The Real World of Manuel Cordova
[Sherman Oaks, California: Ninja Press, 1995 ]. One of 160 copies signed and numbered by W.S. Merwin (1927 – 2019). Eighteen lettered hors commerce copies were also produced. “The Real World of Manuel Córdova” was inspired by the experiences of Manuel Córdova-Rios, a vegetalista (herbalist and shaman in indigenous Peruvian Amazon traditions), in the forests at the headwaters of the Amazon River in 1907. Fifty-five paper panels, plus paper wrappers, fold out to about fifteen feet in length. Printed by Carolee Campbell in handset Samson Uncial on kakishibu, a persimmon-washed and smoked handmade paper from the Fuji Paper Mills Cooperative in Tokushima, Japan. A five-color printed river design runs parallel to the text of Merwin’s poem, which is printed in black. The river design was printed from photopolymer plates. A fine copy. Handmade brown stiff paper wrappers titled in black. Enclosed in a cream-colored sheet of heavyweight flax paper handmade at the Center of the Book Papermaking Facility at the University of Iowa. The enclosure is lined with kakishibu on which is printed a map of the world drawn by Athanasius Kircher in 1665, which was the first map to show the world’s currents. The map is hand-tinted with pencil in five colors that echo the colors of the river design. The enclosure is fastened with alum-tawed goatskin and bone. Housed in an acrylic slipcase. 4 in. x 13 in. Item #17398
In The Art of the Book in California (2011), Robert Bringhurst writes, “One of my favorites among [Carolee Campbell’s] books is her edition of W.S. Merwin’s long poem, The Real World of Manuel Córdova…It is a poem about a river, printed as a river, so it becomes the map of a river, on paper that ripples like a river and is as richly colored as water gorged with red Amazonian mud. It is a river of words and a map of the mind, but it is also, first and last, a book, and so the sheet…folds into something as compact as a Javanese or Tibetan sutra.”.
In her essay “The Ideal Book: In Search of a Book Design” (Book Club of Washington Journal, 2014), Campbell wrote that “Of the number of books I published before 1995, none approached what was to become my ideal book: a work that both embodied my personal encounter with the literature, as well as one that extended the reader’s perspective through its tactile and visual form. With The Real World of Manuel Córdova by W.S. Merwin, I moved closer to that ideal. The Real World of Manuel Córdova is a long, single poem consisting of forty-three fourteen-line stanzas. Upon reading it for the first time I knew I wanted to spend deep time working on it. As it turned out, I would.” Dispatches from the Lizard Brain: A Descriptive Bibliography of Ninja Press, A12.
Price: $2,500.00