(Avant-garde) (Careers)
by JASON ROVITO, BOOKSELLER

"[Etching] is too personal a subject, and consequently too aristocratic, to delight people other than men of letters and artists; people very much in love with all living Personality... Among the different expressions in the plastic arts, etching is the one which comes closest to literary expression and is the best way to betray the spontaneity of the artist" (Baudelaire, 1862). Manet incorporated etching into his practice largely under the influence of Baudelaire's aesthetics. And—full circle, Baudelaire would himself become a recurrent subject in Manet's etching. In 1862, he first etched Baudelaire's top-hat'd profile—so similar to the one figured in his Tuileries canvas from the same year. And then, when word reached Manet that Charles Asselineau was planning a memorial publication in 1869, following Baudelaire's death, Manet insisted on contributing two portraits. With Baudelaire de profil en chapeau II (above), he revisited the earlier profile, although he would here push his subject further towards abstraction. Approaching calligraphy. Thus Harris: "In the first vision, there is a little shading with parallel strokes in the lower part of the hat, the coat collar, and tie. These hatchings are completely eliminated in the second version; what remains is a pure outline drawing untouched by shading."
 

For the author of The soft machine—and one of the typewriter's most ardent lovers—it's hard not to imagine the shadow of the family business looming large. The Burroughs Corporation was originally founded in 1886 as the American Arithmometer Company, designing adding machines for businesses. Burroughs would move forward to embrace twentieth century computing, before eventually merging with Sperry UNIVAC to form UNISYS. Just consider the heresy (for some of us) of burroughs.com. Thus the brilliance of Gerard Malanga's 1975 large-scale portrait of a then-elderly William S., so strikingly capturing the friction between the divergent theories of language competing under a single family name: the digital versus the analogue.
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Eugène Carrière is known more for his brooding Symbolist paintings than for his ephemeral works of print. In fin-de-siècle Paris, however, the Dreyfus Affair was a daily phenomenon, with Alfred Dreyfus accused of colluding with a foreign power amidst a troubling rise of anti-Semitic and nationalist forces. Within this context, Geroges Clemenceau—the future French Prime Minister—was preparing for the publication of L'aurore (roughly translated as The dawn), a daily journal with the triple motto: "Littéraire, Artistique, Sociale." Most famously, it was on the front page of L'aurore in January 1898 that Émile Zola would push the Affair to its limit with his incendiary open letter to President Faure, "J'accuse." But first, in 1897, Clemenceau needed promotion. And so he asked Carrière for a captivating image with which to launch his paper, both for street posters, but also for use in bookshops and similar spaces. The print offered here is one of the latter; marked as "affiche d'interieur." Invoking the aesthetic of a migraine—and of that which will pass—Carrière lent his talent to the cause.
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This group includes one further item. In 1972, Chopin would again revisit the Idea of the Festival, with a collage work mounted on a silver-foiled masonite disc (imaged above). The title for this artist's proof is inscribed to the verso:  Avec 3 figures: Beguier—Bertini—HC, with Chopin thus naming two of his collaborators in the Festival, while citing them within the collage itself through the recycling of their images. The female image by Gianni Bertini thus repeats in this group thrice: on the Gysin poster, in the pages of the catalogue, and in the prominent left-quadrant of this collage, opposite Chopin's absurd black scale. Within this context, the typescript poem might be considered one of Chopin's most self-referential dactylopoèmes, performing his incessant loop between the multiple levels of language: "... que j'en avais la gueule de bois de ne battre avec les lettres les mots parlés de tous il me fallait autre chose c'est pourquoi je suis avec encore hhhh iiii jjjj kkkk llll mmmm nnnn oooo pppp qqqq rrrr quand je dois dire que tout cela n'existe pas tas de personnages bavards ——————————————— c'est tout."
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Of note is the final issue of the Stop press supplement (one of two supplements present in this set), where a brilliant design competition was organized for the invention of the 27th English letter. In addition to the winners, and the judges thorough rationales, a number of "special mentions" were provided for their sheer creativity. Rendering this set rather timely is the March 2017 special issue of The book collector, which revisits the design competition in honour of Ian Fleming's participation in organizing the original competition with Harling.
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Die Alpen—which would continue for one more volume (Jahrgang VII, 1912/13)—was formerly published under the title Berner rundschau (from 1906/07 through 1909/10). In addition to Klee's reviews, this 1911/12 volume includes a long (and well-illustrated) assessment of Klee's early career by Hans Bloesch ("Ein moderner graphiker"), as well as three publications from a young Hermann Hesse: including the poem Adagio (which would become Traum gibt, was Tag verschloss) and the short stories Vater Daniel and Drei linden. An incredibly well-preserved monument from the Modernist movement.
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This particular association copy adds a fascinating twist to the story. Before the edition was confiscated, one of its recipients was the innovative choreographer (and supposed Nazi sympathizer) Mary Wigman, a friend from Dresden of Grohmann, who here presents her with a nostalgic inscription (“In alter treu u. freundschaft"). Of the few annotations to the text—possibly made by Wigman herself, or possibly by Grohmann—is a mark next to number 76 in Grohmann's catalogue, drawing attention to Klee's Drei Hexen from 1927: a work which presumably drew inspiration from Wigman's own Hexentranz (see video above), which she had premiered a year earlier, in 1926.
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Strangely, across the two printings, there's one element that definitively doesn't change. In both instances, the titles go to great lengths to announce a false number of plates. When four additional plates are added in the second printing (all of them being properly credited in the table of contents), the original titling error is carried forward, so that 95 becomes 99 (rather than 104). To add a further twist: with the French Crès edition, the plates correspond to the first Delphin printing (with 100), while the cover image matches that from the second. An interesting case study in marketing for art historians.
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In terms of the reversibility of patronage—catalogue collectors might here take note. Printed as an integral part of this textblock is the 1895 List of books in belles lettres for John Lane, where the publisher performs (in what must have been one of his first opportunities) his repudiation of his one-time golden boy Oscar Wilde, whose monumental works in said genre are strikingly left absent.
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The original publication is scarce enough, with only seven OCLC records appearing in FirstSearch and only three of those copies held outside of Germany (at Yale, Northwestern, and the National Library of Israel). Of those seven recorded copies, however, only one describes an inserted leaf to match our copy—i.e. the record at Berlin's Staatsbibliothek. This outlier is not mentioned in the corresponding entry in the Bonitz/Wirtz bibliography (C2), nor in the few recorded auction instances. Absurdly, this Berlin copy shares the same colophon as ours—as number 1 of 22,863—although the age supplied in manuscript beneath the photograph of Tucholsky-as-Wrobel differs: with the Berlin copy giving his age as 19, and ours stating 21. The logic behind Tucholsky's dissimulation here remains unclear (if there is one); but it's interesting to note that it was in his 21st year that he made his fateful visit to Prague with Szafranski to meet Kafka—entering the latter's diary as "completely of a piece;" after which he abandoned his legal studies for a career as "the heckling voice in the gallery, and more than that: the conscience of Germany" (Harry Zohn, 1990).
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