The book cover features pasted on arrows and other embellishments emulating the painted, pasted, and adorned envelopes Kenneth Patchen sent to Ed Blair.
Beginning in 2018, I’ve worked with painter and printer Karoline Schleh to co-design, print, and bind an -edition of artist’s books commissioned and written by Edwin Blair.
Karoline Schleh is a painter, printmaker, and book artist whose work has been shown locally and nationally. She co-designed and printed the 1996 chapbook Mistah Leary He Dead, featuring a Hunter S. Thompson eulogy for the late Timothy Leary. That book is in the collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, The -Historic New Orleans Collection, Tulane Library, Yale University Library, Harvard University Library, and private collections including that of poet and legendary Beat publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
In the mid-1960s, Edwin Blair was active in the New Orleans poetry and art scene of the time. Among other things, he partially financed the production of Charles Bukowski’s first book, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, by Loujon Press in 1963. He’s since become a source of knowledge, correspondence, and ephemera from that era in New Orleans’ history. His collections of correspondence and publications from that era appear in library and historic collections.
We completed a set of books, titled Patchen Paintings, in Spring 2019. The books convey Edwin Blair’s -experience setting up a show of paintings by proto-Beat poet Kenneth Patchen. It documents a piece of New -Orleans’ own association with Beat and small-press publishing culture in the 1960s. The show recounted in the book resulted from lots of back and forth written communication between Edwin Blair and Kenneth Patchen.
We designed the book around a short narrative and 50-year-old photos. We researched Patchen and Blair’s correspondence to one another. And we designed the book to visually reference that correspondence. Text from their letters appears on the book’s endpapers. And the cover features reproductions of parts of the richly illustrated envelopes in which Patchen mailed his letters. Inside the book, we feature Edwin Blair’s text, a reproduction of the show’s poster, and a fold-out photo section with photos from show’s opening. The book is risograph- and screen-printed and hand-bound.
Karoline Schleh is a painter, printmaker, and book artist whose work has been shown locally and nationally. She co-designed and printed the 1996 chapbook Mistah Leary He Dead, featuring a Hunter S. Thompson eulogy for the late Timothy Leary. That book is in the collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, The -Historic New Orleans Collection, Tulane Library, Yale University Library, Harvard University Library, and private collections including that of poet and legendary Beat publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
In the mid-1960s, Edwin Blair was active in the New Orleans poetry and art scene of the time. Among other things, he partially financed the production of Charles Bukowski’s first book, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, by Loujon Press in 1963. He’s since become a source of knowledge, correspondence, and ephemera from that era in New Orleans’ history. His collections of correspondence and publications from that era appear in library and historic collections.
We completed a set of books, titled Patchen Paintings, in Spring 2019. The books convey Edwin Blair’s -experience setting up a show of paintings by proto-Beat poet Kenneth Patchen. It documents a piece of New -Orleans’ own association with Beat and small-press publishing culture in the 1960s. The show recounted in the book resulted from lots of back and forth written communication between Edwin Blair and Kenneth Patchen.
We designed the book around a short narrative and 50-year-old photos. We researched Patchen and Blair’s correspondence to one another. And we designed the book to visually reference that correspondence. Text from their letters appears on the book’s endpapers. And the cover features reproductions of parts of the richly illustrated envelopes in which Patchen mailed his letters. Inside the book, we feature Edwin Blair’s text, a reproduction of the show’s poster, and a fold-out photo section with photos from show’s opening. The book is risograph- and screen-printed and hand-bound.
Book Interiors
The book features a foldout section of photos from the opening. The photos are reproduced in risograph and digital printing.
The book's endpapers contain bits of correspondence between Patchen and Blair. And the screen printed inside covers again feature elements from Patchen's painted envelopes.
© 2019 Daniel Lievens