Title: Old Quilts
Author: Margaret Kaufman
Printer: Janus Press, Amanda Degener and Claire Van Vliet
Medium: Letterpress, Chine Collé
Paper: Tissue laminated over color printed paper
Size: 17 x 22 inches
Year: 1989
Price: $450
Edition Number: 52/140

Old Quilts

You come upon them sometimes
folded away into trunks lined with paper,
fragile and dry as blue hydrangea,
or you find them stuffed in a wad
at the base of a wardrobe, old quilts,
color reduced to an idea,
stained with love or death,
nothing that can be rubbed away.

They appear as interstitial tissue
linking us to someone else’s labor.
Sometimes, whole pieces fall away
no matter how carefully you take them up—
they shred into nothing, leaving thin ribbons,
a ribbon, a space, a nothing
as if, in serious conversation, the other
falls silent, leaves it up to you.

And you could, in a dark mood, say
that’s all any of it comes to,
shreds, fluff, fragments,
but that is not the mood that connects,
not what makes you spread the quilts to light
when you find them cast away.

You hesitate before brooming spiders’ webs,
you save old letters, pin up children’s crayon
drawings, lay out the best silver every day.
Beauty lies not only in the making of a thing
but in its use, not in its preservation
but in its wearing down.

Colophon: Copyright 1989 by Margaret Kaufman; co-published by the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and the Janus Press; made by Amanda Degener and Claire Van Vliet 

To purchase this work please contact Laura at 23 Sandy Gallery.

Title: If I Were to Write a Book
Author: Helene Cixous
Printer: Kathy Kuehn
Medium: Letterpress, Etching
Size: 11 x 14 inches
Price: $50

The last paragraph of First Days of the Year by Helene Cixous

If I were to write a book, I would begin with a garden at dawn, rosy, at the foot of a mountain. I would do absolutely everything
to keep the book from turning against me,
to make it go toward the south, toward the rosiness, toward the sea, which are my true directions,
if ever it were I who wrote.

To purchase this work please contact Laura at 23 Sandy Gallery.

Title: Brockport Sunflowers
Author: William Heyen
Printer: Janus Press
Medium: Offset, Linocut
Paper: Handmade paper by McGregor-Vinzani
Size: 14 x 20.5 inches
Year: 1986
Price: $250
Edition Number: Edition of 160

Brockport Sunflowers

If they could walk, they would walk slowly.
They would shuffle onto the roads from their fields,
lally-gag into our village, sway on sidewalks,
dangle their silly and beautiful heads.
Sexless, they would not bow to women,
or shake men’s hands with their leaves.
Desiring nothing but sunshine and water,
they’d peer into our shops with amazement.
Seeing themselves in windows, they’d know themselves holy.
They would love the children, and listen to them,
all day long, until the children were ready for bed.
As the evening star rose in the heavens,
they would nod goodby to us, not having said a word,
and return, like walking haloes in their fields. 

Colophon: Copyright 1986 by William Heyen. The relief was cut by Peter Schumann and was printed at the Janus Press in West Burke Vermont on paper made by McGregor-Vinzani in Whiting Maine for William B Ewert Publisher in Concord New Hampshire in an edition of 160.

To purchase this work please contact Laura at 23 Sandy Gallery.

Title:
Author: M.C Richards
Printer; Oregon School of Arts and Crafts
Paper: Rives Heavyweight paper
Size: 13 x 19 inches
Year: 1989
Price: $60
Edition Number: 45

Where making
is a central activity,
every example has value:
making bread,
making a sign,
making a report,
making a table,
making a concert,
making love,
making tea,
making a baseball game,
making plans for next year,
MAKING.

In making,
we develop a feel for materials,
for the play between purpose
and accident and inspiration,
for gestalt,
for instrument,
for becoming,
for death as a physical process
essential to creation;
and we are filled with
wonder

Colophon: Copyright 1989 by M.C. Richards. Reprinted from Centering (second edition), by permission of University Press of New England. This broadside was designed and printed in 1991 in the Book Arts Department at the Oregon School of Arts and Crafts. The numbered edition is printed on Rives Heavyweight paper; the Roman-numeral edition is on handmade Umbria #45.

To purchase this work please contact Laura at 23 Sandy Gallery.

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