The Island of Demons; | A verse play based on a Canadian Legend | With images by Ray Cattell
Tall quarto, 34.2 x 23.5 cm. Cased in full cloth over boards. The cloth was hand painted in acrylic and signed in ink on the upper cover by the Canadian artist Ray Cattell (RCA, b. 1921). The painting is semi-figurative and suggests a coastal cliff. Housed in a hinged-lid box, covered in full dark grey cloth, with a black ribbon pull and printed paper label to the lid. Printed on doubles-leaves. pp. [ll. 7, including self-ends] 5- 71 [pp. 1; plus ll. 2, including self-ends]. The pagination is printed subtly in blind along the inner margins. Mild rubbing from the box to the extremities of the covers; two very faint spots of adhesive staining to the inner margins of pp. 8-9. Else fine. The text was set by Linotype in Caslon Old Face by Robert Reid and Mitchell Atlas and printed by Hugh Michaelson on watermarked Lana Verge Antique paper. Illustrated with 13 colour lithographs, including the frontispiece, and three vignettes by Ray Cattell. Three of the lithographs span full spreads. The photopolymer plates used to print Cattell’s vignettes were made by R.W. Mann Typesetting in Minden, Ontario. Cattell’s lithographs were printed by JB Printing, Newmarket, Ontario. In addition to the primary text, there is a Preface by George Woodcock (written in 1987), and notes on the author, artist, and genesis of the book by Ray Cattell and Robert Reid; the note on Woodcock is unattributed. The binding was done by John Van Huizen. From an edition of 110 copies. The number of copies bound and issued, however, may have been much lower. 10 copies were editioned in roman numerals and presumably retained hors commerce; the present copy is one of these and is number X. Inscribed in ink by Hugh Michaelson to Robert Reid on the recto of the front free endpaper: “to my good friend Bob— hope you like the story— Hugh | March ’99”. Given the story of the book’s publication, a superlative association copy.
A collection of related ephemera and correspondence is laid into the box. The collection comprises:
(1) A prospectus for Robert Reid’s planned but unrealized edition of The Island of Demons.
New Haven: Robert Reid and Terry Berger | At the Sign of the Gryphon, 1987.
Single trimmed sheet, twice folded to produce a bifolium or four-page leaflet on double-leaves. 23.9 x 15.6 cm closed. Printed with the planned title-page of The Island of Demons to the first recto, two sample pages of text, and details of the prospective edition to the last verso: “This edition will surely become a collector’s item, being a unique collaboration between Canada’s first private press printer and one of Canada’s truly intellectual, philosophical, literary figures.”
(2) An undated A.L.S. addressed to Robert Reid from Hugh Michaelson. Single trimmed sheet, 25.2 x 17.7 cm., written on the recto only. In the letter, Michaelson announces that he has completed printing The Island of Demons and that 35 copies have been bound. He mentions an opening and show for the book held at the McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa; he also relays his plans to produce a poster featuring all 100 covers hand painted by Ray Cattell, and makes a few quips on the quality of presswork in Ontario, his frustrations with Linotype (“… next book is monotype”), and his dim view of Library and Archives Canada’s system of legal deposit: “when I complained that I was giving the damn CDN. Government $3000.00 they said that in instances when a book costs this much they will purchase copy no. 2. So they get 2 books for the price of 1 - oh well— Canada —Eh!”
(3) An A.L.S. addressed to Robert Reid from Hugh Michaelson, dated June 3, 1999. Single trimmed sheet of Lana paper printed with Harwood Press letterhead; 30.4 x 21.6 cm, written on the recto only.
(4) An undated A.L.S. addressed to Robert Reid from Hugh Michaelson. Single trimmed sheet of Lana paper printed with Harwood Press letterhead; 30.6 x 21.6 cm, written on the recto only. Item #372
“Forty-two years ago George Woodcock wrote this wonderful play about the universal passions of Doubt, Discord and Regret that have assailed mankind throughout the ages. At that time I had a private press in Vancouver, and desperately wanted to print a fine edition of the work, which I admired greatly. It had been produced on the CBC, but never published. Because I did not do the book before leaving Vancouver on a fellowship, never to return, the demon of Regret was my constant companion for the next thirty years.
I then set up another private press, this time in New Haven, Connecticut. I was finally going to exorcise my personal demon by producing a finely printed limited edition of George’s play, which had remained undiminished by time and was, in fact, more meaningful than ever. I set some text in Caslon Old Face in hot metal on my Linotype machine and proofed up a few pages for George to have a look at. But it was not to be! I had to close down my press, when along came Hugh Michaelson, one of my brilliant design/printing students from the Vancouver School of Art, who had himself set up a private press in Toronto. So Hugh took all the beautiful Caslon Old Face fonts, some presses, and the manuscript of George’s play.
Now, forty-two years later, thanks to Hugh Michaelson, my demon of regret has been exorcised, and the discerning public has a typographic and artistic monument to George Woodcock’s literary imagination.” — Robert Reid
“The Island of Demons is not an historical play that attempts to render an actual incident or situation from the past. It is a dramatic poem emerging from a Canadian legend. This legend of the Island of Demons appears in at least two fairly divergent forms, and so I have been relieved of the need to believe that either is sheer prosaic fact and have been enabled to proceed from a nucleus of myth to a poetic improvisation. […]
In my play I have not kept to what seems to me the more factually likely version of the legend. I have not been concerned with fact, but with getting as near as possible to imaginative truth, and to present a drama that seemed to me satisfactory in such terms I have taken freely from Thévet, less abundantly from Marguerite of Navarre, and added other elements to complete the whole I had in mind. In the process I have tried to universalize the legend, to deepen the implications that seemed to exist in the story when I first heard it. What those implications are I must leave my poem to state in its own way. But do not seek the Island of Demons on the map or in history; it is, I like to believe, as much nowhere and anywhere as the seacoast of Bohemia.” — George Woodcock, from the Preface.
Price: $2,850.00