EDITION HANSJÖRG MAYER, publisher.

[From upper cover]: wasserverlag (water press)…verlagsverzeichnis 1970.

Many black & white text illus. 44 unnumbered pages (incl. inside of upper & lower wrappers). 4to (229 x 170 mm.), orig. printed paper wrappers, staple-bound. [Stuttgart, London & Reykjavik: 1970].

Hansjörg Mayer’s rare and wonderfully designed 1970 catalogue, issued under the imprint Wasserverlag. It offers works by Rot, Emmett Williams, Eduardo Paolozzi, Robert Filliou, Stefan Wewerka, Ludwig Harig, etc.; nearly all works are pictured.

“A printer, art teacher and publisher living in London, Hansjörg Mayer’s typographical experiments and publications in his edition hansjörg mayer made him into one of the most important protagonists of concrete poetry and the art of the 1960s…Since 1963, as Dieter Roth’s publisher, Mayer was prepared to find ways to convert every provocative artistic idea into the letterpress. Mayer moved to England in 1966, where he taught at the Bath Academy of Art and the Watford School of Art. In 1968 the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (The Hague) dedicated the first large retrospective to the 25-year-old artist. Since then, Mayer has published more than 300 books, posters, films, records and videos in the edition hansjörg mayer.”–from the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s exhibition website Hansjörg Mayer, Typoems and Artist Books (October 2019-January 2020).

“At the end of the sixties [Dieter] Roth collaborated with Hansjörg Mayer, who began to republish [Roth’s] earlier work in a standard format and in editions of at least 1,000 copies, thus bringing them out of the limited edition framework and into the multiple book art arena. Some of the volumes in the Collected Works recreated unique bookworks as multiples; others effectively transmuted earlier works into new bookworks; others again reproduced literature or functioned as documentation. In some cases the subject matter of the book went through several metamorphoses before publication in the Collected Works.”–Phillpot, p. 102.

Fine copy.

❧ B. Ferran, The Smell of Ink and Soil: The Story of [Edition] Hansjörg Mayer (2017), Bibliography no. 312. C. Phillpot, “Some Contemporary Artists and Their Books,” in J. Lyons, ed., Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook (1985), pp. 102-7.

Price: $450.00

Item ID: 7296