The Unburnable Book

To support free expression and fight censorship, author Margaret Atwood has joined forces with Penguin Random House and others to produce an unburnable version of The Handmaid's Tale, which is now being auctioned by Sotheby's. All proceeds go to benefit PEN America. The current bid is $42,000, and the auction closes June 7, 2022. 

Here are the technical specifications for the highly engineered edition of one: 

8vo. Printed on black-and-white-coated aluminum Cinefoils, used in film production to wrap hot lights, which are stable to 660°C/1220°F, textblock hand-sewn with nickel wire, often used in electrical components, which is stable to 1400°C/2,600°F, head and tail bands are woven stainless steel, used in aerospace manufacturing, which are stable up to 1530°C/2790°F. Boards 3mm phenolic sheets, used in electronics manufacturing, which are stable to 540°F/282°C, opaque white and CMYK printing produced on an OKI five-colour digital press, with inks stable to 1200°C/2200°F. 

In the video above, Atwood is demonstrating proof of concept. Of related interest are earlier Common Curator posts on censorship, including Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas. 

National Book Festival 2021

The 21th annual National Book Festival, organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress, will be held September 17-26, 2021 in Washington, D.C. The festival is free and open to the public.

More than 100 authors, poets, and illustrators will be making presentations throughout the festival on stages for Children, Teens, Fiction, History & Biography, International, Poetry & Prose, Genre Fiction, Science, and other themes & genres. Speakers include such writers as Kazuo Ishiguro, Roxane Gay, Nikki Giovanni, Joy Harjo, George Saunders, and many others. 

Further information, including a schedule of events and an FAQ can be found at the festival website. 

This year's poster was designed by Dana Tanamachi; a gallery of all Festival posters from 2001 to 2021 can be viewed here.

Iowa City Book Festival [11th edition]

Designated in 2008 as one of the very first UNESCO Cities of Literature in the world, Iowa City will be hosting the eleventh annual Iowa City Book Festival, October 1-6, 2019. In conjunction with the University of Iowa, FilmScene, the Iowa City Public Library, and the Iowa Arts Council, as well as other organizations and individuals, the six-day event will feature a Book Fair, readings by dozens of authors, and non-stop programming at many venues in and around downtown Iowa City.

As usual, many of this year's events will involve the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, which was founded in 1967 by Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh Engle. During this period, over 1,400 writers from more than 140 countries have spent a residency in Iowa City, where they have enriched the writing culture of the community while experiencing firsthand life at an American university. Sponsored by the City of Coralville, the annual Paul Engle Prize will be awarded to both Toi Derricote and Cornelius Eady, writers who have made "an impact on [their] community and the world at large through efforts beyond the page." Derricote and Eady are the co-founders of Cave Canem, a home for black poetry. 

The 2019 Schedule can be downloaded as a PDF, and full details can be found at the festival website.

National Book Festival 2019

The 19th annual National Book Festival, organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress, will be held on Saturday, August 31, 2019, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. The festival is free and open to the public.

More than 100 authors, poets, and illustrators will be making presentations throughout the day on stages for Children, Teens, Fiction, History & Biography, International, Poetry & Prose, Genre Fiction, Science, and other themes & genres. Speakers include such writers as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, José Andrés, Raina Telgemeier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Barbara Kingsolver, and many others. Further information, including a schedule of events and a map of the festival grounds, can be found at the festival website. Mobile apps are also available for the Festival.

This year's poster was designed by Marian Bantjes; a gallery of all Festival posters from 2001 to 2018 can be viewed here.

Public Space One Launches Campaign for New Headquarters

Public Space One (PS1) is creating a permanent home for artistic experimentation and community in downtown Iowa City in two historic houses at 225 & 229 N. Gilbert Street:

—a gallery embedded in a welcoming community space

—increased space for the Iowa City Press Co-op, a community-access educational print and book arts studio, with a new dedicated classroom space
—a public reading room & archive for The Center for Afrofuturist Studies
—a dedicated residency studio for the CAS and Free Studio Residency
—light-filled private studios for local artists

—an outdoor space for community gatherings and creative events of all kinds 

Please visit PS1's Kickstarter campaign site to learn more about this vibrant community arts organization and how you can help fulfill the vision for their new space. 

