Against Fiction.
Druckwerk, 1983. Item #2992
Cloth over boards, 13 x 16 in., 48 pp. illustrated with linocuts. Handset in Stymie light on Warren's Oldstyle paper.
In Books: 1970 to 1994 by Johanna Drucker (Granary Books, 1994), she notes that the images and the text for the book were printed together in one run, which took nearly 800 hours of printing time, "including setting, running, distributing type and making images. [...] typographic oddities in the setting were dictated by necessity—I would begin with standard conventions and subtitute only when my supplies were exhausted. My intention was to use the tabloid format to open up the dense text for browsing."
From the book's entry on Artists' Books Online, Drucker continues:
"Against Fiction was six years in the writing. The notes and texts for the book accumulated over a period that spanned time in Greece and Amsterdam and well into the years in which I returned to the Bay Area, worked, and began graduate studies. The book embodied the conflicts I had with the traditions of fiction in which I had been steeped as a young writer and the terms of literary production I was being exposed to in the Bay Area literary scene, as well as in the art contexts I had encountered in Europe and on my return. The Against of the title was intended to signal dependence on and rejection of that tradition."
The colophon notes that this was printed on a Vandercook Proof Press, in Oakland, California, during June through October. For the edition, 125 copies were attempted; 100 copies on Warren Oldstyle (of which this is one), with 25 others on newsprint. This copy is not numbered. Fine.
Out of Stock