Mary Risala Laird
One-Handed Basket Weaving , 1993
Artwork Shop
9.5 x 6.25
in
Twenty poems by Jelaluddin Rumi translated by Coleman Barks.
9.5 x 6.25" 60 pages. With linen drop spine box and five illustrations including a three color print by Mary Laird. Linen text papers hand made by Madeleine Pestiaux. Blue, gray and crème linen cover papers made in Iowa at the paper mill run by Tim Barrett. Text set in monotype Sabon Antiqua. Drawings and printing by Mary Laird.
"This book took four years to make. Two years for the paper by Madeleine. She actually moved her mill and revamped it in order to make some of this paper. The centerfold was done letterpress; the image was from an etching I had done, from which I had a zinc plate made. The goal was to coat the Mohawk paper dark blue for surface, and then the silver and gold would shine on it. Had I printed gold or silver on the paper plain, as is on text pages, it would have read as grey or brown (due to light reflection or lack thereof). The centerfold is four runs through the press. The blue background was 3-4 runs first, then gold and silver image, then silver type. So that's more like 6-7 runs. I ran into problems with the images. They looked horribly on the page. Gold ink sank it. Drawings felt flat. So I printed them on Japanese paper, backup on the underside with a rectangle of cream so the right side would be more solid for the drawing. Mostly that worked. The hand image on Japanese paper across from the title page was flour pasted on. Linen paper tends to cockle when wet, damp or moistened. In other words, it's a real drag. The whole book had to be printed damp because the paper was so tough it was breaking the type and printed unevenly when paper was dry. Coleman kept changing the wording in the afterword, which was a justified paragraph. This means you have to change the whole paragraph if a word in the beginning is changed. Hours of resetting. I think computers were around by then, and he must have figured it would be a flick of the wrist. I blind stamped an etched image on the front and back endpapers. This same image was printed in gold ink on the paper covers. The image was called " A Room in the House of my Near Future." Within the circle, a hemisphere flanked by Tibetan deities, another hemisphere with Sufi Dervishes. In the center, a rectangular table on which 7 books lay- a scant representation of some of the world's religions. There are ladders connecting one world to the next." [Mary Laird]
One of the books featured in the Illustration section of the Ninety from the Nineties Exhibit by the New York Public Library: "To accompany this translation of Rumi's poems, Mary Laird reproduced her etchings as relief prints. and drawings as line cuts, printed relief.”
Edition # 19/125...
$850