blog home page for details.

2. DOCUMENTARY SCREENING

The Re-creation of a Masterpiece: La Prose du Transsibérien. 

Documentary by Rosylyn Rhee. Los Angeles, 2019. 

DATE: Friday, October 4, 2019, 6:00–8:00 pm

LOCATION: San Francisco Center for the Book, 375 Rhode Island Street, San Francisco, California

In this documentary, we follow Kitty Maryatt as she produces her re-creation of the gorgeous 1913 book by painter Sonia Delaunay and poet Blaise Cendrars, La Prose du Transsibérien. Unique to its time, the book pushed boundaries of book structure, painted imagery and poetic expression. Using original techniques of letterpress printing and pochoir (stenciling) to reproduce her edition of La Prose, Kitty develops insight into the creative and conceptual challenges faced by Blaise and Sonia, while attempting to discover why they did not complete their planned edition.

3. LEGION OF HONOR VIEWING of ORIGINAL

TITLE: Viewing of the Logan Collection’s La Prose du Transsibérien, led by Kitty Maryatt

DATE: October 5, 2019, 3:00–5:00 pm

LOCATION: Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Lower level, Legion of Honor, 100 34th Avenue, San Francisco CA 94121

Join Drop Dead Gorgeous curator Kitty Maryatt and Collections Specialist Steve Woodall (Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts) for this rare opportunity to view the Logan Collection’s original 1913 copy of La Prose du Transsibérien, created by artist Sonia Delaunay and poet Blaise Cendrars. Related books from the Reva and David Logan Collection of Illustrated Books will also be on view.

Note: reservations are required for this event and seating is limited to 20 people.

Email exhibitions@sfcb.org to reserve your space.

4. POCHOIR CLASS

Introduction to Traditional French Pochoir

September 7th and 8th, 2019    9:30 AM – 5:30 PM

San Francisco Center for the Book

Instructor: Kitty Maryatt

The word pochoir in French simply means stencil, which has been done by every culture since mankind blew iron oxide around their hands onto cave walls. As the French are known to do, they developed particularly sophisticated stencil techniques in the early twentieth century. This workshop will introduce the basics of printing multiples through such stencils. The steps involve the following: trace the imagery that you want to reproduce, develop a registration system, identify and separate the colors, cut aluminum plates by hand, mix gouache colors, prime the French pochoir brush and apply the liquid in a swirling fashion.

Demonstrations of tracing images and cutting the plates will be shown first. Participants will trace one color from the image and cut an aluminum plate. The instructor will bring a pre-designed image with plates already cut so that participants can immediately learn the brush techniques. The six colors will be applied as the group makes an edition of the image. Then we will look at the images brought in by participants and discover which images are appropriate to reproduce in this way, including printing a base image.

Next, participants will select or create an image to be reproduced and go through the steps to make an edition of that image. Since this is an introduction, the focus will be on problem-solving and experiencing the joy of vibrant and true color. Additional techniques used on La Prose will be highlighted and demonstrated.

---

Materials to Bring: Removable scotch tape, pochoir brush from Talas: $50 for size 44 (optional), drawing pencil (hard lead) with sharpener or technical mechanical pencil (Staedtler or Faber-Castell) with H lead if possible, eraser (Pentel Clic Eraser if possible), printmaking papers to experiment with: Arches Cover, Rives BFK, Frankfurt, etc. Images that might be appropriate for pochoir; example: Kandinsky early paintings, letterpress printed works that you want to add color to, your own imagery.

Optional and available at SFCB for student use during workshop: Cutting mat, utility knife with snap-off blade, ruler

Workshop Fee (includes $56 materials fee): $400.00

View Originals of La Prose in the U.S.

I apologize for the gap in blog entries, but I have been assiduously working on the edition of La Prose and am now almost done with 106 copies, 30 of which are for the underwriters and for Atelier Coloris. That means that there are 74 more copies to make, which will take another nine months to a year. We plan to return to a more regular schedule of blog entries once we return from our trip to the Oak Knoll Book Fest and from our travels to view more originals of La Prose, two in Pennsylvania and two in Boston.

If you wish to make your own tour of originals in the United States, you can consult the list I have compiled below. There are 13 copies in public institutions and at least two in private hands that I know of. Wouldn’t it be a miracle if we could organize an exhibition of several of them to be hung side-to-side for comparison? That’s what I have been doing virtually through photographs I have taken at various institutions over the past several years, when allowed. You can compare the intensity of the colors, the different folding schemes, the signing of the books, and look at the most complicated areas to determine if they are different enough to be done by different hands.

