Item Details
Dispatches from the Lizard Brain.
New York: Russell Maret, 2022. First Edition. Russell Maret [printer, designer, and afterword]; Nina Schneider [bibliographic descriptions]; Carolee Campbell [commentary]; Harry Reese [foreword]; Annie Schlechter [photography].
One of the 77 numbered copies that includes tip-ins of original material. A lovely catalogue raisonné of the work of Carolee Campbell and the Ninja Press. Russell Maret writes of her: "It takes a special kind of person to know that what one is working on is not ready to be discussed. It takes someone.who unhurriedly allows her books to germinate in her lizard brain until they are ready to be dispatched into the world. With each new book Carolee teaches the rest of us how it should be done - not how to make books like hers , but like her, to make books the way the books want to be made."
The heavily annotated bibliography includes books, broadsides, commissions and collaborations, ephemera, reviews, criticism, and writing. The annotations include comments by Carolee on the making of each book or broadside.
"Imagine this movie: A self-possessed teenager in Los Angeles, brought up by a grandmother because of her mother’s infirmities and her father’s alcoholism, flees to New York City after high school to pursue a dream. Working first as a hatcheck girl in a famous nightclub, and then waiting tables in Mafia restaurants, she reinvents her life from the inside-out in classes taught by elite drama teachers and is offered a bit part on daytime television. Avoiding temptation and putting everything at risk again, she evolves into a television star and eventually a soap opera queen. Meanwhile, she exhibits photographs in New York galleries, practices Japanese martial arts, and competes with her team in Japan. She wins an Emmy for a dramatic role, but abruptly quits acting, returns to California, and takes up whitewater rafting in the Southwest. Nearly fifty, she turns her back on every success she ever knew to start all over again as an entry-level art student in a program she has to explain. Twenty years later, she gains recognition as one of the most accomplished, distinctive, and influential printer-publishers of her generation." [foreword]. Tight, bright, and unmarred; folder bright and clean. Quarterbound, green leather spine, green printed paper boards, gilt lettering, color photographic frontispiece tipped in. Narrow fo. 129pp. Illus. (color and b/w plates, tipped in photos, etc). Numbered limited edition, this being 20 of 77 plus hors commerce bringing total to 102. Signed by all involved. Laid in copy of An Arguement for Lying Fallow / The Habit of Risk. Item #11141
Price: $4,250.00