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ILAB Library - All You Need To Know About Rare Books and the Antiquarian Book Trade
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[+] More Collecting Rare Books and First Editions - Two from the The Archangel Press
Published since 04 Dec 2012This year I finally tracked down a copy of Abraham Lincoln Gillespie's The Shaper, which is as far as I know is not only the first separately published work by the poet, but also the only work published in his lifetime. The Shaper was published by the Archangel Press, a press I know nothing about, but which published another one of my favorite books of visual poetry - Kenneth Lawrence Beaudoin's 6 Eye Poems. Today I got to put the two works, which are presented in a uniform format, side by side. Both are among the strangest, most overlooked works of visual poetry that I know of, and represent a little documented strand of visual poetry in the United States.
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[+] More The Cleveland Manifesto of Poetry, The Asphodel Bookshop and the Future of Bookstores
Published since 24 Jul 2012The Cleveland Manifesto of Poetry was published from Jim Lowell's Asphodel Bookshop in 1964, a year after the bookstore opened at 465 The Arcade. It prints statements by Russell Atkins, d. a. levy, Russell Salamon, Adelaide Simon, Jau Billera, and Kent Taylor. The statements still seem relevant today, especially those of Atkins and levy, whose manifesto begins "To write surface poems with the appearance of artificial flowers in order to communicate with persons by forcing them to resort to instinctive methods of understanding." It is a beautiful and surprising characterization of the concrete tendencies in levy's poetry and bookmaking.
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[+] More Rock in the USSR
Published since 29 Feb 2012This is an underground Russian samizdat translation of Nik Cohn’s classic history of pop music - first published in 1969 as Pop from the Beginning (in America as Rock from the Beginning), and then under the title Awopbopaloobop alopbamboom - produced on a typewriter with manuscript additions for any English words and names and then mimeographed. Although the title here reads ‘London 1969’, the source text must have been the American edition given the title and as the sequence of chapters and their headings also follow that version.
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[+] More Own the Whole World
Published since 28 Feb 2012Own the Whole World is a good example of the commingling of various interests - hardcore punk, mail art, cultural criticism, and irreducible eccentricity - that often seemed to take place in the zines of Ohio. Number 4 includes a manifesto on the need to analyze pop music by Peter Titus, a review with four photographs of Flipper at J. B.'s (proving that this show actually did happen - see an example of the flier here) and a Postal Art Network advertisement and call for submissions for Mark Bloch's New York exhibition The Last Mail Art Show.
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[+] More Collecting Rare Books and First Editions - The Dismal Science of the Mimeo Revolution
Published since 08 Dec 2011Digging through used bookstores, I always keep a look out for books that covered aspects of the Mimeo Revolution when it was a current event. Jeff Nuttall's Bomb Culture is a good one of course. There are many more books on the Underground Newspaper as opposed to the little magazines and Roger Lewis' Outlaws of America and Robert Glessing's The Underground Press in America are two examples.