Herman Melville at 200: Call Me Ishmael

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Herman Melville [1819-1891]. As canonical in American and world literature as his compatriot, Walt Whitman [1819-1892], Melville's wondrous novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, was published in London in October 1851, and a month later in New York. The London edition was simply titled, The Whale; it also lacked the book's Epilogue, which is essential to the story's understanding. 

It was at Arrowhead, his farmstead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, that Melville wrote Moby-Dick, and other such classics as Bartleby, the Scrivener. From his second-floor study, Melville had a view onto Mount Greylock, the tallest peak in the state, which he noted reminded him of a great white sperm whale breaching the ocean surface. Nathaniel Hawthorne was a nearby resident in the Berkshires, and he and Melville first met on August 5, 1850 during a literary gathering.

Hawthorne is perhaps the one contemporary who best apprehended the true merit of Moby-Dick, and Melville famously dedicated the book to his newfound friend: "In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne." Melville, however, did not have an equivalent reception from the reading public during his lifetime. It was not until the 1920s, after his critical (re)discovery, that his literary reputation began to grow into what it is today. Rockwell Kent's compelling illustrations for a 1930 edition of Moby-Dick also helped fuel renewed interest in Melville.

The illustrations above are from the Arion Press deluxe edition of 1979. The project was designed by Andrew Hoyem, and printed by letterpress in an edition of 250. It features 100 engravings by renowned artist Barry Moser, as well as a bespoke typeface, Leviathan, that was used for the initials of each chapter (Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes designed the capitals).

Arion Press has been called the last "full-service letterpress" in the country, replete with type foundry and book bindery. One copy of Arion's Moby-Dick was auctioned last year at Sotheby's for nearly $14,000 (from actor & bibliophile Robin William's estate). First editions of the original London and New York imprints are relatively scarce and even more expensive. Two useful Melville guides from leading antiquarian booksellers are "Collecting Herman Melville," by William S. Reese, and "A Checklist of Herman Melville's First and Major Editions," by Kevin MacDonnell.

We the People Have the Power

Patti Smith and Fred "Sonic" Smith [1948-1994] are shown here performing "People Have the Power," a song they co-wrote and which was included on Patti Smith's 1988 album, Dream of Life. The official music video for the song is viewable here.

Of related interest on the Fourth of July are Mark Twain's Independence Day Peroration and the Declaration of Independence, which is housed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The parchment document is thought to have been engrossed by Timothy Matlack, and although it is dated July 4, 1776, it was not signed by members of the Continental Congress until August 2, 1776; additional delegates later signed it, for a total of 56 signatories.

Walt Whitman Sings Out at 200

The bicentennial of the birth of the great poet Walt Whitman [1819-1892] is today, May 31, 2019. The irrepressible Whitman still sings in the 21st century, but if you would like to check out his sole surviving recording, circa 1889-90, you can listen to it here. The recording is a recitation of the following poem, though the last two lines are not captured on the wax cylinder:

America 

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, 

All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old, 

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, 

Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love, 

A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother, 

Chair'd in the adamant of Time.

The story of how it came about, and its technical aspects, can be read in Professor Ed Folsom's "The Whitman Recording." The scholarship on Whitman is of course vast, with (re)discoveries in recent years including Whitman's novel, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, and a lengthy newspaper series curiously called "Manly Health and Training," both texts being uncovered by Zachary Turpin.

The University of Iowa has long been a center for Whitman scholarship, with Prof. Folsom and others maintaining the extensive Walt Whitman Archive and editing the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. The first MOOC (or Massive Open Online Course) that Iowa's International Writing Program ever offered, in 2014, was "Every Atom: Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself.'"

