Macintyre.

Item Details

Laguna Beach, California, Laguna Verce Imprenta, 1975, Illustrated wrappers.

First edition, Very good+.

Octavo. [16] pp. Illustrated with black and white leaf prints super-imposed over variously colored block backgrounds. Laguna Verde Imprenta colophon.

Green printed wrappers, stitched at spine, with leaf print and title to front wrapper, which exhibits slight creasing at edges. Light toning to wrappers’ edges. Presentation copy,  inscribed to Jake Zeitlin from Ward Ritchie in the month of publication. A very good+ copy.

One of about forty copies. “Printed on an 1853 Albion hand press by Ward Ritchie in his first experiment with nature printing.”

From Ritchie’s introduction: “Carlyle Ferren MacIntyre was a lyric poet. He was a brilliant man. Words were his life. Whether he was talking or writing, they came forth clear, incisive and picturesque. He loved his stage, on which he always managed to be the principal character. As a professor of English Literature at Occidental College, UCLA and Berkeley he influenced several generations of students…I recently found these poems of MacIntyre’s buried in correspondence four decades now past, to be here printed many years after his death.” MacIntyre (d. 1967) is primarily remembered for his translations of Baudelaire, Verlaine, George, Goethe, and Rilke.

Though self-described as his “first experiment with nature printing,” the present work constitutes Ritchie’s only foray into the idiom. As such, it is a unique work within his considerable oeuvre. MacIntyre includes an untitled poem dedicated to “Ritchie and Jake” with the accompanying printed note, “This should be framed or tacked up in your shop. It is better than an etching, a patent leather pillow, a menstruing cloth, a Hoffenstein poem, a first edition, an incunabula, a succubus, a Jefferson Robbers, a Rockwell Kunt [sic], etcetera [sic].”   

Laguna Verde Imprenta Bibliography, 2.