Month: September 2018

F.R.DAVID “what I mean is—”

Typographers normally design using other people’s words and eventually accept a situation in which they are limited to making only slight modifications in a given text even when a syntactic rephrasing could make the message more understandable. […]

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. “what I mean is—” the 16th issue, edited by Will Holder.

F.R.DAVID is concerned with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practice. […] Typographers normally design using other people’s words and eventually accept a situation in which they are limited to making only slight modifications in a given text even when a syntactic rephrasing could make the message more understandable. […] The intention is not to provide a course in typographic history or style, but to provide experiences based on language as communication of a perceptual/cognitive idea or event, language as presented visually—enhancing perceptual meaning, and language as invention or systematic structure. […] I’m the robotic kid looking through digital eyes past the windshield into the pre-invented world […] Material, that is to say unformed or unshaped matter, is the field where authority blocks independent experimentation less than in many other fields […] 15—Craft’s gestural intelligence is apt to discover material potential only by internalising and inhabiting the specificities of a tradition. This tradition knows JOY IS FORMAL INTELLIGENCE. CRAFT’S TRADITION IS JOY […] The resources of expressive art have never been cheaper, the productivity of the individual expressive artist has never been higher, the accomplishment of a density of surface effects in contemporary artworks has never been easier to bring about. […] it is not so much what we want as what we want to want, or what keeps us wanting […] plastic, wondrous plastic! ideal for the girl on the go, easy to care for, hard to care about, plastic. whether it’s a fast escape from an unhappy household, or running for dear life down some dark alley, plastic works for you. […]

120 x 192mm, 224pp b/w, with postcard and bookmark in 3 colours.

EU 10 (excluding postage)

Buy now (through rile*)

F.R.DAVID is co-published with KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

Will Holder’s work is supported by a Paul Hamlyn Foundation award.

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H.D., Palimpsest

“I must explain to you first that the novel is not intended as a work of art—at least, not as it stands. It is a means to an end. I want to clear up an old tangle.…”

“I must explain to you first that the novel is not intended as a work of art—at least, not as it stands. It is a means to an end. I want to clear up an old tangle. Well, I do not put my personal self into my poems. But my personal self [Hilda Doolittle] has got between me and my real self, my real artist personality [H.D.]. And in order to clear the ground, I have tried to write things down––in order to think straight, I have endeavored to write straight. But I hope to come clear and then turn to my real work again. You must remember that writing poetry requires a clarity, a clairvoyance almost. I have been too weak to dare to be clairvoyant. I have tried instead to be merely sensible. I mean in the common sense of that word. In the long run, the clairvoyance is the only sanity for me. But in the novel I am working through a wood, a tangle of bushes and bracken out to a clearing, where I may see clear again.”

H.D., letter to John Cournos, July 9th 1918 (?), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL MSSA24, Box 17, Folder 582 (emphases added). The penultimate word was crossed out by H.D. herself.

This edition of H.D.’s Palimpsest was produced for THE GREEN MAN (Lucy Skaer with Fiona Connor, H.D., Will Holder, Nashashibi/Skaer, Hanneline Visnes); with a sole distribution point – in direct relation to the work of Lucy Skaer – of 500 free* copies, at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, UK, from 26 July to 6 October 2018.

Typeset by Will Holder, using Apple’s Enhanced Dictation, reading Palimpsest, Houghton Miflin, 1926. (Letterpress by Henri Darantiere, Paris, for Contact Editions)

Copy-edited by Rosa Aiello reading Palimpsest, Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. (Linotype)

This third edition reproduces the punctuation of the 1926 French typesetting of English text. Certain spellings are maintained with due consideration for an American writer living in 1920s London. Additional suggestions to spelling are inserted between square brackets.

The cover uses a stencil with parts taken from the geometric construction of Roman capitalis quadrata, inherited from the classical Greek alphabet.

This production would not have been realised without Rosa Aiello, Stuart Fallon, Tessa Giblin, Bitsy Knox, Emmie McLuskey, Tiina Poldaru, Lucy Skaer and Christopher Wait.

Palimpsest: Copyright © 1926 by H.D.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Printed by Tallinn Book Printers

ISBN 978–0–9957133–6–9

* A small edition is available on request.

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