The Alder

Résumé du livre

"When William Everson produced the 1975 Lime Kiln Press edition of Robinson Jeffers' Granite and Cypress he took fine printing to a new level. That book, with its edificial binding, ghost printing and Everson's signature on the colophon as artist rather than author, demonstrated a book has the capacity to embody artistic as well as literary ideals. Granite and Cypress was the first of a new genre of art: the fine press artists' book. When we conceived the idea to make an artists' book using Everson's poem 'The Alder' as the text, we decided to refer conceptually, in a number of different ways, to Everson's masterpiece, Granite and Cypress. We made the paper for The Alder, and explored a new papermaking technique for this book, creating the background colors for Donna's linoleum cuts and the shaded background images behind the poem by spraying colored paper pulp through multiple hand-cut stencils, a process we now call 'paper pulp pochoir.' We had conceived of the binding used for this book, what we call a frame-as-page binding, in 2000 for Three Kinds of Magic, and had always hoped to find a suitable project for it. Everson's poem provided the perfect opportunity. The wood and stone Everson used for the monumental slipcase of his Granite and Cypress came from the site of Jeffer's Tor House. The wood we used for our binding is alder from a tree felled near Everson's home, where he cut the tree in the poem, on Kingfisher Flatin Big Creek Canyon near Santa Cruz..."--From Peter & Donna Thomas' website (accessed on October 12, 2012)