Books

Folio. 13.25 x 14 in. 164 pp., composed of coloured and white Italian Tiziano paper, mould made at the Fabriano mill, featuring Veronese Monotype & handset, as well as Twentieth-Century handset printing types. With 12 photopolymer plates, printed on the mylar with letterpress after artwork executed by Thiebaud, inventively arranged to reveal hidden cities and objects until turned by the reader, with the final sheet simulating hidden etched reproductions of Thiebaud's cakes, gumball machines, tiny cityscapes, and figures while overlaying the rear aluminum plate. Original anodized aluminum 4-ring post-binding, featuring screw-bolt U-posts, allowing leaves to be turned easily, an inventive anodized aluminum cover, notched for the posts, with bolt that slides in to hold the cover in place, title edged into the spine,(very slight divot scoring the upper front cover, slight dimple to a couple leaves, scuffing to lower aluminum plate), still a VG copy, signed by the artist on leaf below photopolymer frontisp., numbered at rear. First Arion Press edition, No. 305 of 400 copies signed & numbered for direct sale of this fabulous collaboration between the Arion Press design team of Andrew Hoyem, and the whimsical artwork of Thiebaud (1920-2021), a noted California artist whose legendary energy and production was prodigious, and whose classes were hugely popular at UC Davis. Calvino's (1923-1985) Invisible Cities was first published in Italy in 1972 as "Le citta invisibili," a surrealistic historical fantasy exploring the complex and exotic 55 fictitious cities visited by Marco Polo as he carries on a conversation with the emperor Kublai Khan describing his ever expanding and vast empire.

Invisible Cities, written by Italo Calvino, is a novel that explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by the explorer Marco Polo. The book is framed as a conversation between Polo and the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan.