Gems. A Censored Anthology
Cagnes-sur-Mer: Roving Eye Press, 1931. First edition. 109, [3] pp. Patterned paper boards, original wrappers bound in. Some rubbing to head and tail of spine and corners, some foxing to preliminaries.
Brown’s mockery of censorship uses visual design to prove its point, by redacting words and phrases using the censor’s black bar, which he was able to do since he typeset the marks individually. He spoofed the purported goal of protecting school-age children from literary works (school primers historically focused on small literary “gems” for recitation); the demonstration makes all of the classic poems seem obscene. In his dedication to Nancy Cunard, he says that “if this Collection proves a storehouse of delight, if it teaches those indifferent to the Poets to them, and those who love them to them more, the aim and the desire entertained in framing it will be fully accomplished.” One can see Duchamp’s influence on the conceptual experiment played on the found poems. Each of these poems, at the time easily recognized as popular literature (Milton, Herrick, Wordsworth, Longfellow, etc), takes on sinister meanings simply by censoring; by appropriating the mechanisms of censorship, old forms of sanitized communication are twisted.
This copy is inscribed to Bill Bird, dated 1931 in Cagnes. Bird was the publisher of Three Mountains Press in Paris, which published work by Hemingway, Stein, Pound and others. A nice association bringing together two major expatriate publishers of the 1920s. Item #2611
Price: $1,500.00