07 December 2016
Cathy Courtney talks about Ken Campbell at the British Library
Earlier this year, the British Library completed its collection of the published works of the British artist Ken Campbell, with his most recent work You All Know The Words (2016). The British Library is the only Library in UK to hold all the works. At the end of October, the Library held a celebration of the work of Ken Campbell. Reprinted here is the text from Cathy Courtney’s introduction to the evening.
You All Know The Words (2016). Image used by kind permission of Ken Campbell
I speak as one of the first beneficiaries of the British Library’s decision to augment its collection of Ken’s books, and was lucky enough to spend some time with a selection of them last week in preparation for tonight, and to re-encounter works I hadn’t seen for at least a decade as well as to meet more recent books for the first time. I’m not a member of the British Library staff so I feel I can also pay tribute to the curators here for their commitment to Ken’s collection and their sensitive and excited response to it.
Beginning in 1983 I wrote a column on Artists’ Books for Jack Wendler and Peter Townsend’s magazine, Art Monthly, and it was Peter who led to my meeting Ken. The world of artists’ books is a hotly disputed one, full of splits and factions about what does and does not count as an artists’ book. At one extreme are the de luxe livres d’artistes, limited editions usually printed on fine paper, often images supporting texts and the two separated on different pages with masses of white space on the deckle edged sheet. At the other extreme are the much cheaper multiples, making use of new technology, often deliberately cocking a snook at the livres d’artistes, rejecting high spec values, usually costing little and often given away. In Britain, at least, the supporters of one school were always anxious to knock down the supporters of the other.
There were ten issues of Art Monthly a year, not much space therefore to cover the field, and I was determined to use the column for a broad range of work. The years writing for Art Monthly were ones in which I was heavily pursued by the book artists, not least by belligerent phone calls before 8 o’clock in the morning from Ken and from another artist who used to ring me at 11 pm and talk for an hour minimum. It’s not unconnected to this that I bought my first telephone answering machine.
Ken Campbell’s books are an outstanding achievement and his is one of the strongest voices we have in the field. His works are a compelling amalgam of erudition and violence, raw pain and refinement, anger and joy. In many ways he has created a place in the spectrum between livres d’artistes and multiples that is his ground alone.
His books are remarkable for a number of reasons and I have only time to refer to a few. One aspect is his professionalism. Ken trained as a printer and is rare in having come to make books with a deep intellectual and hands-on knowledge of the materials and how to control them. Skilled in how to manipulate the letterpress perfectly, nevertheless he chose instead to instigate a fierce and warlike dance with the process, courting accident and breakage, and this vitality is wonderfully captured in the results. You can feel the energy burning off the pages. The massive scale and solemnity of some of the works makes this even more of an accomplishment. Whilst there has been plenty of prior planning, many of his decisions were made in the heat of action on the printing bed and with relish at the semi-accidental richness thereby achieved. He’s a risk taker backed by proficiency, too restless a soul to take the safer route.
A Knife Romance (1988). Image used by kind permission of Ken Campbell
He’s also an ad-libber with a learned tongue. Although some of the works are collaborations, another characteristic not shared by many other book artists is Ken’s repeated taking responsibility for both text and image, these two elements being distilled into a single entity, the content inseparable from the form. His texts are an extraordinary synthesis of the personal and the learnt, the historical and the now. When he quotes from religious or historical texts he does so as if these are deeply felt, avoiding the tripwire of bathos, which is no easy feat. He is a poet with a natural and muscular brimming over of language from which to edit. Anger at injustice is a theme which runs through several of the texts, whether political in the wider sense or closer to home, and his engagement, conflict with and love of his family – his parents, his wife and daughters – bleeds into the works without veering into sentimentality.
Wearing another hat, I am speaking as Project Director for an oral history project, Artists’ Lives which National Life Stories, an independent charity based here at the British Library, runs with Tate. Ken was recorded for Artists’ Lives in 2005 and his recording will go online shortly. As with most National Life Stories recordings, it’s an in-depth life story, made over several sessions, covering biographical material as well as professional experience. It was a perfect platform for Ken, and draws together the elements of his personal life which consume him alongside much detail about his work and how it has been made, and will be very useful for anyone wanting to know more about how the books in the British Library’s and about his sculpture and painting.
