Barbarian Press ~ Canada
(Crispin and Jan Elsted)

Amours de Voyage
By Arthur Hugh Clough
Mission, Canada: Barbarian Press, 2007. Edition of 125.

9.375 x 7"; 88 pages. Quarter cloth with printed St-Armand handmade paper over boards, with spine label. Bugra endpapers. Van Dijck with calligraphic display by Martin Jackson. Zerkall Book Soft White Wove. With eleven wood engravings by Abigail Rorer.

Barbarian Press: "We believe this to be the first fine press edition of an all-but-forgotten Victorian masterpiece - Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage. We have always had an affection for Victorian poetry, and had been considering such poets as Swinburne and Tennyson as candidates for our ongoing series of long poems when we came upon Clough's novella in verse. Rather too long for anthologies (which is unfortunately the way most Victorian poets are read these days), Amours de Voyage seems to have languished in the shadow of Clough's greater contemporaries, Tennyson and Arnold. Encountering it was a vivid, freshening experience, and it seemed perfectly suited to an illustrated fine press edition. Amours de Voyage is a strange poem in many ways. It takes the form of a series of letters written by a young Englishman, Claude, as he is making the 'grand tour' - in other words, as he is pursuing what Patrick Scott, the poem's most recent editor, calls an intellectual tourism.' In the process he falls in love (or believes he has) and is also enmeshed in the political upheavals of Italy in 1849. Clough wrote the poem from his own experience travelling in Italy that year.

"The poem, however, occupies no settled or defined ground in either its form or its content: it is a novella in verse, written when the prose novel was reaching its popular apotheosis; it is an epistolary, private story written almost entirely in one voice in a time when the novel was relishing the public examination of character rom many points of view, and only just before Tennyson himself was being pilloried for his use of a single-voice narration in Maud; and it is written in mixed hexameters at a period when strained experiments in classical metrical patterns were demonstrating the inadequacies of English accentual metres to sustain the lyricism of quantitative metres in Latin. The poem must have found itself extremely ill-at-ease when it was published. Indeed, many of Clough's friends, including Matthew Arnold, expressed dislike for the poem either in matter or manner, and Clough revised it continually for nearly nine years before
nally publishing it in 1858. In the end he discarded almost as much as he left in, and the discarded sections make fascinating reading.

"Whatever the poem's initial reception, to a modern ear attuned to the supple cadences of the best free verse in the work of poets like John Ashbery or Geoffrey Hill, Clough's verse in Amours has a colloquial vivacity and freshness which makes it seem natural:

     Twelve o'clock, on the Pincian Hill, with lots of English,
     Germans, Americans, French, - the Frenchmen, too, are protected, -
     So we stand in the sun, but afraid of a probable shower;
     So we stand and stare, and see, to the left of St. Peter's,
     Smoke, from the cannon, white, - but that is at intervals only, -
     Black, from a burning house, we suppose, by the Cavalleggieri;
     And we believe we discern some lines of men descending
     Down through the vineyard-slopes, and catch a bayonet gleaming.

"This passage also demonstrates another quality of the poem which brings it easily into our own sensibility: its detached observation. The poem was written from Clough's own experiences in Italy in 1849. He was in the fledgling Roman Republic, and knew Mazzini. He was there when the city was besieged by the French in April, he remained there through the siege and the bombardment, and he witnessed the violence of the Roman mobs in May. As a radical in politics he was committed to the cause, but he was shaken: this was not the pleasant ideological discourse of Oxford. He saw men killed, and this is recorded in the poem, in language whose panicking repetitions and stammerings are also curiously modern, familiar:

     So I have seen a man killed! An experience that, among others!
     Yes, I suppose I have; although I can hardly be certain,
     And in a court of justice could never declare I had seen it.
     But a man was killed, I am told, in a place where I saw
     Something; a man was killed, I am told, and I saw something.

"Such language is very far from the plangent certainties and trumpeting confidence we habitually expect to find in Victorian poetry. But of course we have at last come to see that the Victorians were neither so confident nor so assured as we had thought. In its concern with the demands of faith, the nature of love, and the necessities of political radicalism, Clough's poem emerges from the thickets of doubt and irony in the company of such poets as Arnold, Meredith, and the Tennyson of In Memoriam. Such modernity makes us think that Amours de Voyage may only now be ready to take a place in that part of 19th-century verse which lays the ground for the 20th century....

"Abigail Rorer has illustrated the poem with wood engravings. Abbie is fascinated by the Victorian period, and is certainly one of the best engravers of figures working today. She is also interested in costume and has a pleasingly satirical, yet kindly, eye. She has provided four full-page engravings, two half-page ones, and some smaller images and 'spots' as well."
$395

Venus & Adonis
By William Shakespeare
2005. Edition of 130.

10 x 5.5"; 64 pages. Quarter green cloth with decorated printed paper over boards, with spine label. Bugra cream endpapers. Poliphilus and Blado with Poliphilus Titling and calligraphic display by Martin Jackson in green and black on Zerkall Book Cream Wove. With ten wood engravings and a press device by Andy English.

Barbarian Press: "Venus & Adonis'"Venus & Adonis' is one of two lengthy narrative poems written by Shakespeare early in his career, when plague forced the closure of the theatres and he took the opportunity to write something non-theatrical. This poem, along with "The Rape of Lucrece" and some of the sonnets dates from the early 1590s.

'Venus & Adonis' is an erotic jeu d’esprit, based lovingly on a story told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. It is the converse of the usual seduction yarn with the boy and the girl in the back seat of the Chevy – although in rather more salubrious surroundings: Venus, a healthy girl with hearty appetites, falls in love with Adonis, a healthy boy with a taste for hunting, and attempts with all her considerable charms to entrap him. Adonis, with stupefying indifference to what is being offered him, resists manfully – well, resists, in any case – and eventually leaves her in order to hunt the boar, with the inevitable tragic result. The poem ends with Venus’s lament and the springing up of a flower from Adonis’ blood to stand in his memory."
$275

Hoi Barbaroi: A Quarter Century at Barbarian Press
By Crispin and Jan Elsted
2004. Edition of 60, Deluxe; Edition of 150, Regular.

Barbarian's first bibliography, Utile Dulci: The First Decade at Barbarian Press 1977-87 has long since been out of print. Fifteen years passed. Barbarian celebrated twenty-five years of printing. To commemorate such a wonderful history of printing a new bibliography was embarked upon. Because much has happened since the original bibliography it would be easy to issue a further bibliography to mark the press’s silver anniversary. Instead of having two volumes distinct from one another Barbarian has elected to incorporate the earlier bibliography into this one in order to provide a complete picture of the press’s books to date. It is indeed a beautiful anniversary commemoration.

Deluxe edition of 60. 13 x 9.5" 150 pages. Hand set in Bembo and Fairbanks italic with Bembo and Castellar for display. Facsimile text of earlier edition printed in offset facsimile from the original pages. Numerous tip-ins and illustrations, from wood engravings to pages from the original press runs of books. David Evans’ photographic essay laid out at the press and printed in tritone by Western Printers with captions digitally set. Printed in two colours on Zerkall mouldmade papers. Hand bound by Simone Mynen in quarter leather with printed paper over boards, gold stamped leather label on spine. Accompanied by a clamshell box containing original examples of ephemera going back to the beginnings of the press, and an additional signed studio print by David Evans. Book and box contained in a slipcase.
$1000 (Last Copy, Deluxe)

Regular Edition of 150. 13 x 9.5" Quarter bound by Rasmussen Bindery in cloth and printed paper over boards, printed label on spine. Same inclusions as Deluxe edition within book. Slipcased.
$650