Zebra Noise.
Wagener, Richard.
Berkeley: Peter Koch, 1998. One of seventy numbered copies, signed by Wagener. Designed and printed on Zerkall paper by Peter Koch and Richard Wagnener. Twenty-six full-page wood-engravings, one for each letter of the alphabet, with short prose statements on facing pages. Twenty-six smaller woodcut section titles in red. Fine in brown board chemise and red silk slipcase with printed paper label. Quarter red morocco over Fabriano laid paper boards. Gilt spine, Title and illustration stamped in brown on front cover. Folio. 8 1/2 x 14 1/2.& [55] leaves. (Item ID: 14411)
$3,000.00
This beautiful letterpress production is an alpha-bestiary, with woodcuts of animals to accompany each of the twenty-six letters. The subjects range from Armadillo (Tolypeutes tricinctus) to Jumping Mouse (Zapus hudsonius).
“Not since Paul Landacre mastered the aesthetic and technical challenges of wood engraving in the early twentieth-century has any California artist achieved prominence in the medium until Richard Wagener began to explore it in the 1980s” (Victoria Dailey in the preface to Wagener’s 2009 publication, California in Relief).