In 2005, Iowa mounted a major exhibition that drew heavily upon the Whitman collection of Dr. Kendall Reed, and for which Prof. Folsom wrote an extensive illustrated catalog, Whitman Making Books/Books Making Whitman: A Catalog & Commentary. The catalog delves deeply into not only Whitman's writing practice but how his knowledge of printing influenced the design and make-up of his ever-evolving masterpiece, Leaves of Grass. A fascinating study (and freely available online), it begins:  

Walt Whitman is the only major American poet of the nineteenth century to have an intimate association with the art of bookmaking. Everyone knows Whitman as a poet and the author of one of the most studied books of American poetry, Leaves of Grass. What is less well known is that Whitman was trained as a printer and throughout his life spent time in printing shops and binderies, often setting type himself and always intimately involved in the design and production of his books. Whitman did not just write his book, he made his book, and he made it over and over again, each time producing a different material object that spoke to its readers in different ways.

No nineteenth-century American author was more involved in the range of actual activities of bookmaking than Whitman. He began his career as a newspaper worker, learning typesetting at the young age of twelve as an apprentice on the Long Island Patriot under the tutelage of William Hartshorne (1775–1859), a master printer (Whitman called him "the veteran printer of the United States") who later became Brooklyn's city printer. Late in his life, Whitman wrote a poem called "A Font of Type," in which he imagines all the "unlaunch'd voices—passionate powers, / Wrath, argument, or praise, or comic leer, or prayer devout" that lie "within the pallid slivers slumbering" in "This latent mine" of the type-box . . . .

To commemorate Whitman's enduring body of work, the University of Iowa Libraries offers the exhibition, Walt Whitman: A Bicentennial Celebration, through August 9, as well as Walt Whitman at 200: The Bicentennial Symposium, on June 18-19. Additional events and programming nationally can be found at the Walt Whitman Initiative website. 

Note: The illustration above is from the frontispiece for the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), as found in the University of Iowa Libraries' copy. 

The Spirit That Moves Us Press: Morty Sklar

For those who may not know, the poet and publisher, Morty Sklar [1935-2018], died at the end of December 2018 in Jackson Heights, Queens. Morty had ridden his motorcycle out to Iowa City circa 1971, and ended up staying until 1989, when he moved back to New York City. The Common Curator met him in 1988 at a rooming house, where Morty happened to be the resident manager (the property, incidentally, was owned by W.P. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe, which became The Field of Dreams phenomenon). Morty was a true character, with a bottomless reservoir of stories and anecdotes, all conveyed with a pronounced New York accent that was never tempered in the slightest by nearly two decades of Iowa living. 

Morty operated The Spirit That Moves Us Press out of his then-quarters in the house, and a key element of his enterprise was a large, archaic IBM composing machine with which he electronically typeset all his books. His most notable publication was no doubt Jaroslav Seifert's The Casting of Bells (1983). In the following year Seifert won the Nobel Prize for Literature, yet was not then widely known in literary circles outside his native Czechoslavakia. Needless to say, after the prize was announced, journalists and critics from across the U.S. and abroad were scrambling to find copies of Seifert's work in English translation, and inundated Morty with book orders. Unfortunately, according to Morty's recounting, he had recently moved, and the phone company had messed up his call-forwarding request, hence he lost many potential sales as well as a good portion of once-in-a-lifetime publicity. Such are the travails of small presses! 

The Spirit That Moves Us magazine was the first thing Morty published, in 1975, and he went on to issue a number of books of poetry, fiction & essays, including: The Actualist Anthology; Nuke-Rebuke; Editor's Choice (a series); Patchwork of Dreams: Voices from the Heart of the New America; and similar collections. In addition, he published volumes by individual poets, including Seifert (several titles), local Chuck Miller, and others. His own poetry, The Smell of Life: Poems 1969-2005, was also published under the TSTMUP imprint. Morty's final book was The Ultimate Actualist Convention: A Detailed View of Iowa City Actualism in the 1970s & 1980s and Its Migration to the San Francisco Bay Area, which came out in 2017.