National Life Stories has to raise funds for all its recordings. Ken’s was supported by Yale Center for British Art, and I would like to include a message from Elisabeth Fairman, Chief Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Center. She emailed me to say
“how pleased the Center is to also have a complete collection of Ken’s work, someone whom we consider one of the greatest book artists of his time”.
******************************
Following on from the event in October, many of the Artists’ Lives recordings have now been made available on the British Library’s website. These can be heard at http://sounds.bl.uk/Arts-literature-and-performance/Art
15 June 2016
P is for Printess: New Acquisition
Christine Tacq’s latest artist’s book Printess & the p is a reimagining of the timeless Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a young woman who proves her nobility to her suitor prince, by detecting a pea through twenty feather mattresses. Only a princess would be so sensitive to be awakened by a pea. In this version, it is a woman printer, or ‘printess’, who is the person of discernment.
The first thing that is striking about Tacq’s latest work is the interspersed monotone plates sit in sharp contrast to the vibrant rich imagery of the colour spreads illustrating the narrative. This contrast is beautifully underpinned by using different paper. The colour reliefs are printed on Zerkall paper, while, intaglio collagraphs are on Fabriano paper. By cleverly changing the medium it reinforces the initial contrast at the physical as well as on a visual level.
The theme of contrast extends to the depictions. The seven richly coloured double-page spreads juxtaposed with the far more vulnerable black and white which offers an intimate glimpse into an inner darker world. Some of these prints spill out from the confines of the frame with hard edged intaglio printing as if attempting to burst out from the page and ape the freedom a vibrancy depicted in the colour plates.
Tacq’s skill as a book artist are illustrated in the way this volume unravels and draws in a complex range of themes and concepts, techniques; - and then presents them in such an appealing way. Her use of Optima for the text balances with the rich relief collagraphs
The Printess &the p was published in July 2014, it is a first edition of twenty five copies. The volume was printed by p’s &q’s Press, Thame in Oxfordshire and bound at the Fine Book Bindery.
The covers are bound in hand-printed linen designed with relief-blocks and comes in a linen slipcase.
The images are created using the collagraphy technique in which the plate is constructed of adhered elements and inked with a roller or brush to produce in both relief and intaglio, and an embossed impression can be obtained by printing the plate dry without inking.
The way the imagery and the narrative intertwine to create this volume weighted with powerful subtexts which engage with concepts of feminism and identity. In some respects it offers a self-portrait of a printer.
On returning the volume to its slipcase one evening after working with it I noticed a small piece of paper squashed in to the back of the slip case. On retrieving and unfolding it, it read:
“18 Excellent Copy, British Library? Excellent”
Because of the way the creases appear it was possibly placed on the spine as part of the quality assurance process. Nevertheless, to come across such a note adds to an authenticity of the artistic process and speaks to the huge range of skills and processes it takes to create a tome of such outstanding quality.
The Library’s copy of the Printess &the p will be accessible at British Library shelfmark RF.2016.b.35. in the near future.
Images reproduced with the kind permission of Christine Tacq.
Blog by Jerry Jenkins, Curator, Emerging Media, Contemporary British Published Collections
13 April 2016
Seamus Heaney: From “Ex-poet” to Nobel Laureate
Recently the British Library hosted an event to mark the publication of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid, published by Faber. Poets Jo Shapcott, Tom Paulin, Matthew Hollis, and Simon Armitage gave readings from the work, offered insights to Heaney’s influence on their own work, and read much-loved poems from Heaney’s celebrated collections. The translation, which details Aeneas’s descent into the Underworld, is the last collection from the Nobel Laureate, who died in 2013. Here Richard Price, Head of Contemporary British Collections, reflects on two meetings he had with the Laureate at the Library.
