Fleecestreet’s Improved Pig Latin Grammar for Modern Scholars. Adapted from Gen. Cyclops Stonebone’s Four Basic Dialects of Pig Latin by Judge Jason Augustus Fleecestreet.
Los Angeles: The Press in the Gatehouse, 1963. One of 200 copies, letterpress printed by Cheney at the Clark Library. Bound by Bela Blau. Title page printed within a ruled border.
With bibliography and index. A fine copy. Quarter brown calf, marbled paper over boards, spine titled in gilt. Miniature book, 2.5 inches by 1.75 inches. 30, [4] pp. Item #17976
For Fleecestreet’s Improved Pig Latin Grammar, Will Cheney took on the voice of Jason AugustusFleecestreet to add further critical commentary to A Pamphlet in the Four Basic Dialects of Pig Latin (1950) by Brigadier General Cyclops Stonebone. Fleecestreet, a long-suffering scholar and educator,writes, “the works of the late General Cyclops Stonebone (1870 - 1953), though nowadays argely discredited as linguistics, have lain so long on the shelves of our school libraries that his classifications and nomenclature have come to be accepted as classic,” (pp. 3-4). This item is the final work on Pig Latin by Cheney and was printed a full thirteen years after Stonebone’s Pamphlet introduced Southern California (and the world) to Cheney’s Pig Latin scholarship.
“Cheney’s typography stands out in his miniature books. ‘Of the fine printers of the Southern California Renaissance, Cheney is arguably the most unusual,’ wrote Bruce Whiteman. ‘He is devoted to type.... His obsessions are thankfully tempered by a fine sense of irony, and he clearly knows very well that a life devoted to printing small editions of small books about recondite subjects (Pig Latin, pocket knives, Greek, etc.) is an odd life indeed, however fulfilling’” (Bradbury, p. 47). Bradbury, 20th Century United States Miniature Books, 686.
Price: $275.00