Ira Cohen produced his Kathmandu Portfolio during a week’s stay in Rotterdam at his friend Gerard Bellaart’s place in 1976. The portfolio of 12 photographs was a joint production of John Chick’s Bardo Matrix imprint from Kathmandu, with whom Cohen and Angus MacLise had teamed up in 1974, and Gerard Bellaart’s Cold Turkey Press from Rotterdam. The jacket was silkscreened black and silver and Ira Cohen’s photos inside were printed offset as 12 separate postcards…
The Sea Urchin pamphlet The Fifth Day is a passage lifted from Edgar Allan Poe’s tale Manuscript Found in a Bottle. The tale was first published in 1833 after it had won an award of $50 in a contest organised by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. The version published by Sea Urchin is how it later appeared in Poe’s own Broadway Journal in 1845.Manuscript Found in a Bottle is a tale in which a drifting narrator describes how his ship sets sail from Batavia to the Sunda islands in the Malay Archipelago…
Arrigo Lora-Totino (1928-2016) was an artist and poet from Turin, Italy. He is considered one of the key figures in Italian sound poetry. Lora-Totino’s first experiments with poetry stem from the late 1950s-early 1960s, a period in which he also founded his first magazine dedicated to concrete poetry. Lora-Totino is perhaps best known…
From the Divan of Petra Vogt was published in 1976 in an edition of 250 by Cold Turkey Press, Rotterdam. The handsome and sought-after edition contains poems and photographs from Kathmandu by Ira Cohen and artwork by Petra Vogt. During a stay in Rotterdam in the summer of 1976 Cohen put together his edition together with publisher Gerard Bellaart. This particular copy is the first collated one, the pages still uncut and some of them hand…
Heinrich Nowak’s tale Die Sonnenseuche (The Sun Scourge) was first published in 1915 in the expressionist magazine Die weißen Blätter from Leipzig. Inspired by reports of an exceptional and life-threatening heatwave in the USA, the apocalyptic tale remained virtually unnoticed until it was re-published as a book in 1920…