Various (Skodnick, Roy (Editor); Metcalf, Paul; Olson, Charles; Glover, Albert et al.)

All Area No. 1 (Spring 1980) with: Ephemera

Pompton Lakes, NJ: Talking Wood, 1980. First Edition. From the collection of Albert Glover, with note signed by editor Roy Skodnick referring to him. “It’s almost like poetry. In fact it is poetry, Pleistocene, in that simplest alphabetic sense, that you can learn the language of being alive – in that most elementary way which is so easily taken for granted (or used as though it were only elementary) – that with which you are most familiar – as though you were learning to read and to write for the first time. It has that turn around an impossible corner of what is so it that a modo is the last matter one might think is one – that it is there, outside, literally, and can be observed – Venice Observed as well as Venice Destroyed, For All of Us.” (From Pleistocene Man: Letters from Charles Olson to John Clarke during October 1965, Charles Olson, pg. 19) The debut issue of the Charles Olson- (1910 - 1970) connected journal that describes itself as “a series on method and place.” Three numbers were published, with No. 3 not appearing until 1992. Edited by Roy Skodnick, a longtime academic at various schools, former art department employee at the New York Times, and Smithsonian fellow. Per the folks behind “from a secret location,” Skodnick said it “grew out of Talking Wood, a bioregional journal about New Jersey, edited by video pioneer Paul Ryan, who worked with Peter Berg’s Planet Drum in California, the first publication to propose bioregion and watershed as forms of natural and cultural morphology. Ryan inspired me to put the work of Charles Olson into such terms. Ryan and Frank Gillette had already done that for Gregory Bateson in Radical Software. Thus in All Area 1, Ryan interviewed Bateson, Gillette mapped South Padre Island in Axis of Observation, and William Margolis recorded the geography of a Bedouin tribe in the Sinai. Paul Metcalf and Ken Irby were masters of landscape too. Charles Stein provided a reading of Olson’s alchemical landscape. David Finkelstein used Olson’s triad (topos, typos, tropos) to map space in terms of quantum theory.” Also featured is a reprinting of Olson’s Pleistocene Man. Large-format softcover original. First Edition, presumed first-&-only printing. From the collection of Albert Glover (b. 1942), the great American scholar, bibliographer, author & publisher who is the foremost living authority on literary giant Olson. Included are two loose-leaf slips describing this piece’s origin; both in very fine condition: The first a typewritten note by Skodnick informing a colleague to give the copy to Glover and to ask for a copy of Glover’s book (“Most interested to see it; have admired Glover’s edition of O’s letters for Origin since the flood.”); the second a handwritten note by the same colleague (Alan Caseline) to Glover. A very scarce Olson-&-Co. collectible in its singularly rarest form, with outstanding & most-relevant association, provenance & ephemera. In Near Fine condition with moderate spotting, staining (including what appears to be fingerprints) and age-toning to front, back covers & spine; light bumping and creasing to edges & corners of front, back covers; moderate creasing to spine with small cracking and tearing; partial separation of covers from textblock & of page leaves but both remain intact. Interior Fine with some light staining and age-toning. Near Fine. [Item #8333]

Price: $50.00