Charles Hobson
Nelson & Emma, 2008
San Francisco: Pacific Editions
One of thirty-five copies, signed by the publisher, Charles Hobson.
366
$ 950.00
Further images
Oblong small quarto. 10pp., + many leaves illustrated with impressive digital prints on paper and interleaved transparencies. Designed as a 'double love story,' in which Aphrodite and Ares's affair poses...
Oblong small quarto. 10pp., + many leaves illustrated with impressive digital prints on paper and interleaved transparencies. Designed as a "double love story," in which Aphrodite and Ares's affair poses as a mirror for the affair of Admiral Horatio Nelson and Lady Emma Hamilton. The book stages the dual scenes as a series of five "intermezzos," signatures gathered in a concertina spine, which drives the reader through a series of cut-outs that operate as cinematic close-ups and wide shots. The rapid flips of scale and perspective engrain into the movement of the book the tensions between love and war, the divine and the terrestrial, and the political and the personal. Bound in blue cloth with handmade paper over upper cover, in which is set a lenticular photograph that changes from a painting of sailing ships in battle to Titian's "Venus with an Organist and a Dog." Fine, in matching slipcase. Prospectus laid in.