DOROTHY LAMOUR'S LIFE AS A PHRASE BOOK.
Eleven gate-folded pages bound concertina-style, illustrated with coloured linocuts by Mike Hudson; demy folio; within floral patterned purple cloth box with printed paper title label inlaid on the lid, purple ribbon tie and yellow cloth sides; The Wayzgoose Press, Katoomba, NSW, 2006. Edition limited to 30 numbered copies (25 are for sale), signed by the author and publishers Mike Hudson and Jadwiga Jarvis; this being copy number 17 of 21 thus bound. *With the original prospectus, slightly marked, loosely inserted. Conceived, designed and illustrated with multi-coloured linocuts by Mike Hudson and hand set in a variety of types by Jadwiga Jarvis. The linocuts were extra coloured by hand, making each copy in the edition unique. The pages unfold to a total length of 5 metres. Loosely inserted is a printed instruction sheet: Some helpful hints on how best to read/view Dorothy Lamour's life as a phrase book. The book is a typographic rendition of Janaczewska's play of the same title, in which the screen actress 'finds herself in a poem instead of a movie' [Introduction]. Jadwiga Jarvis (The Wayzgoose Affair, p. 175) explained the format: 'In order to maintain the spirit of a performance, we gave the book a theatrical setting: the hotel room which appears on every one of the 11 gate-fold pages, was Dorothy's stage. Onto this stage various scenarios obliquely suggested by the text were introduced ... a chessboard, a maze, a giant pineapple, a clapperboard and an overweight Ronald McDonald. The introduction and colophon pages featured the same room/stage, but on these the set was empty and shown as if unlit, alluding to the characteristic hiatus of a theatrical presentation before curtain-up and after the final curtain'. Item #134535
Price: $12,000.00