Seamus Heaney at the University College Dublin, February 11, 2009, By Sean O'Connor [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
I’m lucky enough to have met Seamus Heaney a couple of times, as part of my job here at the British Library. My first encounter was when he had just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was giving a lecture for the Library on the poetry of Robert Burns, an important influence on Ulster poets in the nineteenth century and perhaps still to this day.
Those were in the days of the Round Reading Room in the British Museum when I was a junior curator in the Library there. He had a little time before the event so before he took to the lectern, I met him with my then colleague Mary Doran, the Curator of Modern Irish Collections, and we ushered him into an anteroom.
We had recently acquired a very rare item relating to Heaney’s early days of writing and were excited about what his reaction might be. It was the Hilary Term 1961 issue of the magazine Gorgon (Hilary Term is the second term, at the start of the calendar year). He had been an assistant editor of the magazine as a student at Queen’s University, Belfast and this was the last issue he was involved in. Unusually, he supplied his own, extra, editorial.
Gorgon, Hilary Term Issue 1961. British Library shelfmark: Cup.410.f.750
It was quite something to be able to show the new Nobel Laureate this early piece of his poetry activism, a slim mimeographed magazine, crammed with poems and articles Heaney had been involved in selecting (the main editor, Pat Roche, makes a point in his editorial that the assistant editors had taken a particularly active role in the process).
Even so, the mere fact of Heaney’s involvement magazine wasn’t why we were so excited: rather, it was because of the dramatic way in which Heaney signed off his editorial. “I am not an ex-editor of Gorgon but something (I have convinced myself) more despicable,” he writes in his last sentence of the editorial, “an ex-poet.”
An extract from Seamus Heaney’s editorial in the 1961 issue of Gorgon in which he signs off as an ‘ex-poet’
What would the elder, feted, famed, Nobel prize winning, poet say to that?
He laughed, of course.
I think in that chuckle there was an affection for his younger self and for the earnest activity of all poets, young or otherwise. The high stakes of poetry, its solemnities, its purposefulness, even in humour, is particularly felt. Five years later, Heaney would publish Death of a Naturalist to worldwide acclaim. As well the first edition of Death of A Naturalist, Faber, 1966, the Library has sound recordings of him from this time and later, e.g. from our British Council collection.
Image from a handbook issued by the British Council: Catalogue of Tape Recordings (November 1974).
I suppose all poets are like the “young bloods” he describes in the opening of The Aeneid VI, making quick landfall, “vaulting quickly out” with their urgent poetry, metaphorically in search of flints for fire or simply to stand amazed at new rivers.
The cover of Seamus Heaney's Aeneid Book VI, with kind permission of Faber & Faber
The second time I met Seamus Heaney, sadly the last time, was in late 2003. It was in our new building at St Pancras – Heaney had been viewing the Ted Hughes exhibition I had curated because he was going to give a reading of some of Hughes’ poems for the launch. We met for a cup of coffee with Hughes’s widow, Carol. We were talking about Hughes of course, who had been an early inspiration and then a great friend to Heaney.
Then, to my surprise, Heaney began to talk about Robert Henryson, the fifteenth century Scots Makar, the name given to a Scottish poet of national standing. He said he had started to translate, or retell, Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid. This would clearly be one of Heaney’s present-in-the-past projects which followed on from his acclaimed version of Beowulf, in which contemporary battles, and contemporary hubris, seem pre-echoed. As with Edwin Morgan’s translation of Beowulf, which Morgan had described as his ‘Second World War poem’, there is a feeling in Heaney’s translations that in such epic translations the present is being addressed by the past.
“Fair Cresseid” © Hughie O’Donoghue, painting reproduced as a tipped-in plate, from Seamus Heaney’s Testament of Cresseid, Enitharmon Editions, 2004, used with kind permission of the publisher and artist
Testament of Cresseid is a sorrowful story about the fate of the once beautiful, vivacious Cresseid, separated from her lover Troilus. For lamenting her life intemperately she is punished by the gods with disfigurements akin to leprosy (though if anything sounds intemperate to me, those punishments do!). Years after they have parted, Troilus recognises her but does not reveal his identity, instead giving a large amount of money to the leper colony. Cresseid, realising who her patron was, dies in grief.