This video shows my facsimile alongside the Legion of Honor copy: 

 And here, you can see my facsimile alongside the Getty Research Center copy:

List of institutions holding an original copy of La Prose du Transsibérien in the United States (this is an update to my census published in this blog last year; all copies are on simili Japon except one):

1. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA, #124, glued and folded into 21 panels, inscribed to Archipenko, vellum cover not attached

2. Yale University (Beinecke Library), New Haven, CT,  #131, glued and folded into 21 panels, vellum cover attached

3. Palace of the Legion of Honor (David and Reva Logan Collection), San Francisco, CA, unnumbered, on Japon (the only one in the US on Japon in a public collection)), glued and folded into 22 panels, vellum cover not attached

4. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, #139 (note that #139 was also assigned by Blaise Cendrars to the copy donated by Sonia Delaunay to the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne in Paris), glued and folded into 22 panels, inscribed to Chilean painter Manuel Ortiz de Zarate: Noël 1916, vellum cover attached

5. New York Public Library (Spencer Collection), New York, NY, #47 (note that #47 ws also assigned by Blaise Cendrars to the copy in l’Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia), unglued and unfolded, inscribed to M. Jean Decloux, 21 June 1938

6. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, #97, glued and folded into 21 panels but now framed under glass, vellum cover detached

7. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, #38, glued and folded into 20 panels, signed by both Blaise and Sonia, vellum cover not attached, cover has snaps on front and back cover

8. Allentown Museum of Art, Allentown, Pennsylvania, unnumbered, four pages unglued and unfolded, vellum cover is surely a maquette with dark blue lines drawn everywhere as the pattern for painting the oil colors, cover is non-rectangular trapezoid, never folded

9. Harvard University (Houghton Library), Cambridge, MA, unnumbered, four pages unglued and unfolded, vellum cover not attached

10. University of Texas (Harry Ransom Center), Dallas, TX, #41, folded and glued, cover attached

11. MoMA, New York, NY, #150, glued and folded into 21 panels, inscribed to Louis Brun, cover not attached (see Inventing Abstraction exhibition catalog, exhibit shown 2012-2013)

12. Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota, MN, #130, glued and folded into 21 panels but now framed under glass), cover still attached

13. Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami Beach, FL, #147

In private hands in the U.S.:

#111 in Massachussetts (note that #111 was also assigned by Blaise Cendrars to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London)

#29 in Louisiana on Japon, folded and glued, inscribed to Mr. Kaplan, vellum cover attached

I have assembled a list of books held outside the U.S. in institutions, which still needs to be updated since last year: (many books on my earlier list show evidence of existence, but I don’t yet know where they are, so they are not listed here; all are on simili Japon unless noted))

#4 Muséo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain, (vellum copy)

Tate Modern, London, unnumbered (vellum copy), maquette

#11 Jean Bonna Collection, Switzerland (Japon copy)

#16 Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France (Japon copy)

#34 Jacques Doucet Library, Paris, France (Japon copy)

#47 l’Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia

#51 Bibliothèque Nationale, Switzerland

#57 Foundation Martin Bodmer, Geneva, Switzerland

#71 Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France

#110 Zadkine Museum, Paris, France

#111 Victoria & Albert Museum

#119 Biblioteca Marío de Andrade, São Paulo, Brazil

#137 National Gallery, Canberra, Australia

#139 Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Paris, France

Jacquet Doucet Literary Library, unnumbered (quite faded)

Musée d’Art et Histoire, Geneva, Switzerland, unnumbered (maquette painted by Sonia Delaunay)

British Library, London, England, unnumbered (“epreuve d’artiste”, artist proof with note to pocheurs)

Private Collection:

#9 South Africa, four pages on Japon, unglued and unnumbered, vellum cover not attached

Additions and corrections to the list are most welcome. Note that another census was published in the catalog for the exhibition at the Foundation Jan Michalski last November which I still need to correlate with my census. More to come.

Besides making books and trying to sell them, I have written a new long article, to be published later this year in The Codex Papers, with my latest theories about where the pochoir was done and why the edition was not completed, and more information about the type styles used by Blaise Cendrars and about Sonia Delanunay’s painting vocabulary. I also plan to have a table at Codex next February and hope to see you there.

