Costume En Face

Long out of print, The Close Chaplet is Laura Riding's first book, originally published in 1926. Riding deliberately ceased writing poems after 1940, when she came to see poetry as irrevocably flawed as a means of expression. These poems demonstrate Riding's early desire to depart from the close and well-tilled ground of traditional lyric poetry. According to her biographer, Elizabeth Friedman, many of the poems for THE CLOSE CHAPLET were brought in typescript from New York, a few were added in Egypt, and the entire text was carefully edited by Robert Graves.

In his introduction, Mark Jacobs writes that Riding was identifying herself with the pre-moment, the 'what-was-there' before Creation. How did the world, the universe, come to exist, why does it exist, why does it die, why do we? From these questions, Riding begins to develop a theory about the role of women as the origin of all human beings, the only animals with written language. This edition also includes Riding's essay A Prophecy or a Plea, a statement of her poetics initially published in 1926.

Laura Riding was a poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and publisher. While primarily known for the critical works that she co-authored with Robert Graves — A Pamphlet Against Anthologies and A Survey of Modernist Poetry — Riding also left behind an incredibly powerful body of poetry and prose works that, regrettably, remain little read today. These include THE CLOSE CHAPLET (Ugly Duckling Press, 2020), EXPERTS ARE PUZZLED (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), CONVALESCENT CONVERSATIONS (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), The Lives of Wives, and The Progress of Stories. Famously rejecting poetry early in her career, she spent the last decades of her life co-writing a theoretical work on linguistics, Rational Meaning, with her husband Schuyler Jackson. She was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1991, the very same year she died.

Molecular typography is the study of the chemical and physical underpinnings of letters. All characters are formed from seven basic atomic building blocks, known as typtoms. These typtoms come together in various combinations and configurations to form letters, numbers, and punctuation. Typtoms are not just theoretical tools for exploring the anatomy of type, but actual particles. Letters are molecules.

H.F. Henderson’s work, Understanding Molecular Typography, originally published in 1992, was a seminal work in the field. By condensing information pulled from nearly forty years of publications from the top molecular typographic scientists, Henderson made the science approachable to the everyday American for the first time. Part primer, part field guide, it lays out the basic principles, followed by detailed diagrams of the molecular formation of letters, numbers, and punctuation. A conclusion sums up the field of molecular typography to date, and a comprehensive bibliography provides valuable reference for the reader looking to learn more.

With the demise of the field of molecular typography as a whole in the mid-to-late ‘90s, (perhaps even due to its increased popularity brought on by Henderson’s work), Understanding Molecular Typography ran out of print, and has long since been forgotten. Peculiar as it may be, molecular typography is nevertheless a science worthy of being brought back to mainstream attention, if for no other reason than demonstrating humanity’s frequent scientific misconceptions throughout history. This reprint edition, with a new introduction by Woody Leslie, seeks to do just that.

"Until Henderson's incredible analysis, no one had created a conceptual framework sophisticated enough to do the analytic work in graphical physics that the alphabet required if it was to be fully understood. True, some of the Russian futurists, like Ilia Zdanevich, in their examinations of the properties of language, had begun to grasp the vague outlines of a modern scientific approach to molecular components, to the formation of compounds, and their behavior as chemical substances, within the structure of poetics. But Henderson's research was comprehensive and the results nothing short of astonishing." —Johanna Drucker

God Is a Bitch Too is the accelerated and acidic English-language debut of Colombian poet María Paz Guerrero­. In this chapbook, god is needy, Latin American, and an overweight woman. No one asks god to dance. Someone speaks, someone tries: “One is the measure of their body.”

God Is a Bitch Too is #13 in the Señal series for contemporary Latin American poetry in bilingual editions.

Written according to its own dictum, "language is the universal inebriant," these epistolary essays, personal narratives, meditations on avant-garde writers, and unorthodox forays into the "narco-imaginary"—the habits and conventions surrounding literary and cultural representations of drug use—attend to the residue of transient impressions that remain, long after the delirium of creative activity subsides.

Ramsey Scott teaches at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His essays, poems, and fiction have appeared in various print and online publications, including the Southwest Review, the Seneca Review, The Massachusetts Review, Shampoo, Tarpaulin Sky, Confrontation, and Mirage #4/Period(ical). The Narco-Imaginary is his first book.

A lost gem of permutational conceptualism from a key figure in artist's book culture, available again

Known internationally as one of Mexico's most important conceptual artists, Ulises Carrión (1941-89) played a decisive role in defining and conceptualizing the genre of the artists' book through his manifesto, The New Art of Making Books (1975), which he wrote soon after the 1972 publication of SONNET(S) and his move from Mexico City to Amsterdam, where he opened the legendary bookshop gallery, Other Books and So, the first space dedicated exclusively to artists' publications and an important precursor to such artists' book hubs as Printed Matter.

One of Carrión's earliest bookworks, SONNET(S) represents a landmark shift in the artist's output from poetry to artists' books. Here, Carrión takes a single poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti through 50 typographic and procedural permutations. This republication is supplemented by new essays on Carrión's bookworks by contemporary artists, writers, and scholars from Mexico, Europe and the US. 

Published March 2021

Afternoon Editions no. 0: List of books in the library of Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. The list consists of books that have been leart by heart within the project (by heart library), an incomplete list of books that were considered to be leart by heart, that played an important role in the process of choice, or that have been considered to be learnt by heart in the future (shadow library), a growing collection of literature, publications, essays, films, ephemera relating to interests within the project (reference library).

Edition last updated May 2020.

‘Five Devours’ is a short essay in five parts about need and food as a part of speech, about speech’s relationship to nourishment and hunger; the currency between eating and speaking, expending and consuming.

12 pages
150 x 200mm
risograph printed 
edition of 150

Here the mirror image of the almost hallucinatory, heart-rending loss of the familiar is literary defamiliarization. Arsanios both mourns and blasts apart the notion of the mother tongue, reminding us that for each “mother tongue” at least another tongue is silenced. Desire propels her genre-defying writing, which grief notwithstanding still manages to tongue languages, and that is her genius. — Mónica de la Torre

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, and Guernica, among others. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. Arsanios currently lives in New York where she was a 2016 LMCC Workspace fellow, and an ART OMI resident in fall 2017. With Rachel Valinsky, she coordinated the Friday night reading series at the Poetry Project from 2017–19.

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister—a sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, and equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. If only she had found the means to create, argues Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling.

In this classic essay, Woolf takes on the establishment, using her gift of language to dissect the world around her and give voice to those who are without. Her message is a simple one: women must have a steady income and a room of their own in order to have the freedom to create.

With a Foreword by Mary Gordon

The fourth in a series of publications, featuring writing by graphic design students of EKA GD MA. Typing... includes essays, scripts, translations and stories on a wide range of topics: killing vowels and milling fonts, personal knowledge management, shortcuts, tedious/careful/tiring/joyful typesetting, type of Georgianness, typing in 3rab(izi) and typing in all lowercase.

With contributions by Anna Wittenkamp Rich, Archil Tsereteli, Fa(tima)-Ezzahra El Khammas, João (Juca) Pedro Nogueira, Karthik Palepu, Laura Martens, Linnea Lindgren, Rok Ifko Kranjc.

Designed by Fatima-Ezzahra El Khammas and Laura Martens
Cover by Hanafi Gazali