Henryson is in a sense writing a sequel to Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde, and is also part of a great Troilus literary chain, since Shakespeare, in one of his more bitter plays, would later dramatise the story in Troilus and Cressida.
“Leper house (gate”), © Hughie O’Donoghue, painting reproduced as a tipped-in plate, from Seamus Heaney’s Testament of Cresseid, Enitharmon Editions, 2004, used with kind permission of the publisher and artist
Heaney’s Beowulf had only recently been published when we met that second time. Famously, the British Library holds the original Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and in fact, now, the manuscript of Heaney’s translation, too. Manuscripts were the link for the Henryson poem, too: Heaney had seen a Henryson manuscript at the Library and this had inspired him, after long admiring the poet, to render Henryson from Middle Scots into modern English.
Heaney’s Testament would later appear in a beautiful artist’s book with images by Hughie O’Donoghue, published by Enitharmon (British Library shelfmark: LD.31.b.557), as well as in a more commercial publication five years later.
“Cresseid” © Hughie O’Donoghue, painting reproduced as a tipped-in plate, from Seamus Heaney’s Testament of Cresseid, Enitharmon Editions, 2004, used with kind permission of the publisher and artist
As we talked, Heaney emphasised how the Makar’s distinctly moral vision appealed to him: there is a teacher-like morality in Henryson he especially admired. As he talked I thought I detected, what, a hesitation? Knowing me as a Scottish poet, was he testing me, about Scottish reaction to ‘versioning’ this apparently sacrosanct text?
No, the moment passed, and I am still not sure if anything happened at all. In retrospect, I doubt he was worried. Henryson, Beowulf, Virgil, are each surely a gift to the world, in the original or in its re-transmission, and there would surely have been little reason for qualm.
“Where is your garden?”, © Hughie O’Donoghue, painting reproduced as a tipped-in plate, from Seamus Heaney’s Testament of Cresseid, Enitharmon Editions, 2004, used with kind permission of the publisher and artist
Seamus Heaney highlights in the British Library include
- Gorgon, Hilary Term 1961. Queen’s University literary magazine for which Heaney was an assistant editor.
- Eleven poems (Belfast: Festival Publications, [1965]), X.909/37714. Heaney’s first collection, followed in 1966 by Death of a Naturalist (Faber).
- Many sound recordings from 1966 onwards, including some made by our own curators.
- Beowulf, typewritten drafts of Heaney’s translation with MS annotations; 1995. Add MS 78917
- 'Forecast', a typewritten poem (inspired by the Shipping Forecast) with autograph annotations, extensively re-worked and edited. Presented by the author; 3 April 1998, Add MS 74089
- Correspondence between Ted Hughes and Heaney, 1991-1998 (Add MS 88918/35/12)
- Testament of Cresseid, with images by Hughie O’Donoghue, Enitharmon Editions, 2004, LD.31.b.557.
29 March 2016
Recent Acquisition: Shirley Jones’ ‘The Quest’
by Jeremy Jenkins, Curator for Contemporary British Published Collections Emerging Media
As part of the Library’s brief to collect a copy of every book published in the UK, the Contemporary British Publications team takes a keen interest in publications outside the mainstream, including the publications of fine presses and artist’s books. Recently, we were pleased to welcome the internationally acclaimed Welsh book artist Shirley Jones of Red Hen Press who visited us to deliver a copy of her latest work, The Quest. Located in Powys, Wales, Red Hen Press has been in operation since 1983, creating limited edition letterpress books that present poetry and prose in concert with etchings and mezzotints.
The title page of the artist’s book The Quest by Shirley Jones
The Quest represents an artist’s book of the very highest order. The book contains five of the most sumptuous coloured mezzotint plates augmented with gold. Jones’ skill and experience as a book artist is plain to see from her reimagining of this folk tale, drawn from the middle Welsh epic Culhwch and Olwen. The Quest explores a stimulating and imaginative narrative of Gwrhyr’s search for Mabon, the son of Modron, which picks at the threads of folk tales which extend back to some of the very earliest oral and folk traditions.
