The Blue Roofs of Japan; A Score for Interpenetrating Voices
[Mission, B.C. | Vancouver]: [Barbarian Press] William Hoffer, 1986. Quarto, 28.6 x 19.9 cm. Side laced with dark blue silk into blue Canson Mi-teintes bleu roi mouldmade paper covers. The title is printed in blue to the upper cover. Unpaginated [ll. 4, ll. 8 on double-leaves, ll. 2]. Very minor rubbing along the delicate extremities of the paper covers; the foot of the spine is mildly bumped; and there is a very faint smudge to the lower cover. Else, a fine copy. The text was handset by Crispin Elsted in Jan van Krimpen’s Spectrum type. It was printed by Jan Elsted on Mohawk Superfine paper. Calligraphy by Tse Yim, printed from a line block, accents the text. Two states comprise the edition: 100 copies comprising the ‘A state’ were numbered in roman numerals, printed on Frankfurt paper, and laced into Richard de Bas Bleu Clair Chine Blanc handmade paper covers. These were published under the imprint of Barbarian Press. 150 copies comprising the ‘B state’ were numbered in Arabic numerals and printed on Mohawk Superfine. These were issued under the imprint of William Hoffer; they were printed from the same setting of type, but with fewer calligraphic blocks. A few of these copies did not survive: “Apparently Hoffer had destroyed some of the edition after quarrelling with Bringhurst and coming to some conclusion about our being ‘unworthy’ – a frequent Hofferism applied to many people for various inscrutable reasons. This was typical Hoffer behaviour and no one paid very much attention” (Crispin Elsted, unpublished list). Hoffer had initially planned to issue this title under his Tanks imprint, but revised his plan after falling out with Bringhurst: “I settled for using my own imprint instead of the more sacred Tanks imprint. In the high minded world of Tanks it was too trivial and too deeply compromised to do so” (quoted in Woodsworth 1998, 59). The present copy is an Artist’s Proof and belongs to the second (‘B’) state. It is numbered ‘A/P 15/15’. Signed in ink by Robert Bringhurst on the colophon page. (Utile Dulci, C16; Woodsworth, Cheap Sons of Bitches: The Publications of William Hoffer. A40; cf. Utile Dulci, A14). Item #314
Bringhurst’s polyphonic poem was written as a score for jazz duet. It combines two ‘interpenetrating’ voices. The two voices face one another on either side of each spread. The text for each voice was given priority on one side and printed in blue. To intimate the intermingling of the two voices, the primary text appearing in blue was printed over its complement, which was first printed in blind. So, on each spread, the two facing pages invert and mirror one another, and on each page the two voices are given simultaneously together: "This is a score for jazz duet, which I hope will function also as a reading text. The full text of the poem is carried on both the right-hand and left-hand pages of the book, but since the two voices frequently overlap, the two parts are not always legible on any one page. The left-hand pages give prominence to the first voice, the right-hand pages to the second voice. Each two-page spread gives the full text, for both voices, of its own portion of the poem" (Bringhurst, from the preface).
“In the spring of 1985, the novelist Audrey Thomas and I made a two-week reading and lecture tour of Japan. This piece began to fashion itself in my mind while we were still in that country, and I hoped from the beginning that it might, among other things, serve in the end as a gift for Audrey— a commemoration of some of our strangely dislocated conversations, and of some of the pleasures and strains of the tour. This is notwithstanding the poem’s assertion (with which I agree, if that matters) that any work’s first audience is the gods. If that priority is clear, perhaps the work is free, like rice, to function also on a human plane.” — Robert Bringhurst.
Price: $375.00