Books

Hardcover. Number 297 of 300 numbered copies of this deluxe edition of Eliot's seminal poem. There were also 26 lettered copies for complimentary distribution. This is the 79th publication from the acclaimed Arion Press. In the prospectus the book is described as the first illustrated edition of Thomas Stearns Eliot's most important work. This is a complex and elegant presentation of Eliot's literary masterpiece that he wrote in the aftermath of the carnage and violence of the first world war and the devastation of a global pandemic. The book is in sections described by the publisher as partitions. There first is an essay on the poem by noted poetry scholar, Helen Vendler. The poem is interspersed with, in detail and entire, the painting "If Not, Not" by R.B. Kitaj. Kitaj ( 1932 2007) was an American artist who spent much of his life in England. He had a significant influence on British pop art, with his figurative paintings featuring areas of bright color, economic use of line and overlapping planes which made them resemble collages, but eschewing most abstraction and modernism. Allusions to political history, art, literature and Jewish identity often recur in his work, mixed together on one canvas to produce a collage effect. [Wikipedia] In an essay by Marco Livingstone describing the poem, written by Kitaj in 1975-76 as an ambitious, mysterious and haunting work that occupies a key position in his history as The Waste Land does in Eliot's. Kitaj in fact took inspiration from Eliot's poem and stated that his picture bears a certain allegiance to it. The Waste Land was edited, designed, and produced by Andrew Hoyem at his Arion Press. The types are handset 18 point Bauer Bodoni for the poem with larger sizes for display and 12 point Bodoni Book for subsidiary text. Printed on Somerset Book for the text, with Mohawk Superfine for the pictorial pages, printed by color offset lithography. Bound in gray cloth with the title in brown on the front cover and the title, author, and artist on the spine. The binding and the text and pictorial pages are all in fine condition. Accompanied by the prospectus. Measures 12 x 12.5 inches. 68 pages. PRI/092024.

The Waste Land is a 434-line modernist poem by T.S. Eliot, first published in 1922. It is one of the most important poems of the 20th century.