In the tale, Gwrhyr, a warrior emissary of King Arthur, petitions various animals in his search for the whereabouts of Mabon, the son of Modron. Each animal refers Gwrhyr to another, older creature. They illustrate their ages by making reference to how the landscape and physical environment have changed over a great length of time. The Blackbird of Cilgwri, pecked away every evening at a smith’s anvil, and in this way she has eroded it to the size of a nut.
A depiction of The Blackbird of Cilgwri in mezzotint plates augmented with gold from artist’s book The Quest
The Blackbird of Cilgwri refers Gwrhyr to the Stag of Rhedynfre, who in turn demonstrates his age by outliving an oak tree, which now is only a withered stump. The Stag of Rhedynfre has no knowledge of Mabon the son of Modron. He goes on to suggest that Gwrhyr visits the Owl of Cawlwyd. In turn the Owl of Cawlwayd, unable to help, suggests he visits the animal that has travelled most, the Eagle of Gwernabwy. The Eagle of Gwernabwy, to illustrate his great age, makes reference to pecking the stars in the sky. He had heard of Mabon when he was searching for food, and attempted to catch the Salmon of Llyn Llyw. The Eagle of Gwernabwy brought Gwrhyr to the Salmon of Llyn Llyw. Finally the Salmon of Lyn Llyw tells what he knows of the fate of Mabon, the son of Modron. It transpires that he is imprisoned in a watery Gloucester dungeon.
The five full page mezzotint plates depict each of these animals in stunning and uncompromising detail. They are interleaved between six folded sheets containing the text.
The story may act as a metaphor for the changing environment and the impact of man on the delicate balance of the natural world. The Owl of Cawlwyd makes reference to men coming and uprooting a wooded glen and its being replaced two times over. However what is most interesting about this depiction is the different ages of the animals mentioned; as the narrative unravels, the animals become progressively older. This is an interesting feature of the tale and contrasts the idea of all animals being the same created on the same day within Christian tradition.
The connection of the salmon and wisdom or knowledge is well established in mythology, and in the quest for Mabon, the son of Modron, it is noteworthy that the salmon is the oldest of the creatures that we come across in the tale. This is similar to the folk tale of the Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Salmon of knowledge, where, while preparing the fish for his teacher, Finnegas, Fionn burnt his finger and inadvertently tastes the fish from his finger and in doing so acquired the gift of all knowledge.
Another more contemporary reference brought to mind by the plates Jones has produced for this tome is the images on Irish coinage prior to the introduction of the Euro. Although the punt and sterling remained linked until 1979, Ireland retained legal tender of its own design. In 1926, the poet William Butler Yeats chaired a committee to plan new Irish coinage. The committee agreed that the national symbol of the harp should continue to adorn the face (common obverse). A set of designs by Percy Medcalf were agreed by the committee for the reverse. Amongst those designs was the salmon, which adorned the florin and then after decimalisation, the ten pence piece. In 1990 the pound coin was introduced, designed with a red deer by the Irish artist Tomas Ryan very much in the style of Percy Metcalf's 1928 design. On seeing the images of the stag and the salmon, from the plates in The Quest, I was immediately reminded of the Medcalf design that rattled around in my pocket during my teens and early twenties while studying in Dublin.
Dr Richard Price, Head of Contemporary British Collections at the British Library receiving a copy of The Quest from Welsh book artist Shirley Jones
The British Library’s copy of The Quest can be ordered up for consultation in our reading rooms. It is stored at British Library shelfmark: RF.2015.b.75. The Quest is also being exhibited at the Craft in the Bay, Members Showcase, Cardiff until 24 April 2016.
Jeremy Jenkins
March 2016
Further reading:
Shirley Jones and the Red Hen Press John R Kenyon, Museum of Wales, 2013.
