Red Square : the next word

Melbourne : Electio Editions, 2012. Octavo, publisher’s Ruscombe grey paper over boards in navy cloth-covered slipcase, 28 pp., with numerous illustrations; internally pristine, a fine copy. Signed and numbered by the poet. Number 35 of 45 copies.

“This book derives from putting two small obsessions together and seeing what happens. The first is with the typographical wonder of Hendrik Werkman, 1882 – 1945, and his remarkable periodical ‘The Next call’, printed in nine issues from 1923 to 1926. Each issue was 8 pages long, in approximately 40 copies, and designed & printed entirely from the materials of his print shop in Groningen, Holland (see H N Werkman by Alsoton W Purvis, Yale University Press, 2004). My second obsession is the imaginary exhibition outlined by Arthur C Danto in his now famous book The transfiguration of the commonplace (Harvard University Press 1981) where he poses a thorny set of intellectual problems around the question of the wording one attaches to paintings. Simply, Danto’s exhibition was a series of red rectangles, all looking the same, but all painted by different artists, and each with a different title. This apparently simple proposition created for Danto one of the knottiest philosophical speculations in contemporary criticism. My book is designed to honor both these men, the material printer who said ‘I produce designs during the courses of printing’, and the intellectual who wrote ‘I am speaking as a philosopher, construing the gesture as a philosophical act’. The pages of the ‘exhibition’ appear on the rectos only. The texts on the versos are constructed solely from all the Dutch words that in their spelling are also English words in Werkman’s texts thru out the nine issues of ‘The next call.” – Alan Loney

Alan Loney is a noted writer, poet, publisher and printer. Born in New Zealand in 1940, he published his first book of poems in Dunedin in 1971, and has directed a number of private presses in New Zealand and Australia. Loney has worked with a number of distinguished writers, poets and artists across North America and the Asia Pacific, his works are collected by a number of institutions and private collectors. Loney has lived in Melbourne since 1998.