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Michael Pyron, Bookseller ABAA/ILAB
Buying and selling fine, antiquarian, and used book
Membership(s): ABAA, ILAB, IOBA
Van Vliet, Claire Greed
$600.00
Newark, VT: Janus Press, 2013. 6-1/2″ x 7.” Limited edition, one of 120 copies. Accordion fold with 8 panels, 4 of them are fold-down pages. Each of the four page-spreads include letterpress text in various typefaces and colors which fold-down, expanding the canvas of words, sayings, and accusations (including a catalog of U.S. Senators and Representatives of the 111th Congress who became lobbyists—a list that fills the fold-down page in a small font); these opposite a lithograph by Van Vliet, each lithograph is titled by the top word on the opposite page: Propagandist, Lobbyist, Banker, Joe Public. Bound in gold paper repeated printed with the word “Greed,” and all housed in gold slipcase. A fine copy.
In a contemporary newspaper article in the Burlington Free Press, Candace Page relates an interview with Van Vliet: “[She] picks up dummy of GREED, a slim volume that will sit inside a glittery cover of gold paper. It opens like an accordion to display four Van Vliet black-and-white lithographs of distorted faces: A banker, a lobbyist, a newscaster, she says, ‘and this one on the end, the sap, John Q. Public, us.'”
Van Vliet continues in the Page interview: “The word ‘greed’ will be printed multiple times on the cover in heavy, unevenly inked type, as though it were printed contemptuously, by some greedy person with no respect for the written word. The paper is not handmade — that would be too good for the book. Instead it is ‘slick, nasty machine-made paper,’ she says. The edges of the gold cover will be sharp ‘because greed is not a comfortable subject.'” There is a wonderful irony that the lithographs employed in Greed were originally drawn for an edition of Kafka decades before that just weren’t quite right for the project. Here, they are perfect! This is a striking book, a political book, one might say, an angry and defiant book. Van Vliet’s politics being informed by the McCarthy era during which she was a student, she admits to having distrusted the powerful ever since. This edition sold out very quickly and is now rare in commerce. A book that was, is, and will always be relevant.
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Offered for Sale by: 32.1 Rare Books + Ephemera