The Mabinogion, translated with an introduction and notes by Sioned Davies. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2007. General Reference Collection Nov.2008/1344
The Mabinogion translated by Lady Charlotte Guest, Dent, 1906. Document Supply W70/2881
Culhwch ac Olwen, Part Three, Celtic Literature Collective
http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/celtic/ctexts/culhwch3.html
12 August 2015
The Michael Marks Awards 2015: now open for entries
We are delighted to announce that this year’s Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets are now open for entries. There are three awards for Poetry Pamphlet, Publisher, and Illustration. Works published in the UK between July 2014 and June 2015 are eligible, and full details of how to apply are available from the Wordsworth Trust website.
The Awards were started by the British Library with the Poetry Book Society, with the generous support of the Michael Marks Charitable Trust, in 2009. They are now entering their 7th year, with the Wordsworth Trust joining the British Library as lead partner in 2012, and the TLS joining as media sponsor.
Laura Scott, winner of the Michael Marks Award 2014, for her pamphlet ‘What I saw’.
Laura Scott: What I saw. Aylsham: The Rialto, 2013.
The Awards were inspired by the Scotland-based Callum Macdonald Memorial Award, also supported by the Michael Marks Charitable Trust, and founded by Tessa Ransford. They were established to celebrate the poetry pamphlet as a unique form of publication, having a fundamental importance in poetry. Traditionally the poetry pamphlet is often seen as the first step to publishing a collection of poetry by emerging writers, but it is also used by established poets who may have a piece of work that they want stand alone, or want to use the opportunity to collaborate with an artist or writer.
Helen Mort
Judges for the 2015 award include Helen Mort, Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow at The University of Leeds, and former Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust; Rory Waterman, poet, lecturer in the Department of English at Nottingham Trent University, and regular reviewer for the TLS; and Debbie Cox, Lead Curator of Contemporary British Publications at the British Library.
There are two major Michael Marks Awards, one of a work of poetry in pamphlet form, and one for a publisher of poetry. Pamphlet publishers are the lifeblood of new poetry, often working on a voluntary basis and often with only their own resources. The Awards are unique in recognising
that commitment.
Winner of the publishers’ award in 2014 was Welsh poetry pamphlet imprint Rack Press
This year, for the first time, we offer a new Award for an illustrator of poetry pamphlets, celebrating the pamphlet as a beautiful object in its own right. The Illustration Award will be judged by Nicholas Penny, Director of the National Gallery, London from 2008 – 2015.
The shortlist for the Poetry and Publishers’ Awards will be announced by the end of October and the winners will be announced at a special dinner at the British Library on Tuesday 24th November.
Full details of the Awards are at www.wordsworth.org.uk/poetrypamphlets.
Closing date for submission of pamphlets is Friday 28th August 2015
25 October 2012
Two recent acquisitions
We are delighted to announce two recent acquisitions in Printed Literary Sources.
We have acquired a new work by the artist Linda Landers at the Spoon Print Press. This beautiful artist’s book is a setting of William Blake’s poem ‘The Shepherd’ from Songs of Innocence. The book contains print and watercolours and is one of an edition of five signed and dated by the artist. This work complements our existing holdings by Linda Landers and will be available shortly in the reading rooms. For more information about Linda Landers please see her website at http://www.lindalanders.co.uk/. For more details about the Library’s collection of artists’ books please see our website at http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelpsubject/artarchperf/art/finepressesartistsbooksandbookarts/finepresses.html
We have also acquired a rare illustrated children’s book, The Sandman’s Hour by Nellie Elliot. Published around 1948 this is one of two known books by this author. The other Grandmamma, and other Irish Stories is also held by the Library at shelfmark 012640.m.42.
The Sandman’s Hour was published by At The Sign of Three Candles Press the Dublin press run by Colm Ó Lochlainn. Not much is known about the author but information is available on the internet about the illustrator Karl Uhlemann at http://hitone.wordpress.com/category/designers/karl-uhlemann/ and for information about Colm Ó Lochlainn please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colm_%C3%93_Lochlainn and http://hitone.wordpress.com/category/publishers/sign-of-the-three-candles/
For more information about the Library’s children’s literature collections please see the following link http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelpsubject/literature/chillit/childlit.html
15 June 2012
Roughened water
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