The Common Curator last saw Morty in the late 1990's/early 2000's at the annual Small Press Fair held in Manhattan, where they both periodically exhibited their wares after leaving Iowa. There's a lot more that could be related, of course, and for those who are interested, below are compiled various resources that touch on Morty's life and career as an author, editor, and small press publisher. He was still giving readings as of last summer, and video of that and other things can be found at his YouTube channel. 

Morty was always a New Yorker through and through, but it seemed that he nevertheless found Iowa to be fertile ground for his fertile mind, and that in the end he gave as much to the City of Literature as he harvested.

May the Spirit Move Us All in 2019!

   *  *  *  *

-- Obituary [Iowa City Press-Citizen, January 1, 2019]

-- The Spirit That Moves Us Press [established circa 1975]

-- YouTube Channel [including readings and miscellanea]

-- The Reminiscences of Morty Sklar [Phoenix House Foundation Oral History Project, Columbia University, September 25, 2014]

-- Poet & Writers Biography

-- Poetry City Actualized: A Look Back at the Birth of an Iowa City-based Literary Movement [Little Village, January 9, 2015]

-- Vibrant Tales In Small Book On Queens [New York Times article about the anthology, Patchwork of Dreams, December 7, 1996]

-- Little-Known in U.S., Nobel Poet Praised Here [New York Times article about Jaroslav Seifert, whom Sklar published the year prior, October 12, 1984]

. . . ''The Casting of Bells,'' a 64-page collection translated by Tom O'Grady and Paul Jagasich, and published in August 1983 by The Spirit That Moves Us Press in Iowa City, Iowa. Morty Sklar, who described himself yesterday as ''publisher, editor, typesetter and stamp licker'' of the press, said his is a small, independent press that publishes two books a year. He published 1,000 copies of the Seifert book, but yesterday, upon hearing the news from Sweden, he reordered 2,500 more. It is available in paperback for $6.

The Final Number of the Wapsipinicon Almanac

The latest--and final--annual installment of the eclectic Wapsipinicon Almanac is now available for purchase and perusal. Published and letterpress printed since 1988 by Timothy Fay of Route 3 Press, the present issue, as with previous numbers, features an engaging mix of essays, reviews, fiction, poetry, art, wit, and wisdom.

Number 25 can be purchased at bookstores and other establishments or by writing the publisher directly at Wapsipinicon Almanac, 19948 Shooting Star Road, Anamosa, Iowa 52205. Single copies are $9, plus $2.70 for postage; Iowa residents should also include 63-cents for sales tax.

The front cover shown here was designed by Will Thomson of Iowa City, his seventh cover overall for the almanac. A brief history of the publication can be viewed at the Almanac's website, and a video of "Linotype Operator Emeritus" Eldon Meeks in action can be viewed here.

The 10th Annual Iowa City Book Festival

Designated in 2008 as one of the very first UNESCO Cities of Literature in the world, Iowa City will be hosting the tenth annual Iowa City Book Festival, October 1-7, 2018. In conjunction with the University of Iowa, FilmScene, the Iowa City Public Library, and the Iowa Arts Council, as well as other organizations and individuals, the seven-day event will feature a Book Fair, readings by dozens of authors, and non-stop programming at many venues in and around downtown Iowa City.

As usual, many of this year's events will involve the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, which was founded in 1967 by Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh Engle. During this period, over 1,400 writers from more than 140 countries have spent a residency in Iowa City, where they have enriched the writing culture of the community while experiencing firsthand life at an American university. Sponsored by the City of Coralville, the annual Paul Engle Prize will be awarded to a writer who "makes an impact on his or her community and the world at large through efforts beyond the page." 

The 2018 Program can be downloaded as a PDF, and full details can be found at the festival website.