Legion of Honor Symposium and an update on Ongoing Sales

Legion of Honor Symposium

The 2018 Reva and David Logan Symposium on the Artist’s Book will be held on Saturday, July 14, 2018 from 1:00 to 4:00 at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. It is free after museum admission and open to the public with no reservations needed. It accompanies the exhibit at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco called Paris 1913: Reinventing the Artist’s Book.

Organizer Steve Woodall writes: By 1913, Cubism was firmly established as a dominant mode for French artists of the avant-garde. Writers and artists traveled in the same circles, especially in the bohemian communities of Montmartre and Montparnasse, and frequent artist/poet collaborations produced radical new experiments with text and image. In that year, artist Sonia Delaunay and poet Blaise Cendrars collaborated on a groundbreaking artist’s book built around the Cendrars poem “La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France.” The 2018 Reva and David Logan Symposium takes this milieu, and La Prose du Transsibérien, as the background for an afternoon of discussions that examine poet/artist collaboration and the book as an art medium.

The keynote speaker is Marjorie Perloff, author of The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, and many other books. Her talk is titled Simultaneity and Difference in La Prose du Transsibérien.

There are four other speakers:

• Craig Dworkin, Cubist Language: The Abstraction of the Word
• Harry Reese, Pattern Recognition
• Inge Bruggeman, Archives and Histories: Collecting and Recollecting
• Kitty Maryatt, Construction and Deconstruction of a Masterpiece

 For more information, please see the symposium website.

Ongoing Sales 

The project to re-create the Blaise Cendrars/Sonia Delaunay 1913 publication, La Prose du Transsibérien, was published by Two Hands Press on January 1, 2018 and completed books are now shipping. It will take another nine months to a year to complete the entire edition. The title of the book is La Prose du Transsibérien Re-creation. The edition is limited to 150 copies, with 30 hors commerce. The price is $3500 plus shipping and may include sales tax if you live in California. To reserve your copy, please email me at twohandspress@gmail.com. I will send you more information about the book, a reservation form, and a pdf with several images.

The type for the book was printed last June by printer Richard Siebert in San Francisco. Two Hands Press licensed a high-resolution scan of La Prose from The Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Richard removed the surrounding pochoir colors from the Blaise Cendrars poem and then went through the whole text for weeks, cleaning up nearly every letter. Sixteen photo-polymer plates were needed to print the four 16 x 23 inch pages, with each one printed in four colors: orange, ruby red, green and blue. Each of the one thousand sheets was printed four times on his Heidelberg letterpress. The printing is very crisp and uses exactly the format of the original.

The gouache color for the Sonia Delaunay imagery is being hand-applied at Two Hands Press using thin metal stencils (pochoir = stencil in French). There are about twenty-five aluminum stencils for each of the four sheets, or one hundred in all. The sixty-six colors have been selected with great care to match the originals. I worked primarily with originals at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Palace of the Legion of Honor, and viewed nine other originals in the US, France and England. The 2008 Yale University facsimile was invaluable in the process; about one hundred tracings of the Yale facsimile were needed as patterns for cutting the aluminum pochoir plates.

The over six-foot book is folded once down the center and folded again into twenty-one panels to result in a book that is 3.625 by 7.125 inches. On one side you see the Delaunay image and on the facing side you see the Cendrars poem with the enhancing pochoir surrounding the type. A booklet with a description of the processes accompanies La Prose. The book is held unattached in its painted vellum cover. Both the book and the booklet are contained in an acrylic slipcase.

Finished, unfolded copy of La Prose du Transsibérien Re-creation

Painted vellum cover holds folded La Prose (left), Booklet with description of processes (right), vellum cover and booklet cover (center); all these parts fit into the acrylic slipcase

Front and back of vellum covers, with acrylic slipcase

It's time to reserve your copy at the pre-sale price!

The project to re-create the Blaise Cendrars/Sonia Delaunay 1913 publication, La Prose du Transsibérien, is in its pre-publication phase. I am planning an edition of 150 copies, with 30 hors commerce. The publication date is January 1, 2018 with pre-sales starting November 1, 2017. The discounted price of $2750 will be in effect from November 1 to December 30, 2017. The price will be $3500 on January 1, 2018. 

To reserve your copy at the prepaid prepublication price of $2750, please email me at twohandspress@gmail.com or by snail mail. The check should be sent to Two Hands Press before January 1, 2018. The delivery date will be subject to the completion of the printing of the booklet and the binding, but is planned be close to January 1, 2018. Delivery of the first 43 will be made in the order prepaid reservations are received. If there is a deluge of pre-sales orders, then the next copies will be shipped by March 2018.

The type for the book was printed last June by printer Richard Siebert in San Francisco. Two Hands Press licensed a high-resolution scan of La Prose from The Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Richard removed the surrounding pochoir colors from the Blaise Cendrars poem and then went through the whole text for weeks, cleaning up nearly every letter. Sixteen photo-polymer plates were needed to print the four 16 x 23 inch pages, with each one printed in four colors: orange, ruby red, green and blue. Each of the 1000 sheets was printed four times on his Heidelberg letterpress. The printing is very crisp and uses exactly the form of the original.

The gouache color for the Sonia Delaunay imagery is hand-applied using thin metal stencils (pochoir = stencil in French). There are about 25 aluminum stencils for each of the four sheets, or 100 in all. The 50 or so colors have been selected with great care to match the originals. I worked primarily with originals at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Palace of the Legion of Honor, and viewed nine other originals in the US, France and England.

The pochoir for five display copies was completed in France; the pochoir for 43 more copies has been completed at Two Hands Press. The remaining 137 copies in the edition will take another six to nine months to complete. About 75% of the first copies were done in France where Kitty and her assistant Chris Yuengling-Niles spent almost two months working daily with Christine Menguy at Atelier Coloris, who fine-tuned their skills in the pochoir process. The next step is to paint the vellum covers and print the booklet that accompanies La Prose.

The book is folded once down the center and 21 times across to result in a book that is 3.625 by 7.25 inches. On one side you see the Delaunay image and on the facing side you see the Cendrars poem with the enhancing pochoir surrounding the type. The book is held unattached in its vellum cover. A booklet will accompany La Prose and will have a description of the processes.

Prepublication parties in New York and Boston!

We are pleased to announce TWO pre-publication events on the East Coast!

New York

Monday, November 20, 2017
6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
Center for Book Arts, 28 W. 27 th Street, New York, NY 10001
TICKETS: Admission is free! RSVP to the CBA: 212-481-0295

Boston

Tuesday, November 21, 2017
6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
North Bennett Street School, 150 North Street, Boston, MA 02109
TICKETS: Admission is free! RSVP to NBSS (617) 227-0155


ABOUT the PARTY: You are invited to the pre-publication party to preview the re-
creation of the1913 book, La Prose du Transsibérien, by poet Blaise Cendrars and
painter Sonia Delaunay, published in a new edition by Kitty Maryatt of Two Hands
Press. La Prose is considered to be one of the most remarkable artists’ books of the
twentieth century.

ABOUT the LECTURE and EXHIBITION: Kitty Maryatt will give a talk about her
extensive research on La Prose and will premiere a short video detailing the making
of this new edition. There will be a pop-up exhibition of several copies of the book in
both folded and scroll formats.

ABOUT the BOOK: The type was letterpress-printed by Richard Siebert with photo-
polymer plates, and the gouache imagery was hand-painted using the original 1913
pochoir techniques. Kitty Maryatt and her assistant Chris Yuengling-Niles have been
producing the pochoir under the supervision of Christine Menguy of Atelier Coloris
in Ploubazlanec, France and will complete the edition at Two Hands Press in Playa
Vista, California next year.

The size of the edition is 150 copies plus 30 hors commerce. The price is $2750 until
the publication date of January 1, 2018 after which time it will increase to $3500.
The book is made up of four 16 x 23 inch parent pages, which are cut to size after
printing and after application of the 100 pochoir stencils and extensive handwork.
The four pages are glued together, folded vertically and then accordion-folded into
sections. The finished book size when folded is 7 1/8 inches by 3 5/8 inches and is
housed in a painted vellum cover. When unfolded, the book is 14 1/4 inches wide x
6 ½ feet long. The book will be accompanied by a booklet containing a description of
the production processes and an English translation of the poem by Timothy Young
of Yale University.

ABOUT the LECTURER: Kitty Maryatt is Director Emerita of the Scripps College
Press and was also Assistant Professor of Art at Scripps College in Claremont,
California. She taught Typography and the Book Arts at Scripps for 30 years. She
recently received the Oscar Lewis Award for the Book Arts from the Book Club of
California.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION about the project: laprosepochoir.blogspot.com or
contact Kitty Maryatt at twohandspress